That's essentially the message that RC & Kakodkar want us to swallow. My bullshit meter needle is swinging wildly when I hear that - even without knowing the details of the simulations or its predictions.
I don't disagree with your concern as such, but I am saying that we need to read all these ppl's messages VERY carefully. Also, negi asks why the SCIENTISTS are claiming that we don't need more testing, when everyone knows testing is the way to more work and baksheesh.
And in all this, the main thing to remember is that I cannot know the real answer, all I can do is sit here and "vent" from my Paleontological layer or whatever.
So the answer to "how did BARC's advisor sign off on it's PhD thesis with only one experiment?"
Actually, Premji, my answer would amaze you but come as no surprise to the many veterans here who KNOW that I am an idiot. I got my PhD, and it was all experimental, after exactly ONE successful "test" with the fire lit and the hydrogen and other stuff jetting out. Well... maybe one "60% successful" experiment to allow me to put in the thesis proposal, and then one "399.5% successful" experiment to finish off the work. In near-record time. Maybe my advisor wanted to get me outta there ASAP. But b4 that ONE successful experiment, I went through more dismal and morale-shattering failures than King Bruce, the Egyptian Army and Pakistan combined. In addition to the hajaar upon hajaar painstaking hours and days and nights getting the many pieces built, tested validated etc. etc. None of those meant squat unless the all-up experiment worked, and I even gave up once and went to my advisor and told him I wanted to quit, pretty early on. Somehow he didn't seem worried at all - except that when I saw the expression on his face after I got through my thesis proposal I understood what being a really world-class thesis advisor involved. I was very very very fortunate to have such an advisor.
If my first experiment had succeeded, would I have got away with only one? Well.. but my advisor was not going to get banned from the Faculty Lounge if I ran another experiment, so the comparison is not accurate there.
We finally start seeing the answer in the BARC case, though. They got their PhD by running validation against ancient data (from 1970), which must have got de-Classified by about 1987. That is what they are publishing: comparisons against AMIRKHANI data. Of course, if AmirKhan put a few phundamental errorj in the results to confuse anyone developing simulations, that's another matter. Maybe they had some other way of verifying that this was not the case. I have a feeling that this was "Dual-Use" and the ITAR and DUST folks are going to scream about the stupidity of making nuke test data available for Earthquake Research.
So, IOW, they had hajaar data points to validate against. This is a perfectly valid reason to get a PhD.
Then they ran ONE all-up experiment where everything was put on the line - and ONLY they could get the really important data - the output from the sensors that were placed between S1 and S2. The test was very carefully designed so that NO ONE ELSE had a prayer of getting the same data, unless one or the other test was a total flop and the seismic waves were from just one.
Beyond that, all the yada yada yada is just Maya.
So does this mean that India should sign CTBT? Absolutely not. India should not sign CTBT because China has been violating CTBT through Pakistan and NoKo (and iran, coming up). India should not sign because Pakistan is violating everything, and the US is funding Pakistan's race to build nuclear weapons to kill Indians. Also because China is being very aggressive, and is likely to go unstable in the near term.
Instead of CTBT, India should insist, as India has always insisted, on TOTAL disarmament. When the US and Russia get down to about 400 warheads each, UQ and France and China should start disarming. When they all get below 100, India and Pakistan and NoKo should join in, and if there can be totally verified disarmament, everyone can go down to zero. THEN there can be a CTBT. Until then, no deal.
So why are scientists joining the clamor of "no testing needed"? Because, besides being loyal Indians, they can also see the common sense in this: no "live", full-up testing, means the investment goes into world-class labs where the phenomena can be really explored, and we can go on far beyond what can be achieved in a "test" program.
Shouldn't the weapons be tested? Yes, we would all like that, but it's not as important as other things that we need. It's that simple.
What is NOT right, is sneering at the Indian deterrent development process just to make political points and attack the Prime Minister and the Ex-President and the serving directors of these programs as traitors, idiots, "feeble-minded" etc, etc. THAT is idiotic, and we seem to have a fair share of those here.