N M Sampathkumar Iyangar
Eleven years after assisting Prime Minister Vajpayee in 1998 to divert public attention from the mess his government had created, India’s top science bureaucrats are issuing shrill denials of the startling revelations by senior scientist K Santhanam, who was coordinating director of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) for Pokhran II, the mission for conducting a second series of nuclear blasts. His admission undermined the credence of India’s claims to have perfected the technology. The thermonuclear devices were the only “technology advancement” over the detonation of a crude device in 1974 at Pokhran. India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) projected Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as Durga, the Hindu goddess of power to gullible Indians. Flouting solemn international agreements not to develop weapons in return for technology led to India’s isolation. The then chief of DAE, Raja Ramanna, is hailed as the “father of the Indian N-Bomb” for hijacking the nuclear programme from its original power-production orientation. The absence of scrutiny turned the DAE into a den of nepotism and corruption. The termination of the self-imposed 24-year “moratorium” on testing with Pokhran-II prompted Pakistan to let A Q Khan go ahead with its own tests. Continue reading »
Karzai’s house of cards will collapse the day America leaves. Permit him to begin talking to his real brethren so that he can find a stable order. Afghanistan must find its own solution; it simply is not programmed to accept one