Word: pokhran
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...India's atomic scientists also go to school on the evidence Washington has presented. Over the next three years, they begin masking their activities at Pokhran, keeping up a steady flow of operations, moving trucks in and out, lulling the U.S. into thinking the bomb team is just puttering around...
...Once at Pokhran, 100 men work in slow motion; any burst of activity at the site would be noticed by the satellites. The more than 700-ft.-deep shafts into which five nuclear devices will be dropped have already been drilled back in the early 1990s, but there are cables to hitch and instruments to set up. Luckily, seasonal sandstorms broom away telltale tracks of vehicles. Every day India's space scientists calculate how long a "blind spot" will open up for workers when the trajectories of two advanced Lacrosse and two KH-12 satellites take their electronic eyes away...
...objects no larger than a paperback novel on the ground. The two Lacrosse satellites, same price tag, with solar-power panels that stretch the length of half a football field, have radar-imaging cameras that can see through clouds and even the dust storms that swirl around India's Pokhran test site. In a crisis, at least one of the four birds can be positioned over a target 24 hours a day, sending photos that can be on the President's desk within an hour...
...fast service doesn't happen "if your consumers aren't asking for it," says John Pike, an intelligence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. With the Administration convinced that India had no plans to explode a nuclear device, the satellites were snapping photos of Pokhran only once every six to 24 hours. Indian scientists, who knew the satellites' schedule, concealed their preparations so the photos CIA analysts scanned in the weeks before Monday's blasts showed what appeared to be routine maintenance...
...will now probe whether that Pentagon agency was paying too much attention to foreign military bases instead of political targets like India. CIA photo analysts got their first glimpse of the incriminating shots when they strolled into work Monday morning. By the time they delivered their first report that Pokhran was being prepared for a test, the Indian government had already announced the detonations...