Word: tested
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Vajpayee takes it, just a week after assuming leadership on March 19, bringing into his confidence only two Cabinet members. A quick internal study concludes that India would suffer manageable pain as a result of international economic penalties. Vajpayee picks an auspicious date for the test: May 11, the same Buddhist holiday when the 1974 nuclear test went...
...nuke pronouncements but accepts at face value private assurances that his government will not heat up the arms race, at least not before it has completed a lengthy comprehensive review of defense strategy. Pakistan is worried, though, by the aggressively nationalistic tone in New Delhi. On April 6, Islamabad test-fires its first intermediate-range missile, the Ghauri, named for a 12th century Muslim conqueror who defeated the last Hindu King of Delhi, Prithviraj Chauhan. Prithvi also happens to be the name of one of India's ballistic missiles capable of toting heavy payloads. With a range of 930 miles...
Late on May 9, after the sky spies make their passes, technicians rush in vans delivering the five nuclear test devices, cutting corners to get the blasts ready. It normally takes a week to position calibration equipment to measure the yield and effects of the explosions, but the Indians do not have time for all that. "The goal was simply to see if they could pop these things off quickly," a U.S. intelligence official told TIME. "It was more important to them to do it than to get all the appropriate data...
Around noon on Monday, Indian soldiers descend on villages just a few miles from the desert test range and order the pacifist Bishnoi herdsmen, who refuse to kill animals or cut down trees, to evacuate. At precisely 3:45 p.m., three devices explode in five seconds: a normal fission bomb, a low-yield bomb for tactical battlefield use and something like a hydrogen bomb, which U.S. officials later insist could have been only a less powerful "boosted" weapon using tritium fuses to amplify the fission chain reaction. Altogether they unleash around 80 kilotons of atomic power, six times as powerful...
...Director George Tenet is sitting in his seventh-floor office at Langley, Va., sipping coffee at 8:45 a.m., when an aide rushes in: India has just set off a nuclear test explosion. This is terrible news because New Delhi has just blown a giant hole in the campaign to control the spread of atomic weapons, and because the CIA is only learning about it from the press. Tenet's $27 billion-a-year intelligence apparatus, the largest and most sophisticated on the globe, has been humiliatingly blindsided. Nuclear proliferation is supposed to be its top priority, yet neither...