Mohan,
I'm not sure I understood your question about the technical aspects and whether or not it is just saber rattling.
Rest assured that the technical challenges of building a full-fledged H bomb are immense. If it really did perform as expected on the first test, India has a great deal to be proud of.
The significance of having an H bomb (as opposed to fission weapons) is that H bombs can have much higher explosive yields (i.e., tens of megatons), allowing the complete destruction of a large city with just one bomb.
I doubt that the U.S. knew about these tests in advance. And I doubt they even knew that India was working on an H bomb. If they *did* know about it, Senator Shelby would not be blabbing his head off in the press about our "collossal failure." Mr. Shelby has the highest level of security clearance for issues handled by the spy agencies.
It would be very surprising if the White House and State Department had been briefed by the Indians about the test and managed to keep this a secret from the spy agencies.
David
From excite.com:
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Top Stories Updated 4:15 PM ET May 12, 1998
Shelby blasts CIA "failure" on India test
By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday criticized what he called a "colossal failure" by U.S. spy agencies to detect preparations for India's nuclear tests.
In what may be the "greatest failure in more than a decade," the $27-billion-a-year U.S. espionage establishment was "caught completely off guard" by the Indian tests, said Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican.
"This is a colossal failure of our nation's intelligence gathering that could set off a nuclear arms race," he said in a statement.
Shelby said he planned to hold closed-door hearings into the lapse as early as Thursday. In an earlier telephone interview with Reuters he said he would be as "open as I can be" about airing the problem in public.
After Shelby's comments were reported, the Central Intelligence Agency announced the creation of an intelligence community team led by retired Adm. David Jeremiah, a former vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to examine what went wrong and draw lessons.
Jeremiah "will assess the Indian nuclear-testing issue and report his findings within the next 10 days" to George Tenet, the nation's chief spymaster, CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said in a statement. He said Tenet would then brief the White House and the committees that oversee the CIA in the House and Senate. "It is apparent that the Indians went to some lengths to conceal their activities and tensions," Harlow added. He said Tenet strongly favored reviewing all the facts to "determine what lessons can be learned from the situation."
One of the CIA's main roles is to tip policymakers to preparations for potentially destabilizing events like India's test blasts in time to try to head them off.
The U.S. espionage apparatus, which includes Pentagon-run agencies such as the code-cracking National Security Agency, uses a wide range of systems to detect preparations for such tests.
Among these are spies on the ground, satellite reconnaissance, electronic communications monitoring and photographic surveillance.
U.S. photo interpreters scour for what they call "signatures," or specific details that, based on experience or logic, may be telltale signs of a planned blast, such as increased vehicle and personnel activity at a suspected test range.
"We want to know why this happened, how this happened, who was asleep, why they were asleep," Shelby said in the telephone interview. "Something's wrong here."
"If we had an inkling that they were going to detonate one or more nuclear weapons perhaps we could have intervened," Shelby said. "We certainly would have tried and the world community could (have)."
Senior Clinton administration officials said they had been caught off guard on Monday when India carried out three underground nuclear tests, the nation's first since 1974.
India went to war with Pakistan, which is also assumed to have nuclear capabilities, in 1948, 1965 and 1971. It fought China in 1962. U.S. policymakers fear the Indian tests could spark a dangerous arms race.
In his statement the CIA spokesman said curbing the spread of nuclear weapons was an "extraordinarily important and difficult target" for the U.S. intelligence community, which is made up of 13 executive branch outfits.
The statement noted that "close scrutiny" had been devoted in late 1995 to what U.S. officials then said were Indian preparations for a nuclear test. No blast took place after the United States and other countries brought pressure to bear on India.
Although the actual blasts apparently caught the CIA napping, the agency had long warned that Pakistan and India's nuclear ambitions made the subcontinent the world's likeliest nuclear flash point.
"Although Indian and Pakistani officials say deterrence has worked for years, it would be at risk in a crisis," Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee Jan. 28 in testimony on current and projected security threats.
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