OK, Here is the yield info, from P.K. Iyengar, as quoted by Reuters below.
Three different weapons: 1 kiloton tactical or artillery shell, a 12 kiloton fission gravity bomb, and a thermonuclear device that yielded 50-100 kiloton on first test with a small load of tritium, but claimed to be capable of megaton yields. Quite a program they have!
David
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Top Stories Updated 11:45 PM ET May 12, 1998 (FROM excite.com)
India defiant over nuclear tests
By Narayanan Madhavan
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India, facing the threat of trade sanctions over its nuclear tests, said Tuesday its national security came first but it still hoped for a world free of nuclear arms.
Amid a storm of international condemnation of Monday's three underground tests, India's arch-foe and western neighbor Pakistan, also a threshold nuclear state, declared it could match "any step of nuclear escalation" by India and would not let outsiders tell it what to do.
President Clinton condemned the tests as a threat to regional stability and said he was prepared to implement a full set of retaliatory economic sanctions.
He also issued an appeal to China, Pakistan and other nations in the region to avoid entering a "dangerous arms race" to counter India's nuclear program.
"I want to make it very, very clear that I am deeply disturbed by the nuclear tests which India has conducted, and I do not believe it contributes to building a safer 21st century," Clinton said at the White House.
He vowed to implement in full U.S. laws intended to deter the spread of nuclear arms -- a clear signal of impending punishment -- and urged India to promise it would make no further tests.
Experts at India's Bhabha Atomic Research Center said that, after breaking its self-imposed 24-year moratorium on nuclear explosions, the country would need more tests before it could produce operational nuclear weapons.
"We have to conduct a couple more tests before seriously entering into production of nuclear weapons which can be deployed into the armed forces," said an official at BARC who did not wish to be named.
Another Indian official told Reuters that the three tests carried out Monday corresponded to three ways in which nuclear arms might be used, from the smallest, battlefield-size A-bomb or artillery shell to the massive city-busting power of the H-bomb.
President Clinton discussed the Indian tests by telephone with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who said "India has let us down with its explosions." Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov said however that Moscow was unlikely to impose sanctions.
Japan, India's largest foreign aid donor and the only country ever to suffer an atomic attack, said it was considering sanctions which might include a freeze of yen loans and aid grants.
Britain, speaking for the 15-nation European Union, expressed disgust at the tests that ended India's self-imposed 24-year moratorium.
Germany called off a round of development aid talks with India. China expressed "grave concern," while Australia and New Zealand proposed a special session of the U.N.-backed Conference on Disarmament to discuss the tests.
But India's Hindu nationalist-led government, emboldened by a wave of support at home for its sudden defiant step, gloried in its proof to the world that India could make nuclear weapons at any time.
"Let the world know of India's capability," Science and Technology Minister Murli Manohar Joshi told a news conference. "People will realize India is a strong nation and cannot be taken lightly."
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's government meanwhile held out an olive branch for disarmament.
"India remains committed to a speedy process of nuclear disarmament leading to total and global elimination of nuclear weapons within a stipulated time frame," it said in a statement.
Defense Minister George Fernandes, who had prepared the ground with a series of statements branding nuclear power China as the main threat to India's security, said India could now "pursue, with credibility and greater conviction, our long-term campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons."
Additional details on the tests and their military significance emerged Tuesday.
P.K. Iyengar, a former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission, told Reuters in Bombay the smallest device, with a blast equivalent to 1,000 metric tons of TNT, was the size that might be fired as an artillery shell or dropped from a combat support aircraft.
The mid-size blast was from a standard fission device equivalent to about 12,000 metric tons of TNT -- the size that might be dropped from a bomber plane.
Iyengar said the largest of the three tests Monday was not a full hydrogen bomb. Most of its 50,000 to 100,000 metric ton explosive force came from a fission device -- the A-bomb which serves as a trigger for the H-bomb's big fusion explosion.
Iyengar said the device contained only a token amount of the hydrogen variant tritium. It showed that India's thermonuclear technology worked, but did not produce the megaton explosion typical of a full H-bomb.
"We need not go for a megaton explosion while testing an H-bomb," said Iyengar, one of the scientists involved in India's only other nuclear test, in 1974.
"Such tests are required only if we are planning for a total destruction of the opposite side. They don't have relevance in our strategy."
Pakistani Foreign Minister Gohar Ayub Khan said Islamabad had the right to take "all appropriate measures for its security" and make its defense "impregnable."
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif refused to say whether his country was planning an experimental nuclear blast of its own.
Sen. Richard Shelby, the head of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, said he planned hearings as early as this week into what he called the colossal failure of U.S. spy agencies to pick up preparations for India's 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 Shelby, an Alabama Republican.
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