The day of the Sand Grouse and Blue Fox

The day of the Sand Grouse and Blue Fox
Raj Chengappa

Ramanna remembers that when he returned to BARC in January 1981, Sethna barely spoke to him. At AEC headquarters in Mumbai's Old Yacht Club, Sethna allotted a room for Ramanna to use as his city office. A month later Sethna asked him to vacate it and wanted him to keep an office only at Trombay. But Ramanna told him firmly: `I ain't moving out.'

The same month Ramanna met Mrs Gandhi and among other things briefed her on the bomb issue. He told her that scientists had made a more compact version of the bulky 1974 device so that it could be delivered by a fighter aircraft. And they had mastered the technology to make a more advanced boosted fission bomb that would, for the same amount of plutonium, give four times the yield. Ramanna then asked her for permission to test the two new devices as they had to be validated. He also pointed out that intelligence reports had indicated that Pakistan was making some headway with its bomb efforts.

When Mrs Gandhi replied that Pakistan was far from ready, Ramanna asked her: `Should Pakistan be guiding our nuclear strategy? Shouldn't we be ready with our own programme or do we strike back only when the enemy reaches Karnal (hundred kilometres from Delhi)?'

Mrs Gandhi was silent. Ramanna changed track and asked: `What is the best answer India can give if Pakistan explodes a bomb tomorrow?'

Again Mrs Gandhi just listened.

Ramanna answered his own question: `We should show that we are far more advanced by exploding a bigger bomb.'

Mrs Gandhi agreed and apart from clearing the digging of two shafts wanted Ramanna to get the bomb team to keep their devices ready. In February 1981, the army assigned the 113 Engineer Regiment to begin work on the shafts. The regiment called Pokharan the devil's cauldron. Apart from the oppressive heat, there were plenty of poisonous creatures including vipers, cobras and scorpions. When snakes crawled into their tents they would catch them out of sport and preserve them in rum bottles.

Even then secrecy was a fetish. Retired Colonel S. Jaganathan, one of the team members, remembers that they weren't even briefed as to what the shafts were for. One day the commanding officer asked them to do puja around a disused well and told them: `Now start digging.' Bewildered, the men said they couldn't proceed unless they knew the diameter and the depth of the shaft. Even then they were given only minimum details. Two months lager digging began on another well with a much shallower depth.

The work was dangerous and slow and was made all the more difficult under the camouflage net. The men used dynamite to deepen and widen the shafts. They used a pulley system driven by generators to go down the shaft and clear the debris. It took almost half an hour to reach the bottom of the deepest well that was close to two hundred metres. A lieutenant general became dizzy just staring down at it and had to be hurried away.

Security was so strict that the engineers had shoot-at-sight orders for trespassers. Visiting army men to the range were rudely turned away with a warning. The 113 Engineers started the practice of giving the shafts code names. `White House' was then called Sand Grouse. And `Taj Mahal' was known as Blue Fox.

Excerpted from `Weapons for Peace', by Raj Chengappa; Rs 395; HarperCollins