I love how I manage to unite the Indian and Pakistani nuclear communities against me. A true feat if I may say so myself. 1974 was not a “weapon” for very clearly technical reasons.https://twitter.com/mosharrafzaidi/status/987766947285741569 …
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@wellerstein wonder if you agree. The Smiling Buddha device weighed 1400 kg and was 1.5 m in diameter. Smaller then “Gadget”. Probably could have been delivered by a Tu-142 or a Canberra Bomber
By 1974 they had demonstrated the capability to build nuclear weapons. But they did not weaponize the physics package (which requires a bit more work, though not too much). Does the difference matter? Depends on what question you are trying to answer.
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Historically the Pakistan Army thought that the test was no immediate threat for the same reasons, while the Pakistan Air Force thought the device was possibly deliverable with minor modifications. You saying both were right?
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Deliverability would mostly require fitting it into a ballistic casing and developing a fuzing system. Neither are significant compared to the difficulty of making the Pu-implosion device in the first place. So sure, you could weaponize it. But AFAIK they didn't.
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So the PAF was wrong? Or it was a “worst case scenario” assessment?
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Depends on what they were claiming. If they were claiming that India could, in a short amount of time, produce weapons — it's not wrong. (Depends more on separated Pu stockpile than anything else.) If they are claiming they had weapons on hand, ready to use, then seems wrong.
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It took India roughly 5 years to “weaponize”, ie develop Mirage-deliverable gravity bombs, after the decision to do so in March 1989.
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Sure — but if the question is, could they have had SOME kind of deliverable capability earlier than that? I mean, I don't see why not. (It might not have been a very good one!)
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Plausibly. Off the back of a cargo plane, if it survived the flight
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1400 KG and 1.5 m diameter. Pretty sure a Tu-142 could carry one. Absolutely a Canberra could.
End of conversation
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