France Offers Lab-Level N-Test Facility

France has offered India use of its laser facility at Bordeaux to conduct laboratory-scale nuclear tests.

Discussions were held during Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's visit to Paris last month as part of co-operation in the nuclear field.

Technology transfer in the maintenance of nuclear plants and other civilian applications was also discussed.

India has imposed a voluntary moratorium on further nuclear testing but kept the option open to conduct sub-critical (laboratory) nuclear tests to validate, develop and alter weapons.

India does not have the technical means to carry out sub-critical tests that require an investment of a few hundred crore rupees to set up a particle accelerator or a giant laser facility.

 

India will have to conduct sub-critical tests regularly to make use of the data generated during the May nuclear tests and to maintain its nuclear weapons programme.

France, as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), may run the risk of angering the US and other nuclear states by co-operating with India in sub-critical testing.

However, officials argued that since sub-critical tests obviate the need for underground tests, they promote the cause of non-proliferation.

The French facility called "Megajoule laser facility" at Bordeaux will cost France about $1.5 billion by the time it is completed in 1999. The facility was initiated in 1995, a year before France conducted nuclear tests in the south Pacific Ocean islands.

It is still unclear what the nature of the French support will be. Whether Indian scientists will be allowed to use the facility or the French will conduct the tests based on Indian data has still not been specified.

Officials say in all probability, France may allow use of its facility to India for a price, partly to recover some of the huge costs that has gone into setting up the Megajoule laser.

The facility can simulate low yield blasts to a thermonuclear explosion.

The experiments involve studying the implosion of a micro-sphere containing a mix of hydrogen isotopes fired from an X-ray source.

Scientists can study speeding matter, the emission and absorption of radiation, propagation in a closed environment and state equations in conditions similar to those governing real weapons.

France is the only country besides the US to have a giant laser facility to simulate nuclear tests.