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Young Scientist Recruited Into Secret Bomb Project
- SK Sikka was summoned from his PhD work to join a secret project and told to "do something for the country."
- He became one of the earliest team members on the classified peaceful nuclear explosion program codenamed Smiling Buddha.
Peaceful Label Masked A Military-Grade Device
- The test was publicly framed as a peaceful nuclear explosion but functionally it was an atomic bomb similar to military tests.
- Project leaders used PNE terminology while acknowledging the core was a bomb and secrecy kept most staff uninformed.
Built A Plutonium Implosion Bomb With Minimal Support
- India developed a plutonium implosion device from scratch without external help after being denied detailed knowledge and computing resources.
- Teams overcame brittle plutonium fabrication and lack of supercomputers using rudimentary calculations and engineering ingenuity.