By Kenneth J. Cooper
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 12, 1998; Page A01

NEW DELHI, May 11—India said that it conducted three underground nuclear tests today, the nation's first since 1974, escalating a strategic arms race with regional arch-rival Pakistan and exposing India to possible U.S. sanctions.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leader of India's seven-week-old Hindu nationalist government, said the three devices tested included a thermonuclear device, commonly known as a hydrogen bomb. A top aide to the prime minister said the device was more powerful than the so-called low-yield warhead India tested 24 years ago.

Vajpayee's brief statement did not explain why the tests were conducted. But the aide, Brajesh Mishra, indicated that the simultaneous explosions 330 miles southwest of New Delhi, near the Pakistani border, were intended to remove any doubt about India's capacity to build nuclear weapons. Previously, India has said its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes and spoke only of keeping open the option of making strategic weapons if they were needed to ensure national security.

A Nuclear Flashpoint? India's explosion of a nuclear bomb may escalate the strategic-arms race in volatile South Asia. Here is a look at the nuclear capabilities of the three major nations there. INDIA Not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Detonated a nuclear device (low-yield) in 1974, its only previous nuclear test. MISSILES India has one of the developing world's most ambitious missile programs. It has developed the short-range Prithvi missile, range 93 miles to 217 miles. It also has developed the long-range ballistic missile known as the Agni, range 1,550 miles. The Agni reportedly needs only a few more tests before it can enter full-scale production. AIR FORCE India has a sizable air force with several advanced fighter-bombers that could deliver nuclear weapons, including the British-French Jaguar, the French Mirage-2000 and the Soviet-supplied MiG. PAKISTAN Not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Secretly launched nuclear program in 1972. A 1993 U.S. Senate report said Pakistan received nuclear assistance from China and made efforts to obtain nuclear equipment from Western firms. MISSILES Pakistan has received complete missile systems from China as well as designs for a missile factory and nuclear warheads. Pakistan may be producing the Hatf-3 missile with a range of 370 to 500 miles; this missile was tested last July. Pakistan reportedly also has developed a 930-mile missile, named the Ghauri. AIR FORCE Pakistan has several nuclear-capable fighter-bomber aircraft, including the U.S.-supplied F-16s. CHINA The region's dominant military power, which has had nuclear weapons for decades. It has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In May 1995, China conducted an underground nuclear test, just days after the successful extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In June 1996, it carried out its most recent nuclear explosion at the Lop Nor test site in northwestern Xinjiang province. China has a highly developed air force, a substantial supply of ballistic missiles and an estimated 400 nuclear warheads. SOURCES: Jane's Intelligence Review, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Military Balance, Associated Press

"These tests have established that India has a proven capability for a weaponized nuclear program," said Mishra, whose position is roughly equivalent to that of a White House chief of staff. "They also provide a valuable database which is useful in the design of nuclear weapons of different yields for different applications and for different delivery systems."

The decision by Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist government to show its strategic strength came a month after Pakistan successfully tested a ballistic missile capable of striking India's major cities and a week after Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes identified another neighbor, China, as the principal military threat to this country.

Since the end of the Cold War, many U.S. analysts have described the Indian subcontinent as the world's likeliest nuclear flash point because of enduring tensions between predominantly Hindu India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Both nations have long been known to have nuclear capabilities, although Pakistan has never exploded a nuclear device.

The announcement of India's tests brought condemnation from the Clinton administration and Pakistan. "Pakistan strongly condemns this Indian act, and the entire world should condemn it," Foreign Minister Gohar Ayub Khan told the Reuters news service. "It has sucked Pakistan into an arms race."

Khan told lawmakers in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, that "the responsibility for dealing a death blow to the global efforts at nuclear nonproliferation rests squarely with India."

"The United States is deeply disappointed by the decision of the government of India to conduct three nuclear tests," White House spokesman Michael McCurry said. "This runs counter to the effort the international community is making to promulgate a comprehensive ban on such testing."

Senior Clinton administration officials said they were seeking further information about the tests to determine whether they would trigger economic and technological sanctions under U.S. law. Mishra said the Indian government anticipated sanctions would be imposed, adding, "We will not face problems" coping with them.

[Early Tuesday morning, it appeared the Clinton administration had moved to raise the diplomatic stakes by ordering the immediate recall of U.S. Ambassador Richard F. Celeste, according to U.S. diplomatic sources in New Delhi. Celeste, a former Democratic governor of Ohio who arrived in India last November, was in Hawaii meeting with U.S. military commanders for the Pacific region and canceled his scheduled return to the embassy, the sources said.]

Other nations spoke disapprovingly of the Indian tests as well, news services reported. German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel condemned India and called the tests a "slap in the face" to the 149 nations that have signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy called the test "a very major regressive step backward. . . . When you get into playing with new nuclear weapons, or new nuclear powers, it's very destabilizing for the whole world."

There was no immediate reaction from China. The official New China News Agency reported the tests without comment.

For years, India and Pakistan have engaged in a regional Cold War that until today had been confined to the development of missiles with progressively longer ranges. Pakistan's test last month of the Ghauri missile, with a range of 930 miles, was seen as a response to India's movement last year of Prithvi missiles into storage near the Pakistani border within range of Pakistan's major cities.

Mishra indicated that the Vajpayee government assumed -- based on statements by Pakistan's top nuclear scientist -- that its regional rival intends to match the latest escalation. That scientist, Rifaat Hussain, an international relations professor and former diplomat, said today: "Our position has always been if India tests, we will follow suit. It's a very dangerous development. . . . You have a missile race going on, and now you have a nuclear race going on."

Vajpayee said the tests "contained explosions like the experiment conducted in May 1974," the only previous time India has detonated a nuclear device. Today's tests were carried out at the same location as the first test: Pokaran, in the desert of Rajasthan state about 70 miles from the Pakistani border. The prime minister said monitoring equipment showed no radioactivity was released into the atmosphere.

India said today's tests included the detonation of a thermonuclear device that Mishra said had a "much bigger" yield than the 1974 explosion, while the other two carried about the same force. One was "a low-yield device" like the one tested in 1974, and the other "a fission device."

Although U.S. use of nuclear weapons in World War II -- along with the Cold War nuclear standoff that followed -- spawned a worldwide effort to ban such devices, the development of strategic arms enjoys wide public support in both India and Pakistan, according to opinion polls.

A majority of people in Pakistan, which has lost three wars to India since 1947, consider nuclear weaponry a practical way to neutralize India's superior conventional strength. In the face of India's vast size -- 950 million people, compared with Pakistan's 135 million -- and its military prowess, Pakistan cannot hope to keep pace despite heavy defense expenditures, analysts say.

India apparently is driven more by a desire for international respect for a huge but poor nation. The nation's strategic analysts typically speak of a need to compete militarily with China, a declared nuclear power that humiliated India in a 1962 border war and has treated its neighbor as an inconsequential military threat since then.

Today's tests follow by seven weeks the rise to power of a coalition government led by Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which -- despite its shaky hold on power -- has been more aggressive than its predecessors in projecting India's global role and in relations with its neighbors. Both the BJP's campaign platform and the government's espoused agenda promised to "exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons" -- wording that was interpreted as deliberately ambiguous.

One BJP leader predicted that the testing would unify a politically divided India.

"Very nice. Very nice," a middle-class New Delhi resident said upon hearing the news. "This is the response to Pakistan, and [Defense Minister Fernandes was] talking about China."

Mishra did hold out the possibility that India's tests could ultimately lead to more restraint rather than escalation. He said that India could forswear future tests in accord with the test-ban treaty -- which neither India or Pakistan has signed -- and in the future depend on computer simulations to update its nuclear capability.

Such a scenario, Mishra said, "would depend on a number of reciprocal activities."