By Kenneth J. Cooper
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 14, 1998; Page A01

NEW DELHI, May 13—India conducted two more underground nuclear tests today, rejecting international condemnation of its detonation of three nuclear devices Monday and once again catching the world by surprise.

The Indian government said in a brief statement that today's exercise "completes the series of tests" that began with Monday's detonations, India's first nuclear tests since 1974. Faced with a worldwide outpouring of denunciation and economic sanctions, the government suggested that the completion of testing might allow India to comply with parts of a nuclear test-ban treaty that it has so far refused to sign.

Nuclear Arms Race in the Making? India's underground nuclear tests Monday and Wednesday have raised fears of a renewed nuclear arms race in South Asia. Many nations, including China -- a declared nuclear power -- and Japan condemned the tests that took place near the border with Pakistan, India's archrival. Pakistan indicated it may now also conduct nuclear tests. DECLARED NUCLEAR POWERS United States, Russia, Britain, France, China All have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. UNDECLARED NUCLEAR- WEAPONS STATES India has tested nuclear devices three times, once in 1974 and twice this week. U.S. officials say they are uncertain if India has assembled nuclear weapons, but it is capable of doing so in a very short time. It has not signed either of the nuclear treaties. Pakistan secretly launched a nuclear program in 1972 but has not detonated a nuclear device. It is believed to have the capability of assembling a nuclear weapon quickly. Pakistan has not signed the nuclear-arms control treaties. Israel is believed to have about 100 nuclear weapons, although it is not known to have tested any. It has not signed the NPT. HIGH-RISK STATES Iran, which signed the NPT, is secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program, U.S. officials believe. Iraq has had a covert nuclear weapons program in violation of the NPT, which it signed. But many of the installations were destroyed in the Persian Gulf War, and U.N. inspectors have determined the program has essentially ended. Libya has been trying to acquire nuclear arms or parts, but has not been very successful. North Korea's nuclear program has been frozen since 1994, as part of an under-standing with the United States. But it is believed to be continuing some aspects of the program. North Korea has signed the NPT. PAKISTAN Some of Pakistan's nuclear facilities: Rawalpindi: Pakistani Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology, which includes laboratory and pilot-scale plant for plutonium extraction. Wah: Possible nuclear weapons assembly site. Kahuta: Khan Research Laboratory with a large-scale uranium enrichment plant. Chasma: Plutonium extraction plant; not complete. Khusab: Plutonium production reactor. INDIA Some of India's principal nuclear facilities: Tarapur: Large plutonium extraction plant Rattehalli: Pilot-scale uranium enrichment plant Kalpakkam: Indira Gandhi Atomic Research Center, which includes fast breeder test reactors and plutonium extraction plants. Trombay: Bhabha Atomic Research Center; possible location of nuclear weapons program, including research and plutonium production and plutonium extraction. CHINA Some of China's main nuclear facilities: Subei: Jiuquan Atomic Energy Complex, including plutonium production and weapons assembly. Haiyan: Northwest Nuclear Weapons Research and Design Academy. Lanzhou: Main facility for producing weapons-grade uranium. Xi'an: Possible site for enriching uranium to weapons grade. Guangyuan: Believed to be hub of nuclear weapons production. Heping: Uranium enrichment plant Yibin: Nuclear fuel component plant Mianyang: Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, sometimes called the "Los Alamos of China." Harbin: Possible warhead assembly and production facility. SOURCE: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

But senior Indian officials also expressed defiance. "This says we will do what we want to do," said Pramod Mahajan, an aide to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. "We don't bother about threats. . . . The news of the day is: India defies world opinion."

Adding nuclear weapons to India's arsenal has long been a primary goal of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which after years in opposition now leads Vajpayee's two-month-old coalition government. Party leaders argued today that India has legitimate national security concerns because one of its neighbors, China, is armed with nuclear weapons and another, Pakistan, is capable of making them.

Basking in a surge of popular domestic support for the tests, government spokesmen insisted the country is strong enough to shrug off international economic sanctions even though India is one of the world's largest recipients of foreign aid. And they said they see the development of nuclear weapons as a way to make the world's second-most-populous nation a "global player," in Mahajan's words.

The government reported two blasts at 12:21 p.m. (3:51 a.m. EDT) at the Pokaran desert test site -- about 330 miles southwest of New Delhi, near the border with Pakistan -- and said they had an explosive force equivalent to less than 1,000 tons of TNT, considerably lower than Monday's blasts. Brajesh Mishra, Vajpayee's top aide, described the devices as "low yield" and said no radioactivity was released into the atmosphere, according to the government statement.

Mishra said in an interview that the tests were scheduled a month ago, at the same time as those conducted Monday, and were not intended as a rebuff to international criticism. "It is not a question of defiance, none at all," Mishra said.

But Mahajan issued his more nationalistic declaration during an informal briefing with Indian reporters. "We could have stopped it after Clinton's reply yesterday," Mahajan said. "But within 24 hours of Clinton's reply, we conducted these tests."

In its statement, the government repeated the offer it made Monday "to consider adhering to some of the undertakings" in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which has been signed by 149 nations -- but not by India or Pakistan. Mishra rejected as "unacceptable" Clinton's demand that India sign the nuclear test ban unconditionally.

Recent Indian governments have denounced the treaty as discriminatory because it sets no timetable for the declared nuclear powers to destroy their arsenals while preventing other countries from amassing such weapons. India is concerned not only about China, a declared nuclear power, but about Pakistan, which has never tested a nuclear weapon but says it has the capacity to do so. India has fought three wars with Pakistan and one with China in the last 50 years.

This month, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes identified China -- with which India has enjoyed improving relations in recent years -- as the principal threat because of what he described as military buildups in Tibet and elsewhere. But China has rejected Fernandes's accusations, and Giri Deshingkar, director of the Institute of Chinese Studies in Delhi, said, "He's conjuring up an excuse to justify something he wants to do for some other reasons."

The BJP won the greatest number of seats in Parliament during elections held in February and March, campaigning on a platform promoting what it described as the common Hindu heritage of all Indians, the continued need for India to control foreign involvement in its slowly opening economy, and "the option to induct nuclear weapons." In forming the still shaky coalition government, Vajpayee and the BJP compromised on many of their campaign promises, but the nuclear plank remained.

Successive Indian governments have sought a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, a status that BJP spokesmen have noted now belongs to the world's five declared nuclear powers -- Britain, France, Russia, China and the United States. The party sees becoming a nuclear weapons state -- as some BJP members suggest that this week's testing makes India -- as a shortcut to an undeniable claim to a permanent council seat.

Vajpayee's government has appeared willing to make a nuclear bid for international prestige even at the risk of losing most of India's foreign aid through sanctions. Aid is spent largely on alleviating India's widespread poverty and disease and upgrading the nation's inadequate infrastructure.

India historically has been the World Bank's biggest borrower, receiving aid commitments from the World Bank and donor nations of about $7 billion annually, although the actual inflow in 1994 and 1995 totaled $4 billion.

The sanctions imposed by the United States, in addition to cutting off direct aid and private bank loans, mandates U.S. opposition to Indian applications for loans from international development banks. But Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha and other officials have confidently predicted that India could cope with the loss of foreign aid because overall it represents a small part of the nation's economic output and hard-currency earnings. "There's nothing to panic about," Mahajan said.

The acceptance of persistent social devastation as a fact of life in India -- where half the population of 950 million are poor, half are illiterate, 70 percent lack toilets and nearly half of all young children are malnourished -- partly explains the seeming lack of concern about the loss of some foreign aid, government critics said.

Another reason is that the upper-caste, educated social elite who form the BJP's political base traditionally have been more concerned about developing advanced technology and asserting the nation's role in the world than about alleviating poverty.

"Nobody can eat these bombs," said Dhirendra Sharma, an anti-nuclear activist. "It's an unfortunate waste of resources. Go in the street and see the common people. They are not jubilant."

Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this article.