| Downloaded on October 22, 2001, from http://www.piads.com.pk/nuke.html Where Mountains Move-V Rai Saleh Azam Once in Chagai, the sub-assembled parts of the nuclear devices were carefully offloaded from the aircraft and were separately taken in their sub-assembled form to the five �Zero Rooms� in the kilometre long tunnels at Ras Koh Hills in Chagai. Dr. Samar Mubarakmand personally supervised the complete assembly of all five nuclear devices. Diagnostic cables were thereafter laid from the tunnel to the telemetry. The cables connected all five nuclear devices with a command observation post 10 km away. Afterwards, a complete simulated test was carried out by tele-command. This process of preparing the nuclear devices and laying of the cables and the establishment of the fully functional command and observation post took five days to complete. On 25 May 1998, soldiers of the Pakistan Army 12 Corps arrived to seal the tunnel. They were supervised by engineers and technicians from the Pakistan Army Engineering Corps, the Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) and the Special Development Works (SDW). Dr. Samar Mubarakmand himself walked a total of 5 kilometres back and forth in the hot tunnels checking and re-checking the devices and the cables which would be forever buried under the concrete. Finally, the cables were plugged into nuclear devices. The process of the sealing the tunnel thereafter began with the mixing of the cement and the sand and their pouring into the tunnels. It took a total of 6,000 cement bags to seal the tunnel and twice the amount of sand. The tunnels were sealed and plugged by the afternoon 26 May 1998 and by the afternoon of 27 May 1998, the cement had completely dried out due to the excessive heat of the desert. After the engineers certified that the concrete had hardened and the site was fit for the tests it was communicated to the Prime Minister via the GHQ that the site was ready. The date and time for Pakistan�s rendezvous with destiny was set for 3:00 p.m. on the afternoon of 28 May 1998. Pakistan�s �Finest Hour� 28 May 1998 dawned with an air alert over all military and strategic installations of Pakistan. The Pakistan Air Force had earlier been put on red alert to respond to the remote but real possibility of a joint Indo-Israeli pre-emptive strike against its nuclear installations. Pakistan thought it fit to be safe rather than sorry. PAF F-16A and F-7MP air defence fighters were scrambled from air bases around the country to remain vigilant and prepared for any eventuality. Before twilight, the automatic data transmission link from all Pakistani seismic stations to the outside world was switched off. At Chagai, it was a clear day. Bright, warm and sunny without a cloud in sight. All personnel, civil and military, were evacuated from �Ground Zero� except for members of the Diagnostics Group and the firing team. They had been involved in digging out and removing some equipment lying there since 1978. Ten members of the team reached the Observation Post (OP) located 10-kilometres away from Ground Zero. The firing equipment was checked for one last time at 1:30 p.m. and prayers were offered. An hour later, at 2:30 p.m., a battle-camouflaged Pakistan Army Aviation Mil Mi-8 helicopter carrying the team of observers including PAEC Chairman, Dr. Ishfaq Ahmed, KRL Director, Dr. A.Q. Khan, and four other scientists from KRL including Dr. Fakhr Hashmi, Dr. Javed Ashraf Mirza, Dr. M. Nasim Khan and S. Mansoor Ahmed arrived at the site. Also accompanying them was a Pakistan Army team headed by Lt. Gen. Zulfikar Ali, Chief of the Combat Division. At 3:00 p.m. a truck carrying the last lot of the personnel and soldiers involved in the site preparations passed by the OP. Soon afterwards, the all-clear was given to conduct the test as the site had been fully evacuated. Amongst the 20 men present, one young man, Muhammad Arshad, the Chief Scientific Officer, who had designed the triggering mechanism, was selected to push the button. He was asked to recite �All Praise be to Allah� and push the button. At exactly 3:16 p.m. Pakistan Standard Time (PST), the button was pushed and Muhammad Arshad stepped from obscurity into history. As soon as the button was pushed, the control system was taken over by computer. The signal was passed through the air-link initiating six steps in the firing sequence while at the same time bypassing, one after the other, each of the security systems put in place to prevent accidental detonation. Each step was confirmed by the computer, switching on power supplies for each stage. On the last leg of the sequence, the high voltage power supply responsible for detonating the nuclear devices was activated. As the firing sequence passed through each level and shut down the safety switches and activating the power supply, each and every step was being recorded by the computer via the telemetry which is an apparatus for recording readings of an instrument and transmitting them via radio. A radiation-hardened television camera with special lenses recorded the outer surface of the mountain. As the firing sequence continued through its stages, 20 pairs of eyes were glued on the mountain 10 kilometres away. There was deafening silence within and outside of the OP. The high voltage electrical power wave simultaneously reached the triggers in all the explosive HMX lenses on all five devices with microsecond synchronization. A short while after the button was pushed, the earth in and around the Ras Koh Hills trembled. The OP vibrated. Smoke and dust burst out through the five points where the nuclear devices were buried. The mountain shook and changed colour as the dust from thousands of years was dislodged from its surface. Its black granite rock turning white as de-oxidisation occurred from the fierce radioactive nuclear forces operating from within. A huge cloud of beige dust then enveloped the mountain. In the OP, shouts of �Nara-e-Takbeer!� and �Allah-o-Akbar!�(God is Great) went up. The time-frame, from the moment when the button was pushed to the moment the detonations inside the mountain took place, was thirty seconds. For those in the OP, watching in pin-drop silence with their eyes focused on the mountain, those thirty seconds were the longest in their lives. It was the culmination of a journey which started over 20 years ago. It was the moment of truth and triumph against heavy odds, trials and tribulations. At the end of those thirty seconds lay Pakistan�s date with destiny. The Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs would later describe it as �Pakistan�s finest hour�. Pakistan had become the world�s 7th nuclear power and the first nuclear weapons state in the Islamic World. Two days later, on 30 May 1998, Pakistan conducted its sixth nuclear test at Kharan, a flat desert valley 150 km to the south of the Ras Koh Hills. This was a miniaturized device giving a yield which was 60% of the first tests. A small hillock now rises in a crater in what used to be flat desert, marking the ground zero of the nuclear test there. THE END |