Smiling buddha to Operation Shakti

Feature: A brief history of India's nuclear deterrence

On the morning of May 18, 1974, at 8:05 sharp, some 110 kilometres from Jaisalmer in Rajasthan’s Thar desert, the push of a button announced India’s entry into the closed club of nuclear nations. 

The reverberations of that test, conducted underground in arid Pokhran, and called Pokhran-I (codename Smiling Buddha), were felt around the world. With this detonation, India had become the only country outside the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the P5, namely the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China – to have conducted a confirmed nuclear weapons test. China had