Bomb man who kept his mouth shut

The best thing about Rajagopala Chidambaram, who passed away recently, was that he “could keep his mouth shut”, as his mentor Raja Ramanna wrote in his memoir, Years of Pilgrimage. No wonder, he tested six atom bombs with no CIA, ISI or satellite spy eyes getting any wiser beforehand.

- R. PRASANNAN

Six bombs? Didn’t he preside over only five tests in 1998? Yes, but he had been the key man behind the 1974 test.

Was that a bomb, or a peaceful nuclear explosion? There is no difference, wrote Chidambaram in his memoir India Rising: “The physics is the same... only the packaging is different.” He should know; he had worked on the physics of the 1974 test.

Ramanna, considered the father of the Indian bomb (no disrespect to Homi Bhabha, who was ready to test in 1965, but Lal Bahadur Shastri didn’t agree), had recruited the shy youth with a doctorate in physics, and asked him to work on the ‘peaceful’ bomb while pretending to continue his work on crystallography. Chidambaram worked on both. He talked a lot about crystallography but kept his mouth shut about the bomb work.