India conducts three underground nuclear tests in Pokhran in 1998, including one with a thermonuclear weapon.
The Pokhran-II tests were a series of five nuclear bomb tests conducted by India in May 1998 at the Indian Army's Pokhran Test Range. It was India's second nuclear test; the first, codenamed Smiling Buddha, took place in May 1974. The tests were successful in their primary goal of providing India with the ability to build fission and thermonuclear weapons with yields of up to 200 kilotons. Each of the Pokhran-II explosions, according to the then-Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, was "equivalent to several tests carried out by other nuclear weapon states over decades." Following that, India established a computer simulation capability to predict the yields of nuclear explosives whose designs are similar to the designs of explosives used in this case.
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