India becomes Nuclear

Due to Satyankar's knowledge, India got its first Uranium mine in the Bhim Basin of Karnataka in 1950. Moreover, Thorium export to USA and Uranium import in return also made uranium available for the nuclear program.

India has huge Thorium reserves, almost amounting to 25% of the total world reserves. But, using Thorium is complex, and Uranium is needed to start its chain reaction. While being much safer than other radioactive elements like Plutonium and Uranium, getting Nuclear energy from it is very difficult, and will take many more years for the technology to develop.

Compared to it, developing a Uranium bomb was much easier. On 18th March 1950, Uranium was successfully enriched to get the U-235 isotope, which is used in nuclear reactions.

During the Indo-China War, due to emergency and the world's attention outside of India's border, plus no satellite surveillance, no one got a wind of the nuclear plan.

On 14th August 1951, Bhabha informed Satyankar that nuclear test was ready to be done. Harnessing nuclear energy for electricity is still far in the future, but a bomb has become feasible. Controlling is more difficult than exploding afterall.

Pokhran mountain range was swiftly chosen as the test site due to Satyankar's instruction. If a good test site was being searched, it had a huge possibility of being discovered.

A small unit of military has completed the necessay things required for the test site beforehand, even before Bhabha gave the greenlight for nuclear test.

On 17th September 1951, Satyankar, Bhabha and his team, and Chief of IIA who has been handling communication between Satyankar and underground nuclear team, the only people who knew about the developments of the nuclear program, went to the test site with cameras.

At 4:15 pm, the first nuclear bomb prototype, 'Mini Brahmastr' was activated, and a deafening, and horrifying explosion happened that caused 5kms of sand around the epicentre to turn into glass. Even though everyone was 20kms away from the bomb prototype, which had less output than the Manhattan project, everyone still saw the explosion and felt the shockwaves and sand dust.

The explosion was recorded on camera, to tell the world that India has become the third nuclear power in the world.

The whole project, titled 'Project Kavach' (Kavach means Shield) costed 1.7 billion rupees in total, and was considered a success.

"Thank you, team. Thanks to you guys, now everyone will think twice before messing with India. I promise that we will not use nuclear weapons first. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent, not for waging wars.

Along with building a sufficient number of defence nuclear equipments, the main focus from now on will be to develop the technology required to harness nuclear energy for electricity."

Everyone congratulated each other, but Sarabhai also had a complicated expression.