At a Nuclear Flash Point, Talk of Accord : Arms: Head of secret India center tells visitors of need for non-proliferation pact.

Deep inside India’s most secretive research center, sheltered between the Trombay Hills and a backwater cove of the Arabian Sea, R. Chidambaram leaned against a 50-foot conference table one recent morning and was astonishingly open about the work going on in the strange, unmarked buildings nearby.

It was here, the center’s director said, that scientists fashioned the fuel and components for India’s first nuclear bomb--the “peaceful nuclear explosion” that it detonated 107 yards beneath the Rajasthan desert to gain unofficial entry to the world’s nuclear club in 1974.

And it is here, he confirmed, that scientists continue to work day and night processing and stockpiling enough weapons-grade plutonium to alarm nuclear weapons analysts from Washington to Moscow--so much so that both capitals have launched unprecedented diplomatic efforts to curb nuclear proliferation both here and in India’s western neighbor, Pakistan.

In short, Chidambaram, the head of India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Center, made it clear that his sprawling seacoast facility--better known by its acronym, BARC--is the brain trust of South Asia’s growing nuclear arms race.

“I can understand the non-proliferation concerns of the developed countries,” the soft-spoken South Indian solid-state physicist said firmly when asked why India insists that his facility remain so shrouded from the major nuclear powers.

“But then, we are not one of these small developing countries on the map you just tick off like that. . . . What technology don’t we have?

“India is not just another one of those countries. India is the one country that has the technology. And we didn’t rely on clandestinely supplied or stolen technology to achieve it.”

They were rare moments of candor from one of India’s long-secretive nuclear elite. But perhaps even more surprising than Chidambaram’s admission of India’s nuclear capability was his audience that day: two American journalists who had been granted almost unprecedented permission to tour the top-secret facility and interview its director.

The timing of the tour and the apparent new policy of nuclear transparency hardly appeared a coincidence, though. Earlier last month, Indian Foreign Secretary Jyotindra Nath Dixit traveled to Washington for three days of high-level talks, largely centered on the nuclear issue.

Dixit’s visit was the latest in a series of efforts by the United States and Russia to cool one of the world’s most volatile nuclear flash points by getting both India and Pakistan to freeze their aggressive nuclear weapons programs.

The short-term goal of this diplomatic crusade is a five-nation nuclear summit that would include the United States, Russia and China and, ultimately, pave the way for a regional non-proliferation agreement between India and Pakistan. Those two countries have refused to sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty--a document that permits nuclear weapons only in the countries that had deployed them before 1968 and mandates international inspections of all nuclear facilities in countries that did not, facilities such as BARC.

Historically, both India and Pakistan have maintained that they will not sign the treaty because it discriminates against nuclear late-comers, developing nations that now have their own regional imperatives to achieve a nuclear-weapons capability.

India, for example, fears not only the intensive nuclear-weapons program in Pakistan, twice its enemy in war, but also the acknowledged capability of its more powerful onetime enemy China, which deployed its nuclear weapons before 1968 and continues to maintain missile bases near the Indian border in Tibet.

Pakistan, which was carved out of India as a separate Muslim state in 1947, similarly fears the proven capability of India’s more advanced nuclear program based in Trombay, just a few hundred miles across the Arabian Sea from Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi.

Underscoring the high stakes of this nuclear chess game--a recipe for regional Armageddon that is compounded by a bloody, Pakistani-backed Muslim rebellion in the Indian border region of Kashmir--CIA Director Robert M. Gates told a Senate committee in January, “The arms race between India and Pakistan is a major concern.”

The nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs in both countries, Gates said, “are particularly worrisome because of the constant tensions and conflict in Kashmir.”

Gates took those concerns a step further in late February, hinting broadly at the advanced state of both nations’ nuclear programs in an assessment that officials on both sides of the South Asian arms race now have confirmed.

“India and Pakistan continue their race to develop weapons of mass destruction,” Gates told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 25, adding that CIA analysts “have no reason to believe that either country maintains assembled nuclear bombs, much less that either has deployed them.”

“But such weapons could be assembled quickly,” he told the committee, “and both countries have combat aircraft that could be modified to deliver them in a crisis.”

Other analysts have stated their concern even more strongly. Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, called India and Pakistan “the highest-tension nuclear flash point in the world today,” with all the ingredients of a nuclear nightmare--”a border dispute, historical rivalry, mutual suspicion and no nuclear doctrine in either country.”

It was partly to mitigate such assessments that India’s decades-old nuclear establishment decided to open at least a few of the doors to its premier research facility last month, as well as to counter recent statements by Pakistani officials confirming their country’s ability to build at least two nuclear bombs but stressing their unwillingness to do so.

When asked whether India has built any nuclear bombs since its 1974 test, for example, Chidambaram smiled and said: “The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty states and defines a nuclear-weapon power as a country which has manufactured and exploded a nuclear device . . . whether you’ve got one or 30,000. So claiming means nothing. . . . Physics is built on things called observables.”

Then the director quickly added: “But the sooner we get rid of all these weapons, the better off the world will be. . . . We are very much for non-proliferation. We want a freeze all over the world. But in these tiny pockets, you say, ‘Freeze here, freeze there.’ This doesn’t make sense. . . . Our only objections to non-proliferation are that it is discriminatory.”

During last month’s look at India’s nuclear program, it was clear that India, unlike its rival Pakistan, has long integrated its weapons program with an ambitious push to develop a broad-based nuclear power industry--virtually from scratch.

In the four decades since Indian-born research scientist Homi Jehangir Bhabha set up the first center for fundamental research in Bombay in 1945, India has designed and built several of its own nuclear reactors and power plants, which, added to several imported reactors, now supply 2.5% of the nation’s energy. Two 500-megawatt, Indian-built reactors help drive its southern metropolis of Madras, and the 100-megawatt Dhruva research reactor that stands as the centerpiece of the BARC research complex is not only entirely of Indian design and manufacture, it also ranks as one of the world’s most powerful and innovative research reactors.

What is more, India has built its own plutonium reprocessing facilities, and its scientists are hard at work on research and development for nuclear power generation. An Indian-designed fast-breeder reactor in the southern town of Kalpakkam is an experiment with futuristic technology that the scientists hope will someday fill nearly all the energy needs of this largely impoverished nation of 850 million.

And yet, it is those same facilities that lie at the heart of the controversy over India’s nuclear-weapons program. All of them are involved in the production of plutonium, an essential ingredient for a nuclear bomb and a commodity that Chidambaram acknowledged India has been stockpiling for years.

To defend the stockpile, India cites the widely acknowledged peaceful uses of plutonium. But the world remains suspicious because no independent, international agency has been permitted to examine just how India is using its plutonium stockpile. The reactors and spent-fuel processing plants that produce the plutonium are out of bounds to inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency because they were built without any assistance from the world’s acknowledged nuclear states.

“We were denied technologies, so we had to make everything ourselves,” Chidambaram said, echoing the sentiments of many Indians who see the nuclear program as a source of national strength and pride. “Now we have everything ourselves.”

Pakistan, similarly, views its nuclear program as a patriotic one. But by contrast, Pakistan’s is a rootless endeavor. Several Pakistanis have been arrested in the West for attempting to steal the technology that India developed on its own, and their scientists are far from the capability of building their own commercial nuclear power station.

Times staff writer John M. Broder in Washington contributed to this report.

BACKGROUND

The Indian subcontinent may be the world’s most dangerous nuclear flash point. Its ingredients are two hostile neighbors, India and Pakistan, that have already warred against each other, a long-running border dispute over Kashmir, mutual suspicion and the means to strike. Both have modern aircraft that could deliver nuclear bombs. India exploded its first nuclear device in 1974, and Pakistan has pushed a nuclear development program that it now says would enable it to make bombs. In the past, both have refused to sign a treaty barring such weapons. But recent diplomatic moves offer some hope that the two rivals will submit to a regional nuclear non-proliferation agreement.