India
celebrates National Technology Day on May 11
On
May 11, 1998, India
successfully test fired the Shakti-I nuclear missile at the Indian Army’s
Pokhran Test Range in Rajasthan in an operation led by aerospace engineer and late
President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam.
Two days later, the country successfully tested two
more nuclear weapons as a part of the same Pokhran-II/Operation Shakti
initiative (Pokhran-I was the 1974 test firing of the ‘Smiling Buddha’
missile).
So the Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared India a nuclear state, making it the sixth
country to join the ‘nuclear club’ of nations and the first one that was
not party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons (NPT) – an international treaty
signed by the US, Russia, the UK, France, and China which aims to prevent the
spread of nuclear weapons and hopes to achieve nuclear disarmament.
