China explodes H. bomb: India detects test

New Delhi, June 27: China to-day exploded in the atmosphere its first hydrogen bomb with an estimated yield of one to two megatones of TNT — the fifteenth nuclear device it has tested since October 1964 — in the Lop Nor region of Sinkiang in Central Asia. The first news of the latest atmospheric nuclear test carried out by China came from the Indian Atomic Energy Department which detected the explosion on its micro-barograph network. According to a spokesman of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Trombay, the Chinese exploded the device at 9:25 IST this morning at their usual test area in the Lop Nor region. It is not yet known whether this thermo-nuclear device was dropped from an aircraft or detonated from a fixed position on the ground, but in either case it represents a remarkable achievement by a technologically under-developed country like China within a short span of nine years ever since it conducted its first atomic test. The explosion of the first hydrogen bomb by China has come as a telling post-script to the Nixon-Brezhnev agreement on the prevention of atomic war and the limitation of the nuclear arms race. The impending French test in the South Pacific in the face of bitter protests from Australia and New Zealand — and in defiance of the ruling by the World Court — will put in sharper focus the inability of the two super powers to prescribe a new nuclear code of conduct for the whole world.