Nuclear duds . . .

There's a controversy raging in India following a statement by a scientist the the country's nuclear test in 1998 was a fizzle. The scientist was involved in the country's nuclear weapons program at the time.

The gist of what he claims is that the Indian government pushed up the tests because of intelligence that Pakistan was about to test its own device. There is ample circumstantial evidence that the test was not everything India wanted at the time, since the yield it announced was more than half the yield estimated in non-classified sources. But the official response has been that he's wrong.

The irony is that the Pakistanis also have had nuclear "fizzles," as the Indian press put it. The yield on their weapons has generally been below expectations.

But perhaps some perspective would be useful - the Indian explosion was measured by outside experts at 20 kilotons. That's in the neighborhood of the yield of the bombs the U.S. used in World War II.