Raja Ramanna

Raja Ramanna (born January 28, 1925 in Tumkur ; † September 24, 2004 in Mumbai ) was an Indian physicist and architect of the Indian nuclear weapons program .

Life

Raja Ramanna started playing the piano at the age of six and showed a lot of talent. The family sent him to Madras Christian College . He received his PhD in physics from King's College London . In 1949 he went to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research to the atomic researcher Homi Bhabha . Shortly after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki , he was attracted by the secret of nuclear power. He later became director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Bombay .

When China carried out an atomic bomb test in 1967 , India also accelerated research. In 1972 the Purnima plutonium reactor was completed. In the same year, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi commissioned Ramanna to build an experimental bomb - orally, for reasons of secrecy. In May 1974, Ramanna's men lowered a body weighing 1,400 kilograms into a shaft near Pokaran in the Tharr desert and detonated India's first atomic bomb. She was soon nicknamed "the smiling Buddha". The world wasn't smiling and the US imposed an embargo. The following year, Ramanna was awarded the second highest Indian state order, the Padma Vibhushan .

He saw the embargo as an "emotional overreaction" and as a scientific advisor to the military later ensured that India continued to manufacture nuclear weapon components. When a second test with three atomic bombs took place in 1998 , the doyen of atomic researchers celebrated this with a bottle of wine and said: "Nobody can push us around now". In 1978 he was a guest at Saddam Hussein's , who also wanted him to make an atom bomb. Ramannan lay awake in bed a whole night in Baghdad - for fear that Hussein would not let him go without the bomb. He later headed the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore , was briefly Minister of Defense and was elected to the Rajya Sabha , the upper house of the Indian Parmalent, in 1990 and 1997 .

He owned many dogs and occasionally gave piano concerts. "Music is yoga for me," he said.

literature

• Raja Ramanna and Aditya Sondhi Unfinished Symphony: A Tribute to the Alumni of Bishop Cotton Boys' School Bangalore , Penguin Books India 2003, ISBN 0-670-04966-2

Web links

• Biography Overview (English)