Some excerpts from the article:
One of the scientists, K. Santhanam, who coordinated India's nuclear weapons program when the country conducted five nuclear tests 11 years ago, has said that the original thermonuclear device test was a dud ... Santhanam said that the hydrogen bomb tested in 1998 "completely failed to ignite" and that the shaft, the frame and the winches were found to be intact even after the tests. No crater was formed in the fusion test."If the second H-bomb stage of the composite device had worked, the shaft would have been blown to smithereens," he told reporters.
[...]
Last week, the former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission, P.K. Iyengar, also joined the chorus advocating more tests and said "nobody makes a weapon out of a single test."
Commentary
A few months ago I heard the Indian ambassador to the U.S. express in public her government's slight regard for both the CTBT and the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). India would in theory be able to support these treaties but only under verification regimes that North Korea and Iran have shown to be completely impractical.
India is extremely unlikely to surprise the world anytime soon with another round of tests. Testing has become so taboo that India would risk enormous diplomatic damage if it attempted to re-verify its two-stage thermonuclear design.
But we should question whether this uncertainty about the effectiveness and reliability of India's nuclear arsenal is really the safest and most stable outcome. If policymakers in India or one of India's adversaries have doubts about whether India's nuclear weapons actually will work, such uncertainty could lead to risky decisions by either side during a future crisis.
Well-meaning arms control advocates have hoped that treaties such as the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the CTBT, the FMCT, and others would either prevent countries from getting nuclear weapons or reduce tensions and provocative acts (such as nuclear tests) if they did establish nuclear arsenals. However, after countries emerge as nuclear weapons states (bypassing the increasingly irrelevant NPT), the most important goal should be creating stability and reducing the probability of nuclear weapons use. A ban or taboo against testing creates doubts about effectiveness and introduces instability rather than stability during decision-making in a crisis.
The question for India, Pakistan, and the rest of the world to ponder is whether they would prefer India to perform a full-power, two-stage thermonuclear test before the next crisis with Pakistan or during it. In the event that, for example, radical Islamists seize power in Islamabad, leading to a high-tension crisis on the subcontinent, Indian decision-makers would want to be assured that all components of the military are ready to defend the country. But questions about the nuclear arsenal will exist, both for India's decision-makers and for Pakistan's. India's leaders may feel the need to organize a hasty nuclear test during the crisis, both to reassure themselves and to deter the Pakistani Islamists. At that moment, nearly everyone will have wished that India had done such a test under more placid circumstances, something the testing taboo and the CTBT are preventing.