Atal Bihari Vajpayee became Prime Minister in March 1998. On March 28, he asked for preparations for a nuclear test. On May 11, India detonated three devices at Pokhran, and two more on May 13.
American spy satellites had detected test preparations in 1996. This time the army’s 58th Engineer Regiment prepared the site. It worked mostly at night and put the equipment back in place each day, so that nothing seemed to have moved.