NEW DELHI: India is preparing for another nuclear test, the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission ... Homi Sethna, announced here today [April 16]. He told a Press conference the Commission was looking for a suitable testing area. The Director of the Nuclear Research Centre at Trombay, near Bombay, Raja Ramanna, said at the conference that it would be an underground test, the same as first nuclear blast on May 18 last year.

[Meanwhile, as reported by news agencies from Paris,] the preliminary talks for a world energy and raw materials conference collapsed here ... after nine days of deliberations without agreement on an agenda for the proposed main conference later this year. The ten delegations from the oil producer and consumer nations and Third World countries remained deadlocked. … Immediately after the meeting opened last week, the oil producers and the Third World … demanded that the main conference would deal with all raw materials, including oil. The industrial bloc — the U.S., Japan … and the European Community — wanted to confine the agenda to only oil. … Before departing, all delegations agreed to remain in contact.

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2025