On May 11, 1998, India announced that it had detonated a thermonuclear bomb in its Operation Shakti tests ("Shakti-I", specifically). Dr. Samar Mubarakmand, a Pakistani nuclear physicist, asserted that if Shakti-I had been a thermonuclear test, the device had failed to fire. However, Dr. Harold M. Agnew, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said that India's assertion of having detonated a staged thermonuclear bomb was believable. India says that their thermonuclear device was tested at a controlled yield of because of the close proximity of the Khetolai village at about , to ensure that the houses in that village do not suffer significant damage. Another cited reason was that radioactivity released from yields significantly more than 45 Kilotons might not have been contained fully. After the Pokhran-II tests, Dr. Rajagopal Chidambaram, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India said that India has the capability to build thermonuclear bombs of any yield at will.