Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

history as told by the people who were there.

Today Italy's shame how an undersea mission finally found the remains of nearly 300 migrants

drowned in the 1990s. You could make out a photo of a very young man with dark skin.

I realized straight away that the nets must have got caught in the wreckage of the ghost ship.

Plus we relive the Spiegel affair, one of the most serious political scandals in post-war Germany,

the Nigerian author Chinoa Achebe remembered by his daughter, and the life and times of Robert Maplethorp, one of the most controversial

photographers of the 20th century best known for shocking male nudes.

And I said, oh my God, and I just walked away.

I couldn't believe it.

He was looking right at me.

That's all coming up later in the podcast, but we begin with an event of truly earth-shaking

proportions. By the early 1970s only the five permanent

members of the UN Security Council, the US, the then Soviet Union, China, Britain and France,

were confirmed nuclear powers. The idea that nuclear weapons

technology could be acquired by others was regarded as dangerously destabilising for the

post-war world order. But then in 1974 India stunned the world

by carrying out its first ever nuclear test, cod-named Smiling Buddha.

Alex Last has been speaking to one of the key scientists involved.

Everybody was almost unanimous that we should have a nuclear weapon at our hand.

On the 138th day of the year, at 8 hours, 0, 8 minutes, 20 seconds in the morning,

Indian Standard Time, the graph went haywire.

...