POKHRAN, India (Reuters) - Village barber Bhabhoot Ram was having a siesta in this Indian desert town on Monday when he felt a tremor. He knew it wasn't an earthquake. Peacocks flew in panic and residents, 15 km (nine miles) from the explosion site, said they could see a large layer of dust rising into the air. New Delhi stunned the world when, after a 24-year nuclear lull, it announced that it was capable of making nuclear weapons, including a hydrogen bomb, if needed. Military officials in Jodhpur, the nearest army centre, said Monday's tests took place at Khetolai, a village in the Thar desert 35 km from the crater that put India on the nuclear map with its first successful test in 1974. "Khetolai is part of the nuclear testing range and it is called Alpha Range. The exact location of the site is about three km north of Khetolai in the interior desert," said Lieutenant General Pankaj Joshi, commander of the Desert Corps at Jodhpur. According to India's Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the 1974 plutonium device was placed at the bottom of a 107-metre shaft and generated the nuclear energy equivalent of some 12,000 tonnes of the explosive TNT. Pokhran is 600 km west of Jaipur, capital of the north-western state of Rajasthan. Indian defence experts were quick to point out that there was no release of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Monday's tests were jointly conducted by the Defence Ministry's Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) and the Atomic Energy Commission. Even the district authorities in Jaisalmer, the tourist centre from which Pokhran is administered, were kept in the dark about an operation which blew the cloak off more than two decades of New Delhi's nuclear ambivalence. The army evacuated the 400 inhabitants of Khetolai three hours before the test, telling them that a military exercise was about to take place, witnesses said. At 3.45 p.m., they heard a huge noise. They did not know the details, but knew it was something important.