Strategic Analysis:

A Monthly Journal of the IDSA

June 2000 (Vol. XXIV No. 3)

Nuclear Targeting Philosophy for India

By Gurmeet Kanwal *

A decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb over one city of one’s own country would be
recognised in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster
beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.

– McGeorge Bundy 1

Counter Value or Counter Force?

At the heart of a nation’s targeting philosophy is the question: what deters? Is the adversary to be
deterred by threatening his major cities with annihilation? Or, is he to be deterred by threatening
decapitating strikes against his political and military leadership? Or, would he be deterred by
rendering his strategic nuclear forces and conventional offensive strike corps incapable of effective
and coherent action? Civilian and military nuclear planners have for long wrestled with the dilemma
of whether to base their targeting philosophies on “value targets” or on “counter force” targets or a
judicious mix of the two.

Value targets consist of major population centres and industrial installations and are the ones that
exemplify terror in the “balance of terror” equation. After the horror of the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in 1945, ordinary people the world over find it easy to understand what might happen
if portions of their own city were to be flattened by a nuclear weapon. “Counter force” targets are
primarily strategic military targets and are generally those that are connected with the storage,
launching and delivery of nuclear weapons and their command, control and communications (C3).
Large mechanised military formations in the field, particularly when concentrated before or during
employment, are also classified as counter force targets. Even if counter force targets are attacked
exclusively, there is an inherent danger of “collateral” civilian casualties since most of these are
likely to be located close to cities and small towns.

Democratic states, in particular, are increasingly placing much greater emphasis on the value of
human life than was the case even a few decades ago and are most uncomfortable with the concept
of massive urban and industrial destruction that was the hallmark of Cold War strategies such as
“Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD). Robert McNamara’s concept of MAD was the assured
destruction of one-fifth to one-fourth of the population and half of the industry of USSR in a second
strike, after absorbing a Soviet first strike. One of the reasons given in justification of such a
massive nuclear strike was that the damage acceptability threshold of totalitarian states is much
higher than that of democratic states where the government is directly answerable to the people.
India has been blessed with two non-democratic nuclear armed neighbours and Indian nuclear
planners have no option but to take this reality into account while formulating a targeting
philosophy.

At the peak of the Cold War, the United States (US) and the erstwhile Soviet Union had between
them about 50,000 to 60,000 nuclear warheads. For them, a “mix and match” option between
counter value and counter force targets and between various types of land, sea and air-delivered
warheads was not only practically feasible but also eminently desirable. However, no Western
analyst has as yet been able to advance a convincing argument justifying the necessity of
employing such a large number of warheads to deter the adversary when it was widely accepted
that one nuclear bomb on one city was one too many. On the other hand, China, France and the
United Kingdom, with their small nuclear forces (SNF), are all known to have opted for an exclusive
counter value (city-busting) targeting policy and correctly so. 2

Another major advantage of targeting mainly counter value objectives is that, being fixed targets,
their planning parameters can be determined accurately during peace time and detailed prioritised
plans for engaging them can be drawn up well in advance of likely hostilities. Several options can be
worked out for engaging fixed value targets with widely dispersed nuclear forces of the triad as per
pre-determined priorities so that the destruction of some of the nuclear forces assets in a first strike
does not completely jeopardise the country’s ability to destroy those targets that have been
assigned the highest priority. A counter value targeting policy also makes it unnecessary to invest in
elaborate surveillance and tracking systems capable of providing real-time intelligence about the
location, posture and state of readiness of mobile targets.

However, a counter value targeting policy need not rule out nuclear strikes on counter force targets
whenever these are considered necessary. For example, if it ever becomes necessary to launch a
retaliatory strike against Pakistan, Indian military planners may consider it desirable to include the
Pakistan army’s General Headquarters (GHQ) at Rawalpindi in the Priority I target list as that
country is run primarily from its GHQ and to a much lesser extent from its political capital at
Islamabad, regardless of the dispensation that may happen to be in power at a particular point in
time. A decapitating retaliatory strike that endeavours to cripple the adversary country’s leadership,
would almost certainly include its military headquarters complex, even though it may otherwise be
classified as a counter force target. Similarly, other counter force targets, some of them mobile,
may also be included with a lower priority so as to ensure that the adversary country’s war waging
potential, particularly its remaining nuclear forces, are crippled into ineffectiveness to the extent
possible.

Nations with large nuclear arsenals, such as the US and Russia, can choose from a range of
responses whenever warning is received about the likelihood of a nuclear attack. Even if nuclear
weapons release orders are finally given, there is a fair likelihood of a graduated response through
counter force attacks, with attacks on cities at the bottom end of the list of options. Herman Kahn,
one of the foremost thinkers on nuclear war, lists eight different types of reaction to warning of
eminent attack: 3

• Increase alert.

• Decrease vulnerability.

• Initiate “positive control” (bombers airborne towards targets but without final attack
orders).

• Local counter force (shooting down intruding aircraft not positively identified as hostile).

• Institute negotiations.

• Limited counter force (in case of reasonable doubt about hostile enemy intentions in firing a
few missiles vis a vis accidental firing).

• Controlled war (all-out counter force attacks for intra-war deterrence plus reasonable peace
offers).

• Unlimited retaliation (attacks on cities).

Besides counter force and counter value targets, nuclear analysts include several other areas for
possible strikes. Theodore A. Postol has written: 4 “...many other applications of nuclear weapons
could in principle be included in a discussion of targeting. These may be aimed at clearing large
areas of ocean from threatening surface or undersea forces, or large volumes of air and space from
threatening aircraft, missiles, or incoming re-entry vehicles. Targeting nuclear weapons in such
circumstances also presents a rich and diverse set of operational and technical problems that have
policy implications.” These postulations appear to be too far-fetched in the Indian context and are
not considered further. In fact, in the changed circumstances after the end of the Cold War and
heightened environmental consciousness, they are largely irrelevant in the Western context too.

The Targeting Process

Though the process of planning attacks by nuclear forces against the adversary’s targets is
essentially simple in concept, it presents complex challenges in filling in the detail necessary to
ensure a successful strike. Postol has formulated the following criteria for selecting nuclear targets:
5

• The direct military value of targets.

• Their contribution in performing important functions for the civilian or military leadership
(protection, communications support and so on).

• The indirect support provided to the enemy’s war effort.

• Their importance in assisting post-war recovery.

• Energy production centres (electricity and petroleum production facilities).

• Heavy and light civilian and military production centres (steel, transportation equipment,
electronics and chemicals factories).

• Military and industrial storage sites (petroleum and chemical storage sites and storages
sites for tanks, trucks, ships and nuclear weapons).

It may be necessary to individually destroy several of these targets located within a single enemy
military complex or city. Contrary to popular belief, a single nuclear bomb of a yield of 10 to 20
kilotons is not sufficiently powerful to destroy a complete military-industrial complex, leave alone a
city. If that city is a large population and industrial centre, it would be necessary to plan nearly
simultaneous strikes with two or more nuclear warheads to ensure that all the key targets in the
group are effectively destroyed. These warheads may be of varying yields ranging from tens of
kilotons to one or more megatons. Judgement regarding the exact type of warhead and the type of
burst necessary would have to be based on the level of damage required to be inflicted and the
need to deny the target the ability to recuperate for a given length of time. The military planner
dealing with nuclear targeting must also take into account the inherent inaccuracy of the delivery
system (the Circular Error Probable–CEP, also called the “miss distance” from “ground zero”–GZ)
and the probability of interception of the delivery vehicle carrying the warhead before the weapon
has been effectively released. Besides yield and accuracy, the effectiveness of a nuclear strike also
depends on the “hardness” of the target. Counter force targets, in particular, are usually hardened
to withstand blast intensities of between 30 to 50 pounds per square inch (psi). Since he will have
only a finite nuclear arsenal to draw from, he must also decide the inter se priorities of various
target groups and of individual targets within each group.

Another key decision to be made is whether to attack a given group of targets only with land-based
ballistic missiles, or with a mix of land-and sea-based ballistic missiles or with a mix of nuclear
warheads from all the three elements of the triad. Since different delivery systems have varying
times of flight to target (aircraft may take six to eight hours against the flight time of 10 to 20
minutes for Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles–SLBMs–and 20 to 30 minutes for Inter-
Continental Ballistic Missiles–ICBMs), the need to use a mix of delivery systems poses its own
challenges.

However, for many targets it would be unavoidable. The military planner must also consider the
engineering reliability of each delivery system as “a certain number of missiles, bombers, cruise
missiles and short-range attack missiles can be expected to suffer mechanical failure during their
flight to target, and some warheads might not explode when delivered.” All of the above factors
influence the probability regarding the achievement of the desired level of damage against each
target or target group. This probability is generally referred to as “damage expectancy” (DE) 8 and
is usually expressed as a product of the probability of killing a target (PK–weapon yield, accuracy,
height of burst, and target hardness) the probability of penetrating air defences (PTP), the
probability that systems function reliably (PRE) and pre-launch survivability (PLS–the probability
that systems survive enemy pre-emptive actions).

An example would help to illustrate the inter-play of various probabilities. Taking the analogy to
eliminate the Pakistan army GHQ first in a retaliatory Indian strike further, if a bomber aircraft was
to be directed to the target, it may have a PLS of 0.8, a PTP of 0.7 and a PRE of 0.9. The resulting
DE would then be 0.5 (1x0.8x0.7x0.9=0.5). In case the Commander Strategic Forces Command had
laid down the probability of damage to be achieved on this target as 0.9, a larger number of
warheads would be required. Two nuclear warheads would achieve a damage expectancy (DE) of
only 0.75; three would achieve a DE of 0.875 and four would take the figure to 0.94. Hence, it
would be necessary to allocate at least four warheads to this target to achieve a DE of 0.9 which
provides an assurance level of almost complete destruction. These four weapons would, naturally,
need to be delivered by different delivery systems “to hedge against the complete failure of an
entire weapon type”.

United States Targeting Policy

US strategic nuclear war plans have undergone several major revisions since 1945. Till 1961,
various agencies in possession of nuclear weapons had their own target lists and had individual
operational plans to destroy those targets. This had led to a fair amount of duplication and lack of
coordination. On April 15, 1961, the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) was instituted
(see box.) In January 1988, President Reagan directed the following: 9

“Our strategic forces and the associated targeting policy must, by any calculation, be perceived as
making warfare a totally unacceptable and unrewarding proposition for the Soviet leadership.
Accordingly, our targeting policy:

• Denies the Soviets the ability to achieve essential military objectives by holding at risk
Soviet war-making capabilities, including both the full range of Soviet military forces and
war-supporting industry which provides the foundation for Soviet military power and
supports its capability to conduct a protracted conflict; and

• Places at risk those political entities the Soviet leadership values most: the mechanisms for
ensuring survival of the Communist Party and its leadership cadres, and for retention of the
Party’s control over the Soviet and Soviet Bloc peoples.

Successive US administrations had been of the view that the “Kremlin would be more deterred from
starting a war by threats to its control structure and its physical survival than to the lives of millions
of Soviet citizens.” 10 As such, the US followed a policy of “withholding attacks” on Soviet cities till
such attacks became absolutely unavoidable. The US SIOP is known to have four basic target
categories (excluding cities), as under:

• Soviet nuclear forces.

• Other military targets (OMT).
 • Military and political leadership facilities (including C3 systems).
• Economic and industrial installations.

The US JSTPS was briefed that the “central purpose of the SIOP was deterrence or, if war came, war
termination.” Several analysts were critical of a targeting policy in which marginal industrial facilities
derided as “shoe factories” were targeted with strategic nuclear weapons as part of a “counter-
recovery” mission, the aim of which was to effectively impede Soviet recovery after full-scale
nuclear exchanges had taken place. After the counter-recovery mission was rescinded in the late
1980s, close to 15,000 economic-industrial targets were eliminated. Thousands of minor military
installations were also eliminated, reducing the US National Strategic Target Data Base (NSTDB)
from more than 50,000 targets to about 14,000 targets by 1988. On the other hand, since the
institution of SIOP-6, the number of mobile targets (also called re-locatable-RT-targets) has grown
exponentially from some 4,000 in 1984 to almost twice that number at the turn of the century.
“These include mobile air defence batteries, bombers scattered among smaller airfields, submarines
hidden up coastal inlets, and conventional forces of soldiers and tanks moved out of their barracks.”
11

New additions include mobile C3 and satellite ground control stations and SS-24 and SS-25 mobile
ICBMs. Locating and attacking highly mobile missiles is extremely complex if a reasonable degree of
assurance is to be achieved. As President Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces demonstrated during the
1991 Gulf War, look-alike decoys and dummies can be easily manufactured and moved around at
will for deception purposes. It is also questionable whether the targeting of widely dispersed
individual ballistic missiles, that are difficult to locate and even more difficult to hit accurately, would
contribute seriously to furthering deterrence. The required number of warheads could certainly be
better utilised to place at risk a larger number of value targets. It would be a fair assumption to
make that with the Russian Duma’s recent ratification of the START-II agreement, the number of
strategic nuclear targets, particularly RTs, would be reduced considerably.

Options for India

The draft Indian Nuclear Doctrine formulated by India’s National Security Advisory Board (NSAB),
part of India’s National Security Council (NSC) in August 1999, laid down the following objectives for
India’s nuclear policy: 12

India shall pursue a doctrine of credible minimum nuclear deterrence. In this policy of “retaliation
only”, the survivability of our arsenal is critical. This is a dynamic concept related to the strategic
environment, technological imperatives and the needs of national security. The actual size
components, deployment and employment of nuclear forces will be decided in the light of these
factors, India’s peacetime posture aims at convincing any potential aggressor that:

(a) any threat of use of nuclear weapons against India shall invoke measures to counter the threat,
and

(b) any nuclear attack on India and its forces shall result in punitive retaliation with nuclear
weapons to inflict damage unacceptable to the aggressor.

The fundamental purpose of Indian nuclear weapons is to deter the use and threat of use of nuclear
weapons by any State or entity against India and its forces. India will not be the first to initiate a
nuclear strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail.

India’s “minimum deterrence” nuclear policy and declared “no first use–punitive retaliation” doctrine
appears to suggest retaliation mainly against the large population and industrial centres of its
adversaries to obtain maximum payoffs with its small nuclear force, after absorbing the full impact
of what may be a massive first strike. However, it needs to be rationalised whether that is a viable
doctrine in all contingencies, or whether a doctrine of proportionate and graduated retaliation will
suffice in certain scenarios. For example, if deterrence was to fail and an adversary country was to
launch a single counter force nuclear strike on an Indian military target, whether inside Indian
territory or within its own territory, it could be argued that India should then retaliate only with a
similar counter force strike, though of a higher yield on a much larger military target, rather than
attack one or more of the adversary’s cities and itself risk the destruction of one or more Indian
cities. The adoption of such a retaliatory posture would nullify the validity of India’s “no first use”
nuclear policy. In such a scenario, India would have lost a lot in adopting a no first use policy.
India’s nuclear adversaries may then find it relatively more tempting to launch a first strike on India
to achieve their political and military aims, secure in the knowledge that their cities and industrial
assets would be safe since India would respond only lightly. The level of damage inflicted by India
on a military target may well be acceptable to them. Also, India would lose escalation control which
would then automatically pass to the adversary who may decide to respond with more counter force
strikes or may upgrade his second strike to counter value targets in India. India’s gains would be
virtually nil.

A doctrine of “proportionate response” would also seriously undermine the credibility of India’s
deterrence by considerably lowering the threshold level for India’s adversaries to launch a first
strike on India. If, on the other hand, India was to adopt the approach that, as stated, the sole
reason for India’s possession of nuclear weapons is to deter the use of nuclear weapons against
India and that this deterrence would be premised on massive “punitive retaliation” to inflict
“unacceptable damage” against the adversary’s large cities and industrial assets regardless of the
level (quantum, yield, type of target, location) of a first strike against India and Indian armed
forces, the credibility of India’s deterrence would be qualitatively enhanced. India’s adversaries
would then be quite clear that the consequences of launching a first strike against India would be
disastrous to them and that the level of damage likely to be inflicted by a retaliatory Indian strike
would be definitely unacceptable. After all, no rational government, and perhaps even an irrational
one for that matter, would be willing to countenance a “disaster beyond history”, particularly as the
leadership of the governing regime and its organisational structure might itself be decapitated.

It is well known that during the Cuban missile crisis the US was deterred, despite its overwhelming
nuclear superiority at that time and the capacity to inflict unimaginable damage on the USSR,
because the US President wanted a guarantee that not even one Soviet missile or bomber should be
able to drop one bomb on an American city and the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not provide such a
guarantee. 13 The days of planning for nuclear warfighting, hypothesising about multiple nuclear
exchanges and the obscene massing of unusable nuclear power have passed into history with the
end of the Cold War. The only way to ensure that deterrence does not fail, particularly for SNFs such
as India’s with a publicly stated no first use policy, is by putting into effect a counter value nuclear
targeting policy. Hence, despite its historic abhorrence for large-scale violence and the centrality of
ahimsa as its defining national characteristic, India has only one viable option and that is to base its
retaliatory nuclear targeting philosophy primarily on targeting counter value targets (large cities and
industrial centres). India’s adversaries need to clearly understand that minimum deterrence is not
synonymous with proportionate deterrence as some analysts erroneously make it out to be. 14

Detailed Target Planning

The level of “unacceptable damage” may vary from one country to another and may also depend
upon the type of regime in power in a country. With development taking place and the
transformation of a country’s economy from a predominantly agrarian to an industrial one, it would
also vary over the years. For example, what the Chinese leadership considers unacceptable today
would be far different from what was unacceptable in Mao’s China. The story is perhaps apocryphal
but Mao is reported to have said that even if the whole world was to be destroyed in a nuclear war,
enough Chinese would survive to rule the world. The McNamara level of unacceptable damage had
been calculated to be between 200 to 300 Megaton Equivalent (MTE) by Geoffrey Kemp. 15 General
Sundarji has worked out that “in the case of an adversary being a small country, even up to 1 MTE
(say 50x20 KT weapons) might do. Even for deterring a large country, one is most unlikely to
require more than 4 MTE (200x20 KT weapons).” 16

The ability to inflict unacceptable damage is not related to the size and diversity of the adversary’s
nuclear force. The cause of deterrence is sufficiently served if the level of damage likely to be
inflicted is perceived to be unacceptable. This is why a nuclear arms race, a pet paranoia of Western
governments and analysts, is neither necessary nor likely in Southern Asia despite India and
Pakistan having overtly declared themselves to be states with nuclear weapons. Kenneth Waltz has
written famously “more is not better if less is enough”: 17

“Those who foresee intense arms racing among new nuclear states, fail to make the distinction
between war fighting and war deterring capabilities. Forces designed for war fighting have to be
compared with each other. Forces designed for war deterring need not be compared. The question is
not whether one country has less than another, but whether it can do unacceptable damage sensibly
defined. More is not better if less is enough.”

There has not been much Indian writing on the issue of nuclear targeting. Brahma Chellaney, a
defence analyst of repute, favours a graduated response to a nuclear strike on India and for this
reason advocates the introduction of tactical (or ‘battlefield’) nuclear weapons into India’s nuclear
inventory. He writes: 18

“Without tactical nuclear weapons, a failed-deterrent situation could uncontrollably spark counter-
city attacks, wreaking limitless destruction...After failing to deter an adversary from committing
aggression, efforts have to shift to force him to halt aggression. Such intra-war deterrence or
compellence can succeed if responses are judiciously modulated to allow for only a stage-by-stage
escalation, with (the) opponent’s civilian population held hostage but not under attack. If cities are
already under attack, the adversary will have little else to lose.”

However, the prevalent view of other Indian analysts appears to be opposite to that of Brahma
Chellaney. Bharat Karnad, Research Professor, National Security Studies, Centre for Policy Research,
New Delhi, has advocated a primarily counter value targeting philosophy. He writes: 19

“(India’s) nuclear ordnance will have to be aimed to take out large enemy cities. To, in the main,
deter China, for instance, Beijing and the commercial and industrial concentrations on the eastern,
southeastern and southern seaboard, including Hong Kong (which sources a third of the burgeoning
Chinese exports) and Shanghai, suggest themselves as obvious targets. A secondary list should
include prominent Chinese military and weapons complexes, among them, the North West Nuclear
Weapons Research and Development Academy (the so-called Ninth Academy) inclusive of the
testing site at Lop Nor in Xinjiang, the various aircraft production complexes in Sichuan and Yunnan,
which are provinces adjoining India, and specifically the regional military command in Chengdu, the
Naval base on Hainan Island and the Bohai shipyard in Huludao, Laoning province, constructed with
Soviet help to manufacture nuclear submarines.”

Brigadier Vijay K. Nair did pioneering work in analysing the nuclear threats faced by India and in
recommending policy options and a force structure during the early 1990s when nuclear weapons
were under wraps in both India and Pakistan and to even talk about them was considered an
anathema by the Indian intelligentsia. Should deterrence fail, in a retaliatory strike, he
recommends: 20

Against Pakistan: The assured destruction of six to ten metropolitan centres, the destruction of a
minimum of one corps sized offensive formation in its concentration area, the neutralisation of a
large number of communications centres, industrial facilities, strategic bridges, military airfields,
nuclear installations, hydroelectric and thermal power stations, railway centres and ports which
would critically limit Pakistan’s war potential.

Against China: The destruction of four to five of her metropolitan centres and nine to ten of her
strategic industrial centres, thereby radically degrading China’s economic growth.

In Brigadier Nair’s view, “The core of India’s deterrent strategy, to counter the possibility of a pre-
emptive nuclear strike by Pakistan, must rest on an assured ability to administer retribution of a
magnitude that would demolish the national fabric of that country–the deterree (sic) should
perceive a threat to its ability to continue to exist as a viable socio-economic system...If India can
pose a credible threat of this nature, the political leadership in Pakistan will be suitably deterred.”
However, in the case of China he feels that the threat of destruction of four to five of her
metropolitan centres and some strategic industries would be adequate to achieve deterrence.
Despite several references to the complete destruction of Pakistan as a viable political entity,
Brigadier Nair offers no justification for these varying perceptions of deterrence between Pakistan
and China. (Brigadier Nair has listed 17 targets in Pakistan and only eight in China for a retaliatory
Indian nuclear strike.) 21

Perhaps the distinction is predicated on a deeply ingrained mindset that India has had enough
trouble from Pakistan since its independence in 1947 and if Pakistan was to cross the ultimate
Lakshman Rekha (famous in Indian mythology as a line the crossing of which would destroy the
intruder through instantaneous combustion; the Indian equivalent of the Rubicon) and resort to the
unthinkable, then India might as well ensure that Pakistan finally ceases to exist as a nation state.
This view is fairly widespread among Indian analysts. In private conversations with the author,
many of them stated that if Pakistan starts a nuclear war, India must ensure that that nation ceases
to exist as a political entity; however, none of them was willing to go on record. The ability to cause
unacceptable damage does not necessarily mean that a complete nation must be made to pay for
the follies of its ruling elite. The modern day dictum that “one nuclear bomb on one city is one too
many” is increasingly gaining currency. A credible threat of this nature posed by India would be
adequate to deter India’s adversaries from uncorking the nuclear genie.

Squeamishness Does Not Pay

Being confronted by viable and credible nuclear threats, India has no option but to evolve a sensible
targeting policy that takes into account India’s no first use policy and minimum deterrent based on
a small nuclear force structure. “A targeting philosophy,” Bharat Karnad writes, “to make deterrence
credible and ensure that it works in all circumstances, requires that the nuclear stockpile be large
enough to be consequential and that it should be perceived by potential adversaries as being
capable of being delivered on target.” 22 Nuclear targeting is a function that is best performed by a
military Joint Planning Staff under the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) or, at present, under the
Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC), till India’s higher defence organisation graduates to
the CDS system. The credibility of the targeting philosophy, as indeed that of India’s deterrence, will
also depend on the assessment of the adversaries regarding India’s political leaders ability to take
hard decisions in consultation with the Services Chiefs and the ability of the armed forces to execute
those decisions resolutely.

Nuclear targeting is undoubtedly a complex subject to analyse. Even for a detached professional
analyst, it is not easy to write about city-busting counter value strategies. It is quite understandable
that civilian analysts and academics should find it difficult to come to terms with the functional
details of nuclear targeting–a subject they consider abhorrent. However, most pacifists are so
emotionally and intellectually hostile to even a detached discussion of this subject that they appear
to lose a sense of balance. In an imperfect world, governed more by the rules of realpolitik than by
altruistic and Utopian conditions, it does not pay to be squeamish. Since it is nobody’s case that
India does not face a clear nuclear threat, including the threat of nuclear blackmail, it should be
simple to see that all available intellectual and management talent in the country must be
harnessed to draw up coherent plans to vacate those threats.

Herman Kahn has written: 23 “To the extent that certain idealists are willing to come to grips with
the real world, their suggestions and programmes are much more likely to prove helpful. To the
extent that they are unwilling to do this I would suspect that they are, likely to do as much harm as
good, but this kind of judgement is so uncertain that I advance it more as a warning than as a
criticism...just as it would do the ‘militarists’ some good to be exposed to some Utopian thinking, it
will do the ‘Utopians’ even more good to be exposed to some military thinking.” It is to be hoped
that this article has presented neither a militaristic nor a Utopian approach, but a balanced, rational
one, to evolving a viable nuclear targeting philosophy for India.

Endnotes
Note *: Senior Fellow, IDSA Back.
Note 1: Cited by General K. Sundarji, “Nuclear Deterrence for India”, Trishul, December 1992, vol.
5, no. 2, pp. 43-60. Back.

Note 2: Bharat Karnad, “Going Thermonuclear: Why, With What Forces, At What Cost,” USI Journal,
July-September 1998, pp. 310-337. Back.

Note 3: Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (New York: The Free Press, 1969), pp. 256-262.
Back.

Note 4: Theodore A. Postol, “Targeting”, in Ashton B. Carter, John D. Steinbruner and Charles A.
Zraket (eds.), Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1987), pp.
373-406. Back.

Note 5: Postol, n. 4. Back.

Note 6: Kahn, n. 3, pp. 482-483. Back.

Note 7: Postol, n. 4, pp. 382-393. Back.

Note 8: Postol, n. 4. Back.

Note 9: Desmond Ball and Robert C. Toth, “Revising the SIOP: Taking War-Fighting to Dangerous
Extremes”, International Security, Spring 1990, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 65-92. Back.

Note 10: Ball and Toth, n. 9. Back.

Note 11: Ball and Toth, n. 9. Back.

Note 12: See Draft Indian Nuclear Doctrine, <www.meadev.gov.in/govt/indnucld.htm.> Back.

Note 13: Jasjit Singh,“A Nuclear Strategy for India”, in Jasjit Singh (ed.), Nuclear India (New Delhi:
Knowledge World, in association with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 1998),pp.
306-324. Back.

Note 14: Gen. Sundarji, n. 1. Back.

Note 15: Geoffrey Kemp, “Nuclear Force for Medium Powers–Part I”, Adelphi Papers, no. 106,
London: International Institute of Strategic Studies. Back.

Note 16: Gen. Sundarji, n. 1. Back.

Note 17: Kenneth Waltz, “What Will the Spread of Nuclear Weapons do to the World?”, in John K.
King (ed.) International Political Effects of the Spread of Nuclear Weapons (Washington DC: US
Government, April 1979, cited by General K. Sundarji, n. 1. Back.

Note 18: Brahma Chellaney, “Nuclear-deterrent Posture”, in Brahma Chellaney (ed.), Securing
India’s Future in the New Millennium (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1999), pp. 141-222. Back.

Note 19: Karnad, n. 2. Back.

Note 20: Brigadier Vijay K. Nair, Nuclear India (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1992), pp. 133-
151. Back.

Note 21: Brig. Nair, n. 20, pp. 181. Back.

Note 22: Karnad, n. 2. Back.

Note 23: Kahn, n. 3. Back.

 Cruise Missiles
The term cruise missile covers several vehicles and their capabilities, from the Chinese
Silkworm (HY-2), which has a range of less than 105 km, to the U.S. Advanced Cruise
Missile (ACM), which can fly to ranges of up to 3,000 km. These vehicles vary greatly in
their speed and ability to penetrate defenses. All, however, meet the definition of a cruise
missile: “an unmanned self-propelled guided vehicle that sustains flight through
aerodynamic lift for most of its flight path and whose primary mission is to place an
ordnance or special payload on a target.” This definition can include unmanned air ve-
hicles (UAVs) and unmanned control-guided helicopters or aircraft.
Cruise missiles pose perhaps the gravest delivery system proliferation threat. They are
inexpensive to build and can, therefore, overwhelm current defenses by sheer numbers.
They can be designed to be small with low-thrust engines and can penetrate radar and
infrared-detection networks. The technology to build them is simple and available to any
country that builds even rudimentary aircraft. Finally, since cruise missiles are unmanned,
they require no flight crew training, expensive upkeep programs, special hangars for
housing, or large air bases for basing. These factors make it especially difficult to collect
intelligence on the development of indigenous cruise missiles and to anticipate the
developing threat.
Countries can achieve a cruise missile capability by simply buying existing cruise
missiles from supplier states and modifying them to meet a particular need, or they can
make a complete system from readily available parts. European aerospace firms, the
FSU, and the Chinese have all sold many cruise missiles of one description or another to
customers in proliferant and industrialized countries. In most cases, the performance of
missiles is range limited and, in some cases, even payload limited, and their use as a
carrier of WMD is probably confined to tactical applications. With the introduction of
new guidance technologies, particularly the GPS, future cruise missiles will be more
accurate and attractive to proliferants.

The United States introduced cruise missiles into its inventory when a combination of
technologies reached a critical point in their development. Taken together, these same
technologies can easily form the underpinnings for a capable unmanned aerial system.
Except for Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM), the 1990’s have seen these
technologies, or the knowledge of how to reproduce them, become wide-spread among
industrialized and newly industrializing nations. The introduction of GPS and GLONASS
eliminates the need for a country to rely on TERCOM navigation. A proliferator is not
forced to seek out any other technologies to build a cruise missile, though many, such as
rocket-assisted take-off units, may give a combatant more flexibility in using a cruise
missile for a variety of combat operations. Many proliferants have the scientific and
research base to design airframes and build them to meet the needs of a cruise missile
program. Arms control officials in the U.S. State Department and many of its overseas
counterparts are attempting to reduce high volume serial production of cruise missiles,
particularly ones that support a chemical or biological weapons infrastructure.
Consequently, the tables identify technologies that assist the mass production of cruise
missiles. Once a country has an assured supply of engines and guidance components, the
path to a capable cruise missile fleet becomes easier.
Of the four major subsystems that compose a cruise missile -— airframe, propulsion,
guidance, control, and navigation, and weapons integration —- none is expensive in and
of itself, and a steady supply of each is available. In the late 1960’s, the United States first
introduced turbine propulsion systems that weighed less than 100 lb and produced many
hundreds of pounds of thrust. These turbine engines, or their lineal descendants, powered
most of the early U.S. cruise missile designs and were one of the least costly items.
Depending upon the range a proliferant desires for its cruise missile, the powerplant may
even be as prosaic as a reciprocating engine with a propeller. The latter, of course, has
little hope of disguising its signature from defenses, but the mission profile may allow it
to disguise itself as another platform. Even if no signature modification is considered, this
type of missile has applications in regional wars where the technology of the defense is
not as important as it is to an attacking proliferant.

Currently, GPS receivers provide more capability and accuracy than any targeting
strategy requires of the guidance, control, and navigation subsystem. Cruise missiles,
being aerodynamic vehicles, do not need the rapid response cycle time that ballistic
missiles must have to keep the vehicle under control and on an appropriate track.
Avionics systems available for first-generation commercial aircraft are both light enough
and accurate enough to keep a cruise missile under control for long periods of time. For
navigation, civilian code GPS is priced for the civilian hobbyist market, so pu-chasing an
off-the-shelf navigation unit capable of obtaining 20 m of CEP is within the range of the
common pocketbook. This level of accuracy is better than that of the early TERCOM
systems installed on U.S. cruise missiles, which made them practical for the first time in
the late 1970’s.

For long cruise missile flight paths, a country without access to GPS systems must
develop a mapping guidance logic for its cruise missile or accept highly degraded
performance from an inertial measurement unit (IMU). A proliferant using one or two
cruise missiles in an isolated attack from a standoff platform can achieve all of its
targeting aims with an IMU, but long flight paths allow errors in the IMU to become so
great that the missile may stray far from its target. Also, without an updated mapping
system, the cruise missile must fly at an altitude high enough to avoid all manmade
obstacles, thereby exposing itself to detection.
Even with GPS, the autonomous cruise missile carrying an on-board map must be
supplied with the latest terrain and physical feature changes that have occurred along its
course if it flies near the ground. Updated autonomous map guidance systems require
large computer storage memories aboard the aircraft with units that can withstand the
flight vibrations and possible thermal extremes of the missile over a long-duration flight.
These units must be supplied with the latest maps that the delivering nation can obtain.
Few nations have the space flight vehicles or high-altitude aircraft to build radar maps
from overflights alone. Consequently, these maps will have to be purchased, or the
proliferant will have to accept the attrition from missiles lost because of outdated
information. The United States and Russia understand the key position that radar maps
play in cruise missile guidance and are unlikely to allow the information stored in these
maps to be released on the world market. Even if these maps are sold through some
clandestine channel, they will quickly become outdated since cultural features change
rather rapidly. As an alternative, a country may try to develop another guidance scheme,
but the costs for developing a new infrastructure to support a map-based guidance system
probably rivals that of the original TERCOM or a GPS constellation itself.
In the absence of GPS, the reliability of the cruise missile targeting philosophy becomes
increasingly more problematic. As an alternative, a country may attempt to fly its cruise
missile with radio guidance or other commands. Usually radio guidance uses frequencies
high enough to operate only on line-of-sight reception. If the country expects to operate
in hostile territory or attack at very long ranges, it must control the intervening repeater
station to contact these missiles by real-time transmission of flight controls signals and
position information.
Since cruise missiles fly relatively slowly and with only gentle accelerations, at the entry
level, the airframes of these delivery systems can be built out of inexpensive aluminum of
a grade as simple as 2024 - T1. Most proliferants with a basic metal production facility
and an access to textbooks on metallurgy have a ready supply of this grade of aluminum.
As proliferants design and build more sophisticated cruise missiles, they will undoubtedly
substitute composite materials and other more elabo-rate structural elements in the
airframe, but, for the most part, these materials are not needed.
A cruise missile airframe does not undergo particularly severe stress on its flight to a
target, it does not pull any high “g” maneuvers, and it does not experience propulsion
accelerations associated with gun or ballistic missile launches. Virtually any airframe that
is structurally sound enough to be used in an ordinary airplane is adequate for a cruise
missile. A designer can use factors of safety of 1.5 or 2 in the design to ensure structural
integrity under all dynamic conditions without recourse to structural finite element
computer codes, which generally only assist a designer to shave four or five percent from
the weight of a design. Still, these technologies are included in the tables because their
use does allow a proliferant to build a more capable cruise missile. Technologies that
advance the large serial production of inexpensive cruise missiles threaten current
defenses built against missile attacks. These technologies include sheet metal processing
machines that could form complex shapes, such as those found on the airframe or leading
edge of cruise missiles; hydraulic presses or stamping mills that shape the nose cones or
turbine inlets; and numerically controlled machines for parts production.
If a country wants to increase the penetrability of its cruise missiles, it must identify
technologies that aid in signature reduction, signature masking, or other means to confuse
detection systems. Some of these technologies include radar jamming and spoofing
technologies; infrared suppression of engine exhaust; paints and coatings that disguise the
thermal signature of leading edges; computer routines that predict the flow field around
aerodynamic surfaces and the methods to change those surfaces to reduce heat transfer
and turbulent flow fields; wind tunnel technology that supports the computer prediction;
and computer routines that predict the RCS from a given geometry and predict redesign
methods to achieve certain design specifications. The cruise missile is suited for the
delivery of chemical or biological agents if it does not fly at supersonic or transonic
speeds. Most cruise missiles designed to fly at high speeds are not similarly able to fly at
slow speeds without dramatic changes in the wing planform in flight. These changes in
wing planform are generally not consistent with cruise missile geometries or packing
volumes in the same way they might be in manned aircraft, such as the FB-111.
Supersonic missiles generally cannot dispense chemical and biological agents from
sprayers since the airstream itself will destroy the agent by heating or shock, but they do
deliver nuclear weapons with great efficiency.
None of these considerations are exclusive impediments to a proliferant’s cruise missile
development program. It is only a general guideline that high-speed cruise missiles make
sense as a means to deliver nuclear weapons and low-speed cruise missiles are better
suited for chemical and biological weapons.

Bomblets can also be included on transonic or supersonic missiles. These bomblets can
be released over a target to ameliorate the airstream problem. After release, the bomblets
decelerate, float to the target, and spray their agent into the air. Bomblets reduce the
packing fraction of agent within the cruise missile airframe and, therefore, reduce the
overall payload of a cruise missile. A subsonic cruise missile equipped with a sprayer
dispensing agent from a single tank onboard the missile may simply release the agent into
the airstream. In most cases, a large fraction of this agent will be destroyed before it
reaches its target. To be more effective, the sprayer must dispense the agent so that it
avoids the vortex from the tips of the wings and the disturbed airflow from the fuselage.
Technologies that are required to develop bomblets, predict their flight path, or enhance
the capabilities of sprayers as a means for a proliferant to deliver WMD from a cruise
missile are highlighted.
Three key concerns of the cruise missile threat are (1) range extension to ranges greater
than 500 km, (2) the ability to penetrate defenses, and (3) any technologies that reduce
the cost of manufacture and therefore increase the size of a cruise missile in-ventory. In
order of priority, the tables first list technologies that assist a country in building long-
range cruise missiles. The tables then cover technologies that reduce the signature of a
cruise missile and list those technologies that decrease the per unit cost or increase the
total serial production of cruise missiles for a fixed price. Finally, the tables include
support technologies that may make cruise missiles easier to use, package, or launch. As
with each of the other delivery systems subsections, the tables are organized by specific
subsystem of the aircraft: airframe, propulsion, guidance, control, and navigation, and
weapons integration.
Cruise missiles differ from ballistic missiles as a potential threat because they share so
many common technologies with existing vehicles that have been designed for other
purposes. As a consequence, a proliferant can obtain much of the hardware to construct a
cruise missile by cannibalizing existing commercial aircraft or by purchas-ing parts and
components for the missile from legitimate suppliers. The technology tables serve only as
a guideline to alert and inform export control regulators of general categories of
technologies as opposed to specific performance specifications.

Systems
At least 12 exporting countries—Great Britain, the United States, China, France,
Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and Taiwan—have developed
cruise missiles with some capability in the hands of proliferants to threaten U.S. world-
wide interests. Generally, these cruise missiles are small and have a limited range. While
it is possible that they can be converted to deliver WMD, their short range limits their
possible targets of interest. They may deliver biological or chemical agents against ports
and airfields in regions of concern such as the Persian Gulf, but are not able to attack
longer range targets. In addition, cruise missiles, such as the Chinese Silk-worm, have
many other limitations besides short range that restrict their utility as a WMD delivery
system. The missiles leave a turbulent airflow in their wake, which makes it difficult to
deliver a sprayed pathogen or chemical agent cloud. They fly along a predictable path
towards the target rather than one that can realign itself to match the geometry of the
target.
The following cruise missiles are a sample of missiles that are available l on the world
market and pose less threat as possible candidates for conversion to WMD delivery: the
British Sea Eagle, the Chinese Seersucker and Silkworm, the French Exocet, the German
Kormoran, the Israeli Gabriel, the Italian Otomat, the Japanese SSM-1, the Norwegian
Penguin, the Soviet SSN-2C and its derivatives, the Swedish RBS-15, the Taiwanese
Hsiung Feng 2, and the U.S. Harpoon. Older missiles, such as the Silkworm, have
cumbersome and slow-moving control surfaces that do not readily adapt to the
improvement in position calculation that GPS provides. Moreover, their guidance
systems are intended mostly for the missiles in which they are placed and have little
transference to a new airframe if they should be cannibal-ized. In most cases, the ease
with which a cruise missile can be built leads a proliferant to build a new missile from
scratch rather than attempting to adapt these older missiles for WMD delivery.
Even if the missiles do not pose a significant threat, some aspects of their manufacturing
base may migrate to more capable missiles and require close scrutiny. Missiles that
contain small turbojet engines can be canni-balized, and the engines can be used in more
threatening applications. A proliferant can also glean the knowledge to build these
turbojets by reverse engineering the engines or setting up indigenous co-production
facilities. Examples of exported missiles with small turbojet engines include the British
Sea Eagle and the Chinese HY-4. Israel is offering an upgraded Gabriel, which features
the latest in propulsion technology, to overseas customers. Other missiles in this class
include the U.S. Harpoon, the Swedish RBS-15, the Soviet SS-N-3, the Soviet SS-N-21,
and the Otomat Mark-II. Cruise missiles that have immediate application to nuclear,
chemical, and biological delivery include the U.S. Tomahawk and ACM, the Russian
SSN-21, the AS-15, and the French Apache.
Harpoons have been exported to 19 countries, including Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, South
Korea, and Saudi Arabia. India has received Sea Eagles, while Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan,
and North Korea have Silkworms and Seersuckers, a version of which North Korea now
manufactures. Italy has Kormorans, and Taiwan, South Africa, Chile, Ec-uador, Kenya,
Singapore, and Thailand have Gabriel Mark-IIs. Italy has exported turbojet powered
Otomats to Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Peru, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, while
the Swedes exported the RBS-15 to Yugoslavia and Finland. In addition, the Soviets sold
the long-range (500 km, 850 kg) turbojet powered “Shad-dock” to Syria and Yugoslavia.
At the next notch down in technological capability, the Soviets have flooded the world
market with 1960’s-generation liquid-fueled “Styx” (SS-N-2C) missiles. Algeria, Angola,
Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, India, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Vietnam,
Yemen, and the former Yugoslavia have the Styx missile in their inventories.
As the list of customers for the Styx demonstrates, the cost of a cruise missile is within
the financial resources of even the most basic defense budgets. Even highly capable
cruise missiles such as the Tomahawk only cost around $1.5 million per copy. This cost
reflects the most advanced avionics systems and TERCOM guidance. At least one
congressional study has shown that with the substitution of GPS, a proliferant could build
a cruise missile with a range and payload capability roughly equivalent to the Tomahawk,
for about $250,000. Unlike production of the heavy bomber, many countries have the
economic resources and technical base to produce this kind of delivery system
indigenously.

Subsystems

Though the sale of complete systems on the world market is a concern, that threat is
much smaller than the possibility that a country could indigenously design and build a
capable cruise missile by cannibalizing other systems for parts it cannot build on its own.
Of particular concern are components and parts that reduce the cost of the mis-sile in
serial production, reduce the cost of position mapping navigation systems, and increase
the range of these missiles.
Navigation and guidance continues to be the pacing item in threatening cruise missile
development. The Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM) is a derivative of the Harpoon
and contains in its nose a video camera that acts as a terminal guidance sys-tem. If a
proliferant adopts this technology and can position a transmitter and receiver within line-
of-sight to the missile from anywhere in the theater, it can dispense with the need for any
other kind of guidance system. Israel has developed a capable guid-ance system that can
be used in this application.
The next major subsystem component that enhances the capability of a cruise missile is
the powerplant. The United States pursued the cruise missile long before the development
of the first lightweight engine technology, so this is not a critical path item towards
developing a cruise missile. Still, more capable engines increase the threat of a cruise
missile. First, they reduce the RCS of the missile. Next, they in-crease the range by
reducing the drag and power required for control surface actuation. Finally, they reduce
other flight signatures, such as infrared cross-section and acoustic emission, that might be
exploited in a defense network.

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Maintained by WebmasterPJ-10
BrahMos
India expects to significantly enhance its long-range strike abilities with the BrahMos cruise missile, jointly
developed by New Delhi and Moscow. The supersonic missile -- which derives its name from the
Brahmaputra and Moscow rivers in both countries - has a range of almost 300 km and is designed for use
with land, sea and aerial platforms. The Indian Air Force (IAF) is reportedly considering the possibility of
fitting the BrahMos on its Su-30 combat jets. The production will commence by end of 2003 for induction in
the year 2004.

The BrahMos, a derivative of the Yakhont, was developed by a joint venture between India's Defence
Research and Development Organisation and Russia's NPO Mashinostroyenia. The BrahMos missile is a
product of an Indo-Russian joint venture known by the same name. Registered in December 1995, the
company was set up as a result of an inter-governmental agreement between Russia and India, eventually
signed in February 1998, to design, develop, produce and market a supersonic cruise missile jointly.

India and Russia plan to begin the induction of the jointly-developed BrahMos supersonic cruise missile into
their armed forces by the end of 2003. However, according to some reports military officials believe it is
several years away from induction into the navy or the air force.

The BrahMos missile is a two-stage vehicle that has a solid propellant booster and a liquid (propellant) ram
jet system.

The jointly developed Indo-Russian anti-ship cruise missile, which was successfully test-fired from
Chandipur interim test range in Orissa, is a crucial step forward in India's defence efforts. This technological
achievement places India among a small group of countries to acquire the capacity of producing cruise
missiles. What, however, makes the jointly produced cruise missile distinguishable from others is that it
travels at a supersonic speed i.e. more than twice the speed of sound. Almost all other contemporary anti-
ship missiles fly at subsonic speed. Its other distinguishing feature is that the Indo-Russian cruise missile is
a state-of-the-art product.

Its unmatchable speed is its high point, making it invincible. The supersonic speed imparts it a greater strike-
power as well. Possessing stealth characteristics, the 6.9-meter cruise missile weighing three tons has a
range of 280 km. Its another outstanding feature is that it is highly accurate and can be guided to its target
mainly with the help of an onboard computer. This has been established by the test-flight. The computer and
the guidance system have been designed by India whereas Russia has provided the propulsion system.

Test flights of the PJ-10 occurred on 12 June 2001, 28 April 2002, with a third test expected in June 2002.
The test-firing of the cruise missile which took place in the middle of June 2001 was described as an
unqualified success. The Brahmos recorded its performance as having met technical parameters, both in
terms of the flight range and hitting accuracy. Defence Minister Jaswant Singh who was present at
Chandipur along with Indian and Russian scientists and technologists described the launch as a "landmark
in technology partnership".

The Chandipur launch was the first in a series of test-flights of the cruise missile planned to demonstrate the
capabilities of the system. A series of other test-flights will take place before the missile is simultaneously
inducted into the Indian and Russian arsenals. It will also be sold to third countries in due course of time.

One of its special features is that this essentially anti-ship missile can be launched from ground, ship,
submarine or air. Defence analysts underline that the eventual addition of this strategic missile is a logical
follow-up of the goal set as per the country 's nuclear philosophy. Stated in plain terms, it is essential for the
fulfilment of India's minimum nuclear deterrent profile as outlined in the draft nuclear doctrine prepared by
the Vajpayee Government. The acquisition of the cruise missile which can be tipped with a nuclear warhead
has obvious implications for our nuclear weapons' delivery system.

In order to avoid controversy, both India and Russia have taken care to ensure that the production of the
cruise missile did not violate obligations under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) or any of the
international agreements related to proliferation. That is why the missile range is well within the 300 km limit
stipulated under the MTCR.

Both India and Russia welcomed the joint development of the supersonic cruise missile with great
exuberance. Elated at the successful test flight from Chandipur, the state-owned Russian collaborating
company, Mashinostroyenie, put the cruise missile on display at the Moscow annual air show.
Mashinostroyenie designed the missile and its propulsion system, leaving the all-important software and the
guidance system to its Indian counterpart— the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO)
of the Defence Ministry.

New Delhi described the missile as an "outstanding example of Indo-Russian joint endeavour". The
President, Mr KR Narayanan and Prime Minister Mr Vajpayee termed it as a symbol of defence cooperation
between the two countries.The development of the cruise missile takes their decades-old defence
cooperation and the revived post-Cold War strategic partnership to a new high. It may be recalled that
during the Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin's visit to India in October 2000, a Joint Declaration of
Strategic Partnership was issued. During the Defence Minister, Mr Jaswant Singh's visit to Moscow a few
days before the Chandipur launch, this strategic relationship was further reinforced. On these two occasions,
the two countries signed a series of agreements on the acquisition of sophisticated weapon system and for a
joint production of some of them including missiles.

The newly developed cruise missile is more than a match to similar anti-ship missiles available with China.
The latter has mounted Moskit anti-ship missiles on its recently acquired Soverameny-class warships.
Beijing is also planning to mount its aerial version of the Moskit on its SU-27 planes. The Indian cruise
missile with its supersonic speed will be able to check movements by the Chinese warships, especially in
the Indian Ocean area. Besides, its extraordinary accuracy and speed increases the range of its targets.

INTRO: India has successfully tested a supersonic cruise missile developed in cooperation with Russia.
From New Delhi, Anjana Pasricha has a report.

TEXT: Defense officials say the anti-ship missile, known as Brahmos, was fired from the Chandipur testing
range in the eastern Orissa state.

The missile has a range of about 300 kilometers and can carry a 200-kilogram conventional warhead. It
travels at twice the speed of sound, and can be launched from ships, submarines, aircraft and land-based
platforms.

Officials say both India and Russia plan to induct the missiles into their armed forces after sufficient tests.
This is the fourth time the missile has been tested.

India and Russia jointly developed the "Brahmos" through a company their state defense organizations
formed in 1998. The close military cooperation between the two countries goes back nearly five decades,
and a substantial part of Indian defense hardware is of Russian origin.

India has already developed a range of nuclear-capable missiles, which can hit targets in Pakistan and
China.

Western nations often criticize missile tests by nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, who have fought three
wars and came close to a fourth one last year.

But the deputy director of New Delhi's Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis, Uday Bhaskar, says both
countries have the ability to handle their nuclear capabilities.

/// BHASKAR ACT ///

It is true that there is a certain anxiety which is often generated when India or Pakistan carry out missile
tests. But I think both countries are aware of the potential of strategic capabilities, weapons of mass
destruction as they are referred to. Once India and Pakistan are able to have their confidence-building
measures in place, my sense is that they should not generate that degree of anxiety.

/// END ACT ///

Defense officials also say the latest nuclear-capable missile being developed by India -- known as Agni III --
will be tested early next year. The Agni III has a range of three-thousand kilometers. The shorter range
versions of the Agni have completed the testing phase and are being added to the arsenals of the Armed
Forces.

Pakistan carried out a series of missile tests earlier this month. (signed)

NEB/HK/AP/JO

Cruise Missiles
The term cruise missile covers several vehicles and their capabilities, from the Chinese
Silkworm (HY-2), which has a range of less than 105 km, to the U.S. Advanced Cruise
Missile (ACM), which can fly to ranges of up to 3,000 km. These vehicles vary greatly in
their speed and ability to penetrate defenses. All, however, meet the definition of a cruise
missile: “an unmanned self-propelled guided vehicle that sustains flight through
aerodynamic lift for most of its flight path and whose primary mission is to place an
ordnance or special payload on a target.” This definition can include unmanned air ve-
hicles (UAVs) and unmanned control-guided helicopters or aircraft.
Cruise missiles pose perhaps the gravest delivery system proliferation threat. They are
inexpensive to build and can, therefore, overwhelm current defenses by sheer numbers.
They can be designed to be small with low-thrust engines and can penetrate radar and
infrared-detection networks. The technology to build them is simple and available to any
country that builds even rudimentary aircraft. Finally, since cruise missiles are unmanned,
they require no flight crew training, expensive upkeep programs, special hangars for
housing, or large air bases for basing. These factors make it especially difficult to collect
intelligence on the development of indigenous cruise missiles and to anticipate the
developing threat.

Countries can achieve a cruise missile capability by simply buying existing cruise
missiles from supplier states and modifying them to meet a particular need, or they can
make a complete system from readily available parts. European aerospace firms, the
FSU, and the Chinese have all sold many cruise missiles of one description or another to
customers in proliferant and industrialized countries. In most cases, the performance of
missiles is range limited and, in some cases, even payload limited, and their use as a
carrier of WMD is probably confined to tactical applications. With the introduction of
new guidance technologies, particularly the GPS, future cruise missiles will be more
accurate and attractive to proliferants.
The United States introduced cruise missiles into its inventory when a combination of
technologies reached a critical point in their development. Taken together, these same
technologies can easily form the underpinnings for a capable unmanned aerial system.
Except for Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM), the 1990’s have seen these
technologies, or the knowledge of how to reproduce them, become wide-spread among
industrialized and newly industrializing nations. The introduction of GPS and GLONASS
eliminates the need for a country to rely on TERCOM navigation. A proliferator is not
forced to seek out any other technologies to build a cruise missile, though many, such as
rocket-assisted take-off units, may give a combatant more flexibility in using a cruise
missile for a variety of combat operations. Many proliferants have the scientific and
research base to design airframes and build them to meet the needs of a cruise missile
program. Arms control officials in the U.S. State Department and many of its overseas
counterparts are attempting to reduce high volume serial production of cruise missiles,
particularly ones that support a chemical or biological weapons infrastructure.
Consequently, the tables identify technologies that assist the mass production of cruise
missiles. Once a country has an assured supply of engines and guidance components, the
path to a capable cruise missile fleet becomes easier.

Of the four major subsystems that compose a cruise missile -— airframe, propulsion,
guidance, control, and navigation, and weapons integration —- none is expensive in and
of itself, and a steady supply of each is available. In the late 1960’s, the United States first
introduced turbine propulsion systems that weighed less than 100 lb and produced many
hundreds of pounds of thrust. These turbine engines, or their lineal descendants, powered
most of the early U.S. cruise missile designs and were one of the least costly items.
Depending upon the range a proliferant desires for its cruise missile, the powerplant may
even be as prosaic as a reciprocating engine with a propeller. The latter, of course, has
little hope of disguising its signature from defenses, but the mission profile may allow it
to disguise itself as another platform. Even if no signature modification is considered, this
type of missile has applications in regional wars where the technology of the defense is
not as important as it is to an attacking proliferant.

Currently, GPS receivers provide more capability and accuracy than any targeting
strategy requires of the guidance, control, and navigation subsystem. Cruise missiles,
being aerodynamic vehicles, do not need the rapid response cycle time that ballistic
missiles must have to keep the vehicle under control and on an appropriate track.
Avionics systems available for first-generation commercial aircraft are both light enough
and accurate enough to keep a cruise missile under control for long periods of time. For
navigation, civilian code GPS is priced for the civilian hobbyist market, so pu-chasing an
off-the-shelf navigation unit capable of obtaining 20 m of CEP is within the range of the
common pocketbook. This level of accuracy is better than that of the early TERCOM
systems installed on U.S. cruise missiles, which made them practical for the first time in
the late 1970’s.

For long cruise missile flight paths, a country without access to GPS systems must
develop a mapping guidance logic for its cruise missile or accept highly degraded
performance from an inertial measurement unit (IMU). A proliferant using one or two
cruise missiles in an isolated attack from a standoff platform can achieve all of its
targeting aims with an IMU, but long flight paths allow errors in the IMU to become so
great that the missile may stray far from its target. Also, without an updated mapping
system, the cruise missile must fly at an altitude high enough to avoid all manmade
obstacles, thereby exposing itself to detection.
Even with GPS, the autonomous cruise missile carrying an on-board map must be
supplied with the latest terrain and physical feature changes that have occurred along its
course if it flies near the ground. Updated autonomous map guidance systems require
large computer storage memories aboard the aircraft with units that can withstand the
flight vibrations and possible thermal extremes of the missile over a long-duration flight.
These units must be supplied with the latest maps that the delivering nation can obtain.
Few nations have the space flight vehicles or high-altitude aircraft to build radar maps
from overflights alone. Consequently, these maps will have to be purchased, or the
proliferant will have to accept the attrition from missiles lost because of outdated
information. The United States and Russia understand the key position that radar maps
play in cruise missile guidance and are unlikely to allow the information stored in these
maps to be released on the world market. Even if these maps are sold through some
clandestine channel, they will quickly become outdated since cultural features change
rather rapidly. As an alternative, a country may try to develop another guidance scheme,
but the costs for developing a new infrastructure to support a map-based guidance system
probably rivals that of the original TERCOM or a GPS constellation itself.
In the absence of GPS, the reliability of the cruise missile targeting philosophy becomes
increasingly more problematic. As an alternative, a country may attempt to fly its cruise
missile with radio guidance or other commands. Usually radio guidance uses frequencies
high enough to operate only on line-of-sight reception. If the country expects to operate
in hostile territory or attack at very long ranges, it must control the intervening repeater
station to contact these missiles by real-time transmission of flight controls signals and
position information.
Since cruise missiles fly relatively slowly and with only gentle accelerations, at the entry
level, the airframes of these delivery systems can be built out of inexpensive aluminum of
a grade as simple as 2024 - T1. Most proliferants with a basic metal production facility
and an access to textbooks on metallurgy have a ready supply of this grade of aluminum.
As proliferants design and build more sophisticated cruise missiles, they will undoubtedly
substitute composite materials and other more elabo-rate structural elements in the
airframe, but, for the most part, these materials are not needed.
A cruise missile airframe does not undergo particularly severe stress on its flight to a
target, it does not pull any high “g” maneuvers, and it does not experience propulsion
accelerations associated with gun or ballistic missile launches. Virtually any airframe that
is structurally sound enough to be used in an ordinary airplane is adequate for a cruise
missile. A designer can use factors of safety of 1.5 or 2 in the design to ensure structural
integrity under all dynamic conditions without recourse to structural finite element
computer codes, which generally only assist a designer to shave four or five percent from
the weight of a design. Still, these technologies are included in the tables because their
use does allow a proliferant to build a more capable cruise missile. Technologies that
advance the large serial production of inexpensive cruise missiles threaten current
defenses built against missile attacks. These technologies include sheet metal processing
machines that could form complex shapes, such as those found on the airframe or leading
edge of cruise missiles; hydraulic presses or stamping mills that shape the nose cones or
turbine inlets; and numerically controlled machines for parts production.
If a country wants to increase the penetrability of its cruise missiles, it must identify
technologies that aid in signature reduction, signature masking, or other means to confuse
detection systems. Some of these technologies include radar jamming and spoofing
technologies; infrared suppression of engine exhaust; paints and coatings that disguise the
thermal signature of leading edges; computer routines that predict the flow field around
aerodynamic surfaces and the methods to change those surfaces to reduce heat transfer
and turbulent flow fields; wind tunnel technology that supports the computer prediction;
and computer routines that predict the RCS from a given geometry and predict redesign
methods to achieve certain design specifications. The cruise missile is suited for the
delivery of chemical or biological agents if it does not fly at supersonic or transonic
speeds. Most cruise missiles designed to fly at high speeds are not similarly able to fly at
slow speeds without dramatic changes in the wing planform in flight. These changes in
wing planform are generally not consistent with cruise missile geometries or packing
volumes in the same way they might be in manned aircraft, such as the FB-111.
Supersonic missiles generally cannot dispense chemical and biological agents from
sprayers since the airstream itself will destroy the agent by heating or shock, but they do
deliver nuclear weapons with great efficiency.

None of these considerations are exclusive impediments to a proliferant’s cruise missile

development program. It is only a general guideline that high-speed cruise missiles make
sense as a means to deliver nuclear weapons and low-speed cruise missiles are better
suited for chemical and biological weapons.

Bomblets can also be included on transonic or supersonic missiles. These bomblets can
be released over a target to ameliorate the airstream problem. After release, the bomblets
decelerate, float to the target, and spray their agent into the air. Bomblets reduce the
packing fraction of agent within the cruise missile airframe and, therefore, reduce the
overall payload of a cruise missile. A subsonic cruise missile equipped with a sprayer
dispensing agent from a single tank onboard the missile may simply release the agent into
the airstream. In most cases, a large fraction of this agent will be destroyed before it
reaches its target. To be more effective, the sprayer must dispense the agent so that it
avoids the vortex from the tips of the wings and the disturbed airflow from the fuselage.
Technologies that are required to develop bomblets, predict their flight path, or enhance
the capabilities of sprayers as a means for a proliferant to deliver WMD from a cruise
missile are highlighted.
Three key concerns of the cruise missile threat are (1) range extension to ranges greater
than 500 km, (2) the ability to penetrate defenses, and (3) any technologies that reduce
the cost of manufacture and therefore increase the size of a cruise missile in-ventory. In
order of priority, the tables first list technologies that assist a country in building long-
range cruise missiles. The tables then cover technologies that reduce the signature of a
cruise missile and list those technologies that decrease the per unit cost or increase the
total serial production of cruise missiles for a fixed price. Finally, the tables include
support technologies that may make cruise missiles easier to use, package, or launch. As
with each of the other delivery systems subsections, the tables are organized by specific
subsystem of the aircraft: airframe, propulsion, guidance, control, and navigation, and
weapons integration.
Cruise missiles differ from ballistic missiles as a potential threat because they share so
many common technologies with existing vehicles that have been designed for other
purposes. As a consequence, a proliferant can obtain much of the hardware to construct a
cruise missile by cannibalizing existing commercial aircraft or by purchas-ing parts and
components for the missile from legitimate suppliers. The technology tables serve only as
a guideline to alert and inform export control regulators of general categories of
technologies as opposed to specific performance specifications.

Systems

At least 12 exporting countries—Great Britain, the United States, China, France,

Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and Taiwan—have developed
cruise missiles with some capability in the hands of proliferants to threaten U.S. world-
wide interests. Generally, these cruise missiles are small and have a limited range. While
it is possible that they can be converted to deliver WMD, their short range limits their
possible targets of interest. They may deliver biological or chemical agents against ports
and airfields in regions of concern such as the Persian Gulf, but are not able to attack
longer range targets. In addition, cruise missiles, such as the Chinese Silk-worm, have
many other limitations besides short range that restrict their utility as a WMD delivery
system. The missiles leave a turbulent airflow in their wake, which makes it difficult to
deliver a sprayed pathogen or chemical agent cloud. They fly along a predictable path
towards the target rather than one that can realign itself to match the geometry of the
target.
The following cruise missiles are a sample of missiles that are available l on the world
market and pose less threat as possible candidates for conversion to WMD delivery: the
British Sea Eagle, the Chinese Seersucker and Silkworm, the French Exocet, the German
Kormoran, the Israeli Gabriel, the Italian Otomat, the Japanese SSM-1, the Norwegian
Penguin, the Soviet SSN-2C and its derivatives, the Swedish RBS-15, the Taiwanese
Hsiung Feng 2, and the U.S. Harpoon. Older missiles, such as the Silkworm, have
cumbersome and slow-moving control surfaces that do not readily adapt to the
improvement in position calculation that GPS provides. Moreover, their guidance
systems are intended mostly for the missiles in which they are placed and have little
transference to a new airframe if they should be cannibal-ized. In most cases, the ease
with which a cruise missile can be built leads a proliferant to build a new missile from
scratch rather than attempting to adapt these older missiles for WMD delivery.
Even if the missiles do not pose a significant threat, some aspects of their manufacturing
base may migrate to more capable missiles and require close scrutiny. Missiles that
contain small turbojet engines can be canni-balized, and the engines can be used in more
threatening applications. A proliferant can also glean the knowledge to build these
turbojets by reverse engineering the engines or setting up indigenous co-production
facilities. Examples of exported missiles with small turbojet engines include the British
Sea Eagle and the Chinese HY-4. Israel is offering an upgraded Gabriel, which features
the latest in propulsion technology, to overseas customers. Other missiles in this class
include the U.S. Harpoon, the Swedish RBS-15, the Soviet SS-N-3, the Soviet SS-N-21,
and the Otomat Mark-II. Cruise missiles that have immediate application to nuclear,
chemical, and biological delivery include the U.S. Tomahawk and ACM, the Russian
SSN-21, the AS-15, and the French Apache.
Harpoons have been exported to 19 countries, including Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, South
Korea, and Saudi Arabia. India has received Sea Eagles, while Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan,
and North Korea have Silkworms and Seersuckers, a version of which North Korea now
manufactures. Italy has Kormorans, and Taiwan, South Africa, Chile, Ec-uador, Kenya,
Singapore, and Thailand have Gabriel Mark-IIs. Italy has exported turbojet powered
Otomats to Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Peru, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, while
the Swedes exported the RBS-15 to Yugoslavia and Finland. In addition, the Soviets sold
the long-range (500 km, 850 kg) turbojet powered “Shad-dock” to Syria and Yugoslavia.
At the next notch down in technological capability, the Soviets have flooded the world
market with 1960’s-generation liquid-fueled “Styx” (SS-N-2C) missiles. Algeria, Angola,
Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, India, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Vietnam,
Yemen, and the former Yugoslavia have the Styx missile in their inventories.
As the list of customers for the Styx demonstrates, the cost of a cruise missile is within
the financial resources of even the most basic defense budgets. Even highly capable
cruise missiles such as the Tomahawk only cost around $1.5 million per copy. This cost
reflects the most advanced avionics systems and TERCOM guidance. At least one
congressional study has shown that with the substitution of GPS, a proliferant could build
a cruise missile with a range and payload capability roughly equivalent to the Tomahawk,
for about $250,000. Unlike production of the heavy bomber, many countries have the
economic resources and technical base to produce this kind of delivery system
indigenously.

Subsystems

Though the sale of complete systems on the world market is a concern, that threat is
much smaller than the possibility that a country could indigenously design and build a
capable cruise missile by cannibalizing other systems for parts it cannot build on its own.
Of particular concern are components and parts that reduce the cost of the mis-sile in
serial production, reduce the cost of position mapping navigation systems, and increase
the range of these missiles.
Navigation and guidance continues to be the pacing item in threatening cruise missile
development. The Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM) is a derivative of the Harpoon
and contains in its nose a video camera that acts as a terminal guidance sys-tem. If a
proliferant adopts this technology and can position a transmitter and receiver within line-
of-sight to the missile from anywhere in the theater, it can dispense with the need for any
other kind of guidance system. Israel has developed a capable guid-ance system that can
be used in this application.
The next major subsystem component that enhances the capability of a cruise missile is
the powerplant. The United States pursued the cruise missile long before the development
of the first lightweight engine technology, so this is not a critical path item towards
developing a cruise missile. Still, more capable engines increase the threat of a cruise
missile. First, they reduce the RCS of the missile. Next, they in-crease the range by
reducing the drag and power required for control surface actuation. Finally, they reduce
other flight signatures, such as infrared cross-section and acoustic emission, that
WMD- ARTICLES
Article no. 1955
Date 6 March 2006
How many Nuclear Warheads does India Need?

Gurmeet Kanwal
Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation

O ne of the contentious issues that had threatened to derail the nuclear cooperation agreement
signed by India and the United Sates in July 2005 is over the number of nuclear warheads that India
needs for credible minimum deterrence. While the estimates put forward by Indian analysts range from
one to two dozen 'survivable' warheads at the lower end of the spectrum to over 400 warheads at the
upper end, these are mainly based on gut judgments and not on dispassionate cold logic.

Nuclear weapons are political and not of "warfighting". Their sole purpose is to deter the use
and the threat of use of nuclear weapons. A nation's nuclear force structure depends on its nuclear
doctrine and deterrence philosophy. These are essentially based on its civilisational values, its national
security strategy and its assessment of how much would be enough to deter its adversaries. The number
of nuclear warheads that a nation must stockpile depends on the availability and quality of weapons-grade
fissile material, its mastery of nuclear weapons design technology, the accuracy and reliability of its
delivery systems, the fiscal constraints that govern its defence budget, the present and future air and
missile defence capability of its adversaries, and their ability to absorb retaliatory nuclear strikes.

I f deterrence fails, in keeping with its nuclear doctrine, India will have to absorb a nuclear strike
before retaliating against the adversary's major cities and industrial centers. India's targeting philosophy is
based on a 'counter value' (as against 'counter force') strategy of massive punitive retaliation to inflict
unacceptable damage to the adversary's major population and industrial centres. Hence, India's nuclear
forces should be so structured that the warheads and their delivery systems are able to survive a first
strike in sufficient numbers to be able to inflict the required amount of punishment on selected targets in a
retaliatory strike. The survivability of India's nuclear arsenal can be ensured by redundancy in numbers,
through wide dispersion of nuclear warheads and delivery systems over Peninsular India, by having rail-
and road-mobile missiles in addition to air-delivered warheads and by investing in a limited number of
difficult-to-detect nuclear powered submarines (SSBNs) armed with submarine launched ballistic missiles
(SLBMs). Only SSBNs provide true retaliatory capability.

A retaliatory strike capability to destroy eight to 10 major population and industrial centres would
be adequate to meet the requirements of deterrence. For 10 counter value targets to be destroyed in the
adversary country, a total of 40 nuclear warheads, at the scale of four 20 to 40 Kiloton warheads per
target, would be adequate to cause unacceptable damage in a retaliatory nuclear strike if the probable
error (CEP) of the Agni IRBM delivery systems is taken to be 1,000 metres and a destruction assurance
level of 0.7 (about 70 percent) is considered acceptable.

I f the efficiency or overall reliability of India's nuclear delivery system is taken to be between 0.5
and 0.6 (50 to 60 per cent), a reasonable assumption for a modern nuclear force, then 75 warheads must
actually be launched for about 40 to 45 warheads to explode successfully over their targets as some
missiles may fail to take off, some may veer off course, some may be intercepted and some warheads
may either fail to explode or may explode in a sub-optimal manner. Hence, a minimum of 75 warheads
and, of course, their delivery systems must survive the enemy's first strike on Indian targets and be
available for retaliation.

D espite the best possible concealment and dispersion measures approximately 50 per cent of
the nuclear warheads and delivery systems may be destroyed in a first strike by the adversary. It would,
therefore, be reasonable to plan a warhead stocking level of at least twice the number of warheads that
are actually required to be launched, that is, 150 warheads. The last aspect to be catered for is a prudent
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Background
Though the dust has settled over Pokhran and the Chagai Hills since the nuclear blasts of May 1998,
their aftershocks are still reverberating round the world. The crossing of the nuclear Rubicon had
propelled India and Pakistan into de facto membership of the most exclusive club in the world—that
formed by the five Nuclear Weapons States (NWS). The NWS, of course, still refuse to accept the
two nuclear upstarts as members. Paradoxical as it may seem, India has acquired nuclear weapons
in order to renounce them. India's present status as a de facto nuclear power is already forcing the
P-5 and the G-8 to take India's principled opposition to the discriminatory NPT, CTBT and the
proposed FMCT seriously and to heed India's long-standing and consistent position that the P-5
must agree to implement a time bound programme for nuclear disarmament. In a world driven by
Realpolitik, a soft voice is heard with respect only when it is backed by a big stick. However, at this
stage it is more important to fine tune India's nuclear strategy and doctrine and draw up a balanced
and overtly visible nuclear force structure with a viable command and control system in order to
ensure that India's professed minimum deterrent is genuinely credible.

Above all else, India's nuclear force structure should flow out of the nuclear doctrine and the
national security strategy. The nuclear force must be based on India's declared strategy of 'no first
use' and should be capable of 'punitive retaliation' to inflict unacceptable damage for a nuclear
strike on Indian civilians, soldiers and civil and military assets. Like any other military force
structure, a nuclear force structure must be dynamic and flexible enough to evolve suitably in
synchrony with the technology trajectory as, more than any other military force, nuclear weapons
and their delivery systems are heavily dependent on emerging technologies. India's nuclear force
structure should also be adaptable to changes in threat perceptions and be adjustable enough to
give effect to bilateral or multilateral treaties that may be negotiated in future. Also, should the P-5
and other nuclear weapons states (NWS) be amenable to gradually moving towards the total
elimination of nuclear weapons a few decades hence, India's nuclear force should be so structured
that it permits easy dismantling. Total universal nuclear disarmament remains a key objective of
India's foreign policy.

This article is a sequel to and based on the background work already published by the author as
under:

• Command and Control of — Strategic Analysis, January 2000 India's Nuclear Weapons
(Paper presented at IDSA Fellows Seminar on November 20, 1999.)

• Implementation of India's No — Strategic Analysis, April 2000. First Use Doctrine:

(Commentary)

Need for some Inescapable Qualifications

• Does India Need Tactical — Strategic Analysis, May 2000. Nuclear Weapons?

• Nuclear Targeting Philosophy — Strategic Analysis, June 2000. for India

The salient deductions derived in the above mentioned articles are summarised below and form the
backdrop for this article:
 • Nuclear weapons are political weapons and not weapons of 'war fighting'. Their sole
purpose is to deter the use and the threat of use of nuclear weapons.

• For India's doctrine of minimum deterrence and 'no first use' nuclear strategy to be
credible, India's targeting philosophy must be based on a counter value strategy of
massive punitive retaliation to inflict unacceptable damage against the adversary's
population centres and industrial assets. The retaliatory strike should be massive
regardless of the level (quantum, yield, type of target, location) of a first strike against
India and its armed forces.

• Since India's targeting philosophy is not premised on 'proportionate deterrence' or 'flexible

response', India does not need tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. Also, the inherent
disadvantages of tactical nuclear weapons (primarily, the lower threshold of use, the need
for 'launch on warning' and 'launch through attack' strategies, complex command and
control challenges, increased cost of manufacture and maintenance, the problems of
storage, transportation and handling in the field and the greater risk of accidental and
even unauthorised use) should preclude the use of these weapons for deterrence.

• A National Command Authority headed by the Prime Minister should be established for the
command and control of India's nuclear weapons. A clear chain of succession should be
laid down.

• Within the military, the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS—a new overall Commander-in-Chief
who would provide 'single point military advice' to the Government) should be assisted by
a tri-Service joint planning staff for threat assessment and the formulation and execution
of a joint military strategy, including nuclear strategy.

• A tri-Service Strategic Forces Command should be raised under the CDS to exercise
functional control over the nuclear weapons and to oversee the functioning of the
surveillance, early warning, nuclear forces intelligence, targeting and attack and damage
assessment systems.

• The actual nuclear force units, forming India's 'triad' of land-, sea- and air-based forces,
should form part of the Army (all land-based ballistic and cruise missiles), the Navy
(SSBNs with SLBMs) and the Air Force (strategic bombers with air-delivered nuclear
bombs).

Is Minimum Deterrence a Numbers Game?

Writing in the early-1980s, Bhabani Sen Gupta had said that the entire basis for nuclear weapons is
deterrence: 2 "The entire purpose is to deter the enemy, not to fight him... the very existence (of
nuclear weapons) is justified on a theoretical base that is gravely limited at best, and outright wrong
at worst... it would be better for India to settle the doctrinal issues before going nuclear, instead of
first going nuclear and then looking for doctrinal justification." However, India's nuclear policy
evolved without major debate on the doctrinal issues and the nuclear weapons research and
development programme was shrouded in secrecy. It is only after the Pokhran-II nuclear tests that
Indian analysts have begun to wrestle with the complexities of nuclear theology and most of the
home truths have had to be re-learnt. It is a universally accepted truism that deterrence is
ultimately a mind game. It needs to be achieved during peace to ensure against the use or threat of
use of nuclear weapons by one's adversaries and for the purposes of coercive diplomacy. The
concept of nuclear deterrence first evolved in a US Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum where it was
stated that the "threat of the use of atomic bomb would be a great deterrent to any aggressors,
which might be considering embarking on atomic war." 3

Should deterrence fail and a nuclear strike be launched against India, the Indian nuclear force
should be able to survive in adequate numbers to respond in a punitive manner to inflict
unacceptable damage on the adversary who initiated the nuclear exchange. The key question is the
determination of what the adversary considers unacceptable damage. If India's adversary for a
retaliatory nuclear strike was a developed Western nation, for example one of the original members
of NATO, it would be safe to assume that such a nation would be deterred if it was certain that
nuclear warheads in single digit numbers could be effectively delivered to destroy a few of its cities.
As McGeorge Bundy said: 4

There is an enormous gulf between what political leaders think about nuclear weapons and what is
assumed in complex calculations of relative advantage in simulated strategic warfare. Think tank
analysts can set levels of acceptable damage well up in the tens of millions of lives. They can
assume that the loss of dozens of great cities is a real choice for a sane man. They are in an unreal
world. In the real world of real political thinkers... a decision that would bring even one hydrogen
bomb over one city of one's own country would be recognised in advance as a catastrophic blunder;
ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred
cities are unthinkable.

However, what the Pakistanis consider acceptable damage is likely to be several orders of
magnitude greater than what, for example, the Americans might consider acceptable. And, what the
Chinese consider acceptable is likely to be much more than what may be acceptable to the
Pakistanis. It would also be far more than what the Indian Government may consider acceptable.
"In his conversation with Jawaharlal Nehru, Chairman Mao Dze Dung told him that even if 300
million Chinese perished in a nuclear war, the remaining 300 million Chinese would build a new
glorious civilisation." 5 It is well appreciated that totalitarian regimes tend to be less mindful of the
value of the lives of their citizens than democracies. On the other hand, these perceptions vary with
the level of development and "What the Chinese considered acceptable damage in 1950 would be
way above what they consider acceptable today. With greater affluence and more democracy, the
level of acceptable damage will go down further. Even today, India and Pakistan are softer states in
this regard than China." 6

During the Kennedy era, the Soviet arsenal was estimated to be only one-seventeenth of the US
stockpile. 7 Yet, it is well known that during the Cuban missile crisis the US was deterred because
the Chiefs of Staff could not assure the government that a few Soviet warheads would not hit
American cities even if the US launched a massive disarming first strike. The enduring lesson of the
Cuban missile crisis is that even gross asymmetry in the number of nuclear warheads in one's
adversary's arsenal provides no guarantee that the adversary would not be deterred if he was
convinced that even a few warheads would get through and cause unacceptable damage. K.
Subrahmanyam has written in the Indo-Pak-Chinese context: 8

"When we talk of deterrence between Pakistan and India, is Kashmir worth the loss of Lahore for
the Pakistanis? Even if they are in a position to hit Delhi, will that compensate for the loss of Lahore
and Karachi? Surely not. Will the Chinese risk Kunming and Chengdu at present and even Shanghai
and Guangzu later — when India has an operational Agni —for any conceivable political, military and
strategic objective?...

"Minimum deterrence is not a numerical definition but a strategic approach. If a country is in a

position to have a survivable arsenal, which is capable of exacting an unacceptable penalty in
retaliation, it has minimum deterrence as opposed to an open-ended one aimed at matching the
adversary's arsenal in numerical terms. Those arsenals in thousands were produced in an era when
the strategic establishments believed in nuclear war fighting and did not understand its ecological
consequences. Today, sections of the US strategic community argue that the US can discharge its
global responsibilities with an arsenal of 200 warheads."

China has approximately 20 ICBMs to over 1500 of the US. However, it is nobody's case that the US
is not deterred by the Chinese arsenal. Had China's ICBMs not deterred the US, it would not have
been so vigorously engaged in developing a national missile defence (NMD). It clearly emerges that
the nuclear force levels necessary for a retaliatory strike are independent of the quantum of the
adversary's nuclear force and depend only on the numbers that are needed to inflict unacceptable
damage. The side that can cause greater damage does not necessarily achieve greater deterrence.
Quite obviously, the required number of nuclear warheads and their delivery systems must survive a
first strike and there should be adequate redundancy. Hence, for a retaliatory strategy, attempts at
maintaining a numerical parity with the adversary are neither necessary nor desirable and, as a
corollary, there is no substance in the bogey of a nuclear arms race on the Indian Subcontinent.
Kenneth Waltz has written: 9 "Those who foresee intense arms racing among new nuclear states, fail
to make the distinction between war fighting and war deterring capabilities. Forces designed for war
fighting have to be compared with each other. Forces designed for war deterring need not be
compared. The question is not whether one country has less than another, but whether it can do
unacceptable damage to another, with unacceptable damage sensibly defined." Among other senior
government functionaries, Brajesh Mishra, the National Security Advisor and the Principal Secretary
to the Prime Minister, has emphatically stated that India has no plans to enter into an arms race
with China. 10

Nuclear Capabilities of India and its Neighbours

Due to the thick veil of secrecy surrounding the nuclear weapons research and development
programmes of almost all the nuclear weapons states (NWS), it is extremely difficult for an analyst
to estimate the number of nuclear warheads possessed by a NWS with any degree of precision.
Estimates are generally based on the quantity of un-safeguarded enriched uranium or plutonium
that the NWS may have accumulated over the years. Since these figures are only rough estimates,
they are bound to be unreliable. Also, there is considerable difficulty in trying to compute the total
yield of fission and thermonuclear warheads that a NWS may possess because, for the same
amount of fissionable material, it is possible to produce almost the same number of thermonuclear
bombs but with much greater yields than pure fission or even boosted fission bombs. However, it is
possible to arrive at rough guesstimates with a similar margin of error by using the same method of
calculation. Such estimates should suffice to serve the purpose of computing relative nuclear
capabilities.

India

In an interview after the Pokhran-II nuclear tests of May 1998, Dr. Rajagopala Chidambaram,
Chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), said that India has the capacity to design
and make nuclear weapons of any size or type, including neutron bombs. 11 Bharat Karnad has
reported that "according to the data collected by the US Congressional Research Service, by the
year 2000, India will have an annual production rate of 127 kg of un-safeguarded fissile material
and an accrued total of some 1,607 kg of the same, which is sufficient to fashion 400 warheads...
were all this material to be turned into fission (nuclear) weapons, the cumulative yield of the
prospective Indian arsenal by the end of the century would be 3,095 Kt or a little over three
megatons, while the total destructive power if this amount of material were exclusively fusioned,
would be over three times as much at... 10.317 megatons of TNT." 12 In a report entitled "Repairing
the Regime: Preventing the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction," the Institute for Science and
International Security (ISIS), Washington, has estimated that the median value (which is midway
between the smallest and the largest estimates) of India's stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium (in
which the concentration of Plutonium-239 isotope is greater than 93 percent) was about 290 kg at
the end of 1998. 13 "The report claims that India's inventory of weapons-grade plutonium is derived
by estimating total production in its reactors and by subtracting 'drawdowns' from nuclear testing,
processing losses and civil uses." Since 290 kg is a median value, the fissile material stockpile could
actually range from 200 to 400 kg. Earlier, in July 1998, Dr. David Albright of ISIS had estimated
that India's stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium was around 370 kg and was enough to make
about 74 nuclear weapons. 14 These estimates are at variance with the figures quoted by Bharat
Karnad.

Table 1. Nuclear Tests at a Glance

US Russia France UK China India
Number of Tests 1,032 715 210 45 45 6
First Explosion 1945 1946 1961 1952 1964 1974
Last Explosion 1992 1990 1996 1991 1996 1998
Nuclear Warheads 12,070* 22,500* 500* 380* 450* 65*
* Estimates.
(Source: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.) 15

A report by W. P. S. Sidhu in the Jane's Intelligence Review soon after the May 1998 nuclear tests
estimated that India's nuclear stockpile contained between 20 to 60 warheads assembled from the
weapons-grade plutonium re-processed from the fuel taken from the research reactors located at
Trombay. 16 However, according to Sidhu, if the plutonium produced in India's commercial reactors is
also taken into account, India would possess adequate fissile material to produce "at least 390
nuclear weapons and as many as 470 weapons." 17 R. Ramachandran writes that it does not make
sense to use reactor-grade plutonium "which has a high content of spontaneously fissionable Pu-240
and makes only 'dirty' bombs as against weapons-grade Pu-239 from research reactors." 18 He has
calculated that India is likely to have adequate stocks of plutonium for about 30 bombs and that "A
good upper band would... be 35." 19 It also needs to be noted that India's fast breeder programme
requires reactor-grade plutonium and if it were to be used for making nuclear warheads, it would
not be available for the purpose for which it is actually intended. 20 Estimates of the nuclear
stockpile in the Indian media have ranged from 25-65 21 warheads to 50-64 22 warheads.

George Perkovich has written, "knowledgeable Indian sources confirmed" that reactor-grade
plutonium was used in a low-yield device tested on May 11, 1998 at Pokhran. 23 He believes that
India's stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium was "probably around 250 to 300 kg by 1998... this
stockpile could 'fuel' perhaps fifty weapons." On the other hand, if approximately 600 kg of reactor-
grade plutonium was to be added to the stockpile and actual tests in May 1998 had confirmed that
the difficulties associated with designing nuclear warheads using such fissile material had been
overcome, India's capability to produce and stockpile nuclear warheads would be considerably
enhanced and so would the quantitative content of its deterrent. Given the lack of transparency in
these matters, it will be a long time before this controversy is resolved. The Kargil Review
Committee has recommended that a White Paper should be published by the government on India's
nuclear weapons programme. 24 Such a step would be a positive one.

Pakistan

After its stunning military defeat at India's hands in 1971, Pakistan's Prime Minister, Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto had said that the Pakistanis would eat grass if need be but would spare no effort to produce
an 'Islamic' (nuclear) bomb. Pakistan started producing weapons-grade uranium at the Kahuta
Research Laboratories near Islamabad some time between 1980 to 1985. During the mid-1980s,
Pakistan is now known to have conducted 20 'cold' tests. In 1987, Richard Barlow, the CIA operative
in Islamabad, reported to Washington that Pakistan had assembled a nuclear weapon. Pakistan
acquired this capability with generous help from the Chinese, who found in Pakistan a strategic ally
willing to countervail India. By now it is well established that there was nothing Pakistani about the
Islamic bombs detonated in Chagai in May 1998. "The Chinese help to Pakistan in supplying ring
magnets (5,000—for gas centrifuges), the Khushab plutonium production reactor and setting up a
missile factory, is now part of history." 25 The Heritage Foundation, a Washington based think tank
that used to wield considerable influence during the Reagan and Bush presidencies, has chronicled
how the Chinese helped Pakistan to build its nuclear bomb and delivery systems. "China's role in
helping Pakistan to acquire nuclear weapons has raised serious concerns about China's part in
fostering instability in South Asia." 26

China is also known to have provided a complete nuclear weapon design to Pakistan along with
sufficient weapons-grade uranium for two tests, established a special industrial furnace at the
Khushab facility to produce plutonium, transferred enough tritium gas for triggers for ten nuclear
weapons, trained Pakistani technicians and guided Pakistani scientists in propellant and warhead
technologies. 27 It is also generally believed that China permitted Pakistan to carry out a nuclear test
at its Lop Nor range. During the early to mid-1990s, China transferred fully assembled M-11
missiles to Pakistan. In February 2000, the CIA reported to the US Congress that despite its promise
to stop ballistic missile and nuclear assistance to Pakistan in May 1996, China continued such
assistance during the first half of 1999. 28 The CIA also reported that Pakistan's flight test of the
Ghauri missile in April 1998, was based on North Korea's No Dong missile. 29 Earlier US reports had
attributed the Ghauri design to China.
Pakistan's nuclear scientists were apparently quite satisfied with the May 1998 nuclear tests and Dr.
Abdul Qadeer Khan even boasted that they could test a thermonuclear bomb "within days" if the
political leadership wanted them to do so. 30 The Pakistani scientists believe that the country needs
between 60 to 70 nuclear warheads to achieve credible deterrent capability against India. Pakistan
has between 350 to 400 kg of weapons-grade (highly enriched) uranium which is sufficient for
about 20 warheads of 15 to 20 Kt yield. 31 The ISIS estimated after the Chagai nuclear tests that
Pakistan possessed 335 to 400 kg of weapons-grade uranium that is sufficient to assemble 16 to 20
nuclear weapons and that by end-1998, it could increase the production to 600 kg—enough for 30
nuclear weapons. "The ISIS report predicted that in future Pakistan's stock of weapons-grade
uranium would grow at an annual rate of about 110 kg, or enough for five weapons per year." 32
According to W. P. S. Sidhu, "Pakistan's arsenal is estimated at between six and 12 nuclear
weapons." 33 In the Indian media, estimates of Pakistan's stockpile have varied from 15 to 20 34
warheads to 15 to 24 35 warheads. R. Ramachandran has estimated that Pakistan is likely to have
"about 10-15 bombs if it had capped (production of highly enriched uranium in 1991, as has been
widely reported) and 25-40 bombs if it had not." 36 In Brigadier Vijay K. Nair's view, "Pakistan's
nuclear potential... could be 1998-99: 2 to 4 first generation, free fall, aircraft delivered nuclear
explosive devices, 1999-2001: 10 to 15 nuclear weapons having first generation guidance systems,
delivered by aircraft or short-range missiles, 2002-2010: 25 to 35 nuclear weapons delivered by a
mix of aircraft, short-range missiles and IRBMs." 37

An NBC TV report on June 7, 2000, ostensibly based on information leaked by a US intelligence

agency, stated that Pakistan has 25 to 100 nuclear weapons, "five times" India's arsenal. 38 It also
gave Pakistan a major lead in ballistic missile capability based on Chinese and North Korean designs
and the supply of even fully assembled missiles by these two nations and claimed that India was
trailing way behind. 39 Pakistan, of course, formally denied the assessment. A Foreign Office
spokesperson said that "it was removed from reality" and was an "extraordinary assertion". 40 Since
Pakistan's nuclear weapons are based primarily on highly enriched uranium and each warhead
requires a minimum of 15 kg of fissile material (assuming a sophisticated design), with a production
capacity between 45 to 120 kg per year since 1986 at Kahuta, Pakistan could have produced a
maximum of between 30 to 50 warheads, according to Dr. Sanjay Badri-Maharaj. 41 He estimates
the Indian capability at 40-plus warheads from plutonium produced at the CIRUS and Dhruva
reactors and affirms that India may have produced enough reactor-grade plutonium for 300-plus
weapons at its nuclear power reactors. The NBC report is obviously a motivated report and its
accuracy could be discounted, even though the purpose of the concerned US intelligence agency in
releasing such information to the media shall remain the subject of debate. R. Prasannan has
quoted the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as having estimated India's stockpile at
between 85 to 90 warheads and Pakistan's at 15. 42 He quotes the estimate of Gregory S. Jones at
80 warheads for India and 20 for Pakistan. 43 It could be concluded from the foregoing analysis of
the nuclear capabilities of India and Pakistan that India possibly possesses between 50 to 70
warheads (excluding fissile material from commercial nuclear power plants) and Pakistan is likely to
possess between 15 to 30 warheads.

China

China is believed to have developed an arsenal of about 400 to 450 warheads of various types—for
land-and sea-based ballistic missiles, for delivery by bomber aircraft and tactical nuclear weapons
for tube and rocket artillery and short-range missiles. The Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI) assessment of Chinese nuclear forces is given at Table 2: 44

Table 2. Chinese Nuclear Forces (January 1999)

Type NATO Range (km) Warheads Warheads in

Designation x yield stockpile

Aircraft

H-6 B-6 3,100 1-3 bombs 120

Q-5 A-5 400 1 bomb 30

Land-based missiles

DF-3A CSS-2 2,800 1 x 3.3 Mt 40

DF-4 CSS-3 4,750 1 x 3.3 Mt 20

DF-5A CSS-4 13,000+ 1 x 4-5 Mt 20

DF-21A CSS-6 1,800 1 x 200-300 Kt 48

SLBMs

Julang-1 CSS-N-3 1,700 1 x 200-300 Kt 12

Julang-2 CSS-N-4 8,000 1 x 200-300 Kt ?

Tactical weapons

Artillery/ADMs, short-range missiles (< 1,000 km) Low Kt 120

Total 410

China is known to be seriously engaged in efforts to modernise its nuclear forces. The focus appears
to be primarily on developing "new land-based, solid-fuelled, road-mobile missiles such as DF-21,
DF-31 and DF-41 to replace older liquid-fuelled missiles such as the DF-5A as well as producing a
new class of warheads thought to be either miniaturised or of smaller yield to increase targeting
flexibility and launcher mobility. Other developments include developing a new second-generation
replacement sea-launched ballistic missile, the solid-fuelled JL-2, and possibly a small fleet of four to
six more advanced ballistic missile submarines, as well as a new bomber, the FB-7, as a
replacement for its antiquated H-5 and H6 fleet." 46 China is also engaged in developing new
warheads for its short-range missiles 47 and further improving its tactical nuclear warheads.

Should China ever decide to launch a disarming first strike against India (an improbable but not an
impossible scenario), it will be able to employ up to 60 percent of its IRBM force and air delivered
warheads, keeping the remainder, as well as the entire ICBM and SLBM force, as a strategic reserve.
Hence, in a worst case scenario, approximately 240 warheads (60 percent of 400) would be
available for a first strike. With these, using four warheads per target, it will be possible for the
PLA's Second Artillery to effectively destroy about 50 to 60 targets, with an assurance level of
almost 80 to 90 percent if warheads in the megaton class are used. The strikes are likely to include
primarily counter force targets and may include some counter value targets. All air bases, missile
silos, hardened shelters for ballistic missiles, rail-mobile missile marshalling railway yards, military
headquarters and communications centres and strategic choke points (such as the rail and road
bridges across the Brahmaputra River) in eastern and northeastern India will be targeted and
destroyed. Only the most skilfully and innovatively concealed nuclear force installations are likely to
survive. However, the strikes will not be limited only to eastern India. Similar counter force targets
and population and industrial centres in other parts of the country will also be hit and will suffer
varying degrees of damage. India's ability to retaliate will depend on how widely dispersed and well
concealed over Peninsular India the nuclear force assets are, how efficient the command and control
structure is, how failsafe the communications system is and how well integrated the armed forces
are in India's nuclear deterrence programme.

Strategic Delivery Systems

The number and variety of nuclear warheads and their level of technological sophistication are
ultimately of value only to the extent that accurate strategic delivery systems are available for
reaching them to the intended targets. Since it is now possible for almost any technologically
advanced country to design simple nuclear weapons (in fact, several designs can be downloaded
from the Internet!), the real test of genuine deterrence capability lies in the possession of strategic
delivery systems, particularly ballistic missiles. Missiles are increasingly being touted as the new
currency of power. 48 K. Subrahmanyam is of the view that while nuclear weapons are largely
unusable as weapons of war, missiles are usable and that the development of Agni and other such
missiles will be useful to keep missiles like the Tomahawks away at safe distances. 49 He has
observed that "The NATO campaign (in Yugoslavia) is proof that missiles would be standard
equipment for war and deterrence in future and, therefore, they are as much part of a country's
defences as aircraft, tanks and guns." 50 It is in this field that China is well ahead of India and, since
India has carried out only limited tests of the Agni-I and Agni-II, 51 the 'missile gap' appears to be
growing. "Today, Chinese CSS-2 missiles in Saudi Arabia, nuclear warheads from Tibet and mainland
China... all affect Indian security interests." 52 Despite some reports that the serial production of 20
Agni missiles is likely to be completed by 2000 53 some analysts have estimated that "the Agni will
not be fielded with nuclear warheads for another ten years." 54

Another area in which India is lagging is in the development of cruise missiles. Commenting on
India's plans for cruise missiles, Pravin Sawhney has written that the Sagarika missile, currently
under development, is an anti-ship cruise missile. Quoting Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, he states that the
'pilotless' target aircraft (PTA) Lakshya "can be converted, without much alteration, to a cruise
missile with a range of 500 km and a 300 kg payload." 55 The export of missile technology and even
fully assembled missiles by China and North Korea to Pakistan has been well documented. In fact,
confirmatory information has often come from former CIA officials. 56 It is well known that between
30 to 84 x M-11 Silkworm missiles of 280 km range and an unknown number of M-9 missiles were
supplied by China to Pakistan during the early 1990s. North Korea has supplied No Dong and Taepo
Dong missiles to Pakistan. The US policy has been ambivalent towards the proliferation of nuclear
weapons and missile technology by China and North Korea to Pakistan, presumably to safeguard US
trade interests. However, this is now being increasingly criticised in the US itself. Paul Bracken has
written that "... India, the world's largest democracy, is punished for testing nuclear weapons, while
China, hardly a democracy, is courted as a strategic partner." 57

Agni-II 58

• Length: 20 metres; diameter: 1 metre; weight: 16 tons; achieved range: 2,200 km;
achievable range: up to 2,500 km; booster engine: two-stage, solid-solid propellant; time
of flight: 11 minutes for 2,200 km, of which powered phase is two minutes.

• Agni-II is an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM), implying that the reentry vehicle,
which has the payload and other accessories, leaves the atmosphere, coasts in an elliptical
orbit in vacuum and then re-enters the atmosphere at temperatures up to 18,000 degrees
Celsius.

• Agni-II is a mobile system with strap-down inertial navigation system and indigenous on-
board microcomputers that will provide greater accuracy with the aid of Global Positioning
System.

• The two stage-solid booster engine of Agni-II is an improvement over the solid-liquid
engine of Agni-I. A complete solid propellant, as compared with a solid-liquid configuration,
has quicker reaction time, longer shelf life and minimal logistics problems in the field.
Otherwise, basic capabilities of Agni-I and Agni-II are the same. Agni-I—length: 19
metres, diameter: 1 metre, weight: 14.5 tons.

• Approximate cost of a single Agni-II weapon system is Rs. 335 crores. It can be cost-
effective only with nuclear warheads. Payload is about 1,000 kg, implying that the actual
warhead weight would be 700 to 800 kg. The remaining weight is of support systems
inside the re-entry vehicle.
 • Agni-II can be enhanced to Agni-II with a range of up to 5,000 km with a new design: the
diameter will change from the present 1 metre to about 1.8 metres (as suggested in Dr.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's book Wings of Fire).

A 1999 RAND report stated that India lacks the capability to launch effective missile strikes against
China and is incapable of withstanding a nuclear first strike by China. The report, entitled "From
Testing to Deploying Nuclear Forces: The Hard Choices Facing India and Pakistan", observed that
"India has an 'unready force', is vulnerable to a first strike, does not have the means to detect
enemy ballistic missiles in flight, and does not have a command, control and intelligence structure
that is resistant to an attack aimed at decapitating India's civilian leadership." 59 Around the same
time, the New York Times had reported in a front-page article that "China possessed roughly 20
missiles that could reach American shores and perhaps 300 nuclear weapons aboard medium-range
missiles or bombers that could hit India, Russia and Japan." 60 While China's aim is clearly to build
up Pakistan as a strategic ally to countervail India in Southern Asia, North Korea's interests are
primarily monetary in nature. Pakistan's testing of North Korean missiles also enables North Korea
to validate its partially tested systems at Pakistan's cost without inviting international opprobrium
and the pressure of sanctions. 61 Using designs of foreign origin, Pakistan is engaged in pursuing
both the liquid and solid fuel routes to develop its indigenous ballistic missile capability. Clearly,
India is at a major disadvantage and it is imperative that the foremost national security priority
should currently be the development and operational fielding of Agni-I and Agni-II ballistic missiles
(to a range of 5,000 km to cover all likely targets in China), followed by SLBMs and the Surya ICBM
with a global reach to cater for future threats. Till such time as these missiles become fully
operational, India's nuclear deterrent will continue to lack credibility, especially against China.

Force Structure Proposals of Indian Analysts

Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s (up to mid-1998), the Indian nuclear debate concentrated
mainly on striving for universal nuclear disarmament, nuclear free zones, whether India should join
the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the advantages
and disadvantages of exercising the 'nuclear option', the finer nuances of 'opaque', 'non-
weaponised', 'recessed' and 'existential' deterrence, and the need to work for a global 'no first use'
commitment. Very little was either discussed or published even in academic journals and by security
studies think tanks on a nuclear strategy for India and a viable force structure to give effect to that
strategy. The anti-nuclear lobby, the so-called 'doves', was so strong that few editors would have
dared to publish an article specifying the nuts and bolts of a nuclear arsenal for India. As such, few
Indian analysts have written on the subject and there is not much to go by.

K. Subrahmanyam has written that "... if a country can project an image of having around 500
nuclear warheads, which India can build in twelve to fifteen years time if it were to set out on the
programme and disperse them on its vast area, the country will have a credible deterrent." 62 Even
after the Pokhran-II tests, while explaining that minimum deterrence is not a numbers game, he
wrote: "Whether it is 150, 250 or 300, the Indian deterrent will still be a minimum one compared to
others except Pakistan." 63 However, he is known to believe that "... a force of around 60 deliverable
warheads could meet adequately India's need for a minimum deterrent." 64 For delivering these 60
warheads, Subrahmanyam advocates the development of 20 Prithvi missiles and 20 Agni missiles;
the remaining 20 warheads are to be delivered by air force bomber/fighter-bomber aircraft.
Subrahmanyam argues that "If India were to develop a modest force of 20 Agni missiles, the India-
China ratio in deterrence capability will still be higher than the present China-US ratio." 65 He does
not visualise the need for SSBNs armed with SLBMs. He does not make a major distinction between
low-yield fission weapons and those in the thermonuclear class, but instead emphasises the
criticality of solid-fuel missiles: "Whether the warheads are of 15 kilotons-fission or 120-150 kilotons
(thermonuclear warheads), both are bound to have a deterrent effect... What is absolutely crucial
for credible deterrence is the solid-fuelled missile of appropriate ranges. That is what India needs to
concentrate on." 66

Jasjit Singh also advocates a minimalist approach and a time period of 15 to 20 years for the Indian
arsenal to stabilise. He writes. 67 "The exact size of the arsenal needed at the end-point will need to
be worked out by defence planners based on a series of factors. But at this point it is difficult to
visualise an arsenal with anything more than a double-digit quantum of warheads. It may be
prudent to even plan on the basis of a lower end figure of say 2-3 dozen (survivable) nuclear
warheads by the end of 10-15 years. It is necessary to keep in mind the fact that with the passage
of time, deterrence decay factors will lead to the requirement of a smaller arsenal rather than a
larger one." Though he bases his force structure on a triad for delivery, he feels that "It would
indeed be infructuous to pursue the development or possession of an intercontinental capability to
do so," and that intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs — with a range between 500 and 5,000
km) would be adequate for India's requirements. Maharajkrishna Rasgotra is of the view that "Some
30 bombs of Hiroshima strength committed against five major targets in Pakistan, 60 deployed
against eight to ten targets in China, and another 30 held in reserve for contingencies and
deployment at sea, should adequately meet the needs of minimum deterrence. This number (120
warheads in all) allows for possible losses in an enemy first strike and leaves enough for a
devastating counterattack." 68

General K. Sundarji, a former Indian Chief of the Army Staff and a perceptive military thinker, was
perhaps the first analyst in India to write about the military aspects of India's nuclear deterrence.
He advocated a nuclear force structure of approximately 150 warheads mounted almost entirely on
a Prithvi-Agni missile force. 69 Brigadier Vijay K. Nair has suggested a force level of 132 nuclear
warheads of different types, including weapons in the megaton range. 70 For delivery, besides
bomber/fighter-bomber aircraft, he recommends five SSBNs (each with 16 SLBMs) and 48 ballistic
missiles (12 SRBMs and 36 MRBMs). He writes: "India must ensure adequate reserves to provide
fail safe assurance of her strategy and yet maintain an adequate force structure after hostilities
cease. An additional reserve of two weapon systems is required for each planed autonomous strike
and a minimum of 20 percent of the entire force structure should be available for post-strike
security imperatives." Out of a total requirement of 111 nuclear warheads for retaliatory strikes
against Pakistan (17 targets) and China (eight targets), he feels that 37 warheads are required for
strikes and an additional 74 as "65 percent reserve for reliability". He adds another 22 as a "post-
war reserve", taking the total to 132 warheads.

Rear Admiral Raja Menon (Retd.) recommends that India's nuclear arsenal should be based
primarily on SSBNs from about 2020 onwards. 71 Till then, he feels that India's nuclear deterrent
should be based only on ballistic missiles. He excludes bombers/fighter-bombers from the
deterrence calculus because of the destabilising impact of the short flying time (20 minutes)
between Pakistan and India's forward airfields and the inducement for the early use of nuclear
weapons even in a conventional conflict. He supports the elimination of air delivered nuclear
weapons from the arsenals of both India and Pakistan under mutually agreed nuclear risk reduction
measures (NRRMs). He writes: "If both India and Pakistan can resist the temptation to field some
kind of nuclear weapons urgently and postpone their arsenals to a less vulnerable set of missiles,
the total number of nuclear weapons would be reduced; and, the inducement to a first strike would
also vanish." While the logic may be impeccable, practical realities preclude the adoption of such an
option. Till the Agni-I and Agni-II IRBMs become fully operational and the Indian Navy begins to
acquire SSBNs, India has no option but to base its deterrence against China solely on air delivered
nuclear warheads. Indian bombers/fighter-bombers such as SU-30s, Jaguars and Mirages can
effectively reach value targets in the Chinese hinterland. However, it would be wishful thinking to
assume that Pakistan would accept that India might retain nuclear-capable/nuclear-armed aircraft in
the eastern theatre while removing them from its western borders under mutually agreed NRRMs.

Admiral Menon has estimated that the modernised Chinese arsenal would comprise 596 warheads
after 2010. Up to 2030, he suggests that an all-missile, land-based force should comprise five
regiments of 12 missiles each (with survivability being ensured by concealment and rail-garrison
mobility) and fifty percent of them should have up to four independently targetable warheads each.
He feels that these would suffice to withstand a first strike by China with the maximum number of
warheads that China may decide to launch and yet have enough missiles remaining to inflict
unacceptable damage. He feels that some hardened silos may need to be provided "if the rate of
degradation of the rail garrison missile force is judged to be too rapid." Against Pakistan, he
proposes a force of 200 cruise missiles, 36 of them nuclear tipped, as cruise missiles are the least
provocative. He visualises the "handing over of Indian deterrence from the land-based force to the
sea-based force... over a ten year period... (to be) completed by 2030" and suggests a nuclear
force of six SSBNs, each armed with 12 SLBMs. Each SSBN will carry at least 12 missiles and, in his
view, as India has MIRV (multiple, independently targetable re-entry vehicles) ambitions, each
missile could carry up to ten 250 to 400 Kt nuclear warheads. "Such a force would give India a
warhead strength of 216 (6 x MIRV) in a pre-launch scenario and probably 380 warheads in a
scenario with adequate strategic warning and with five boats deployed. This could be the entire
Indian deterrence till the middle of the 21st century." 72

It is indeed intriguing that Admiral Menon does not visualise a need for air-delivered nuclear
warheads for the Indian deterrent. He writes: 73 "With opposing airfields separated by barely 20
minutes flying time, it would be a case of use-them-or-lose-them for Pakistan, a fear reinforced by
the threat of capture by armoured forces, in a country handicapped by lack of strategic depth. An
airdropped bomb is perhaps the farthest from a second strike weapon on the Subcontinent. It
contributes nothing to deterrence stability and, if at all the weapon is discussed in a worsening
crisis, it can only be in reference to a first strike." Besides their dual-use capability and the "sunk
costs" already incurred in the acquisition of nuclear capable bombers/fighter-bombers, it must be
remembered that unlike ballistic missiles, aircraft are recallable even after they have taken off with
nuclear weapons on board. They present a cost-effective solution to India's immediate deterrence
requirements till the Agni-I and Agni-II series of ballistic missiles can be made fully operational. As
for the proclivity to use-them-or-lose-them, the analogy is suggestive of flippant nuclear decision-
making. There is no reason to believe that the Pakistani leadership, military or civilian, will act
irrationally and set off nuclear exchanges merely because they would be worried about their forward
airfields being put temporarily out of commission by the Indian Air Force. India will need air-
delivered nuclear warheads in its arsenal not only against Pakistan, but also against China for a long
time to come as they offer a here-and-now solution and are akin to a bird in hand.

To base the entire Indian nuclear force only on SSBNs would not be appropriate for the following
reasons:

• Flexibility of targeting options for targeting individual targets with a variety of weapons
platforms to achieve better strike assurance would not be available.

• The problems of communicating with submerged submarines are well known.

• It is becoming increasingly easier to locate and track submarines and by 2020-30

advanced navies such as the US Navy may be able to map and track the position of every
submarine in any of the oceans.

• The Indian hinterland provides adequate depth and area to disperse widely India's ballistic
missiles and the rail and road networks provide ample opportunity to keep moving the
missiles at random, though with attendant problems of command and control and missile
launch inaccuracies.

• The force structure would lack inter-Services balance, which in itself is not desirable.

Bharat Karnad follows what has been dubbed a 'maximalist' approach to nuclear deterrence and
strongly advocates the need for megaton-class thermonuclear weapons in the Indian arsenal. He
assumes that the primary and secondary target lists could contain about 60 locations that need to
be hit. In order to ensure that each of these targets can be destroyed with an acceptable assurance
level so that deterrence is credible, he recommends the targeting of each with four nuclear
weapons, each of which has a two mile (approximately three km) CEP (circular error probable—a
measure of the accuracy of delivery; it denotes the distance from the point of impact to the centre
of the target as the radius of the circle within which, on average, 50 percent of the missiles aimed at
the target will fall). Bharat Karnad suggests that India's nuclear arsenal be gradually built up over a
period of three decades to a total of 328 nuclear warheads, as given in Table 3: 74

Table 3. Requirement of Nuclear Warheads

Timeframe Maximally Strategic* (Warheads) Minimally Tactical** (Warheads) Total
2000-2010 57 30 87
2010-2020 131 40 171
2020-2030 268 60 328

Delivery systems:

* ICBMs, IRBMs, SLBMs, SU-30s armed with N-gravity bombs (NGBs) and N-air-to-surface missiles
(N-ASMs) and atomic demolition munitions (ADMs).

** Jaguars and Mirage-2000s armed with NGBs and N-ASMs up to 2010 and SU-30s thereafter.

The breakdown of the final figure of 328 nuclear warheads and the proposed delivery systems
suggested by Bharat Karnad is as under:

• 4 x SSBNs with 48 SLBMs (presumably with a single warhead each).

• 40 x SU-30s with 40 x NGBs and 40 x N-ASMs (maximally strategic) and 30 x SU-30s with
30 x NGBs and 30 x N-ASMs (minimally tactical).

• 25 x ICBMs.

• 40 x IRBMs.

• 25 x ADMs.

• 50 reserve warheads.

Leaving out the 50 reserve warheads, Bharat Karnad has suggested that, out of the remaining 278
warheads, 253 should be thermonuclear. Hence, in his view, all the warheads in the Indian arsenal,
with the exception of 25 ADMs, should be thermonuclear. He writes: "If a counter-cities or counter-
value nuclear bombardment strategy is the only one that makes sense, then thermonuclear bombs,
with megaton yields, are the most convincing instruments of this strategy." 75 It is difficult to dispute
the logic of this statement. However, India's 45 Kt, two-stage thermonuclear explosion during the
tests of May 1998 has the potential to be upgraded to a practical capability of about 200 Kt only. 76
For weapons in the megaton class to be developed, further refinement of the design and additional
physical testing would be necessary. As India has unilaterally renounced further nuclear tests, it is
doubtful if such a capability can be created. Also, as missile accuracies continue to improve and
CEPs drop to hundreds of metres and lesser, the trend among the P-5 is to limit warhead yields to
between 200 to 300 Kt. Yields in this range should be adequate for India's purposes also for a
counter-value strategy provided India can develop ballistic missiles with a CEP of less than 500
metres. As for ADMs, their use in Tibet, as suggested by Bharat Karnad to stop a major Chinese
offensive, would prove to be counter-productive as the waters of almost all the rivers in Tibet flow
into India and it would hardly be prudent to pollute those waters with long-lasting nuclear radiation
by creating landslides on the snow covered mountainsides and endanger life in the northeastern
states. Besides, it would be a major environmental disaster.

R.R. Subramanian, a senior analyst at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New
Delhi, and a physicist by training, is of the opinion that India needs at least 425 warheads if the
combined efficiency (accuracy, reliability, in-flight interception) of the delivery systems is taken to
be 0.3. He feels that with an efficiency of 0.3, approximately 125 to 130 warheads could be counted
upon to destroy their intended targets. Of these, he is of the view that 25 to 30 are needed to
target Pakistan and about 100 are required against China. 77 To assume that India's nuclear force
would deliver an overall efficiency of only 0.3 would appear to be overly pessimistic. However, in the
absence of accurate factual information about individual components of the nuclear force, primarily
the targeting and delivery systems, it is possible to neither prove nor disprove this contention.
Lieutenant General Pran Pahwa (Retd.) recommends that India's deterrence be based on 182
warheads. 78 He bases his calculations on the assumption that China is likely to employ two
warheads each to destroy every Indian warhead and that 20 percent Indian warheads would survive
a Chinese first strike which would be essentially a counter force one. He feels that if India had 182
warheads, China would need to fire 364 warheads and, given a Chinese arsenal of 400 warheads, it
would be left with 36 to India's surviving 36 warheads. Since the numbers remaining would be
matched, China would be deterred from launching a first strike. This argument gives the Chinese an
excessive 80 percent success rate and does not take into account the possibility that a Chinese first
strike is likely to combine counter value with counter force targets.

It emerges that Indian analysts have widely varying views on the number of nuclear warheads that
India needs for its minimum deterrent. The figures vary from the low double digits ("two to three
dozen") at the lower end to just over 400 at the upper end. Suggestions for weapons yield range
from 15 to 20 Kt fission weapons to thermonuclear weapons in the megaton range. The
recommended delivery vehicles embrace the entire range of the triad including ICBMs and cruise
missiles. As discussed earlier, the sole purpose of India's nuclear weapons is to deter the use and
the threat of use of nuclear weapons. Minimum deterrence is not a numbers game. Its ends are
served if the adversary is deterred from crossing the nuclear threshold and from threatening to do
so. As Kenneth Waltz famously said, "More is not better if less is enough." 79 What matters is to find
a rational way to determine how much is enough.

Practical Considerations Underpinning the Force Structure

It has been emphasised by the Indian government that India's nuclear weapons are not country
specific. However, a military force structure can only be configured to neutralise specific current
threats and must be made flexible enough to be adaptable to meet emerging challenges. Without
going into specific details of the nuclear threats faced by India, an aspect that requires a separate
analysis, it could be stated that the nuclear weapons possessed by both China and Pakistan, when
placed in the context of their unresolved territorial and boundary disputes with India, are definitely
a threat in being while those possessed by the other NWS that are distant from India are far less
hazardous. Hence, a realistic force structuring option would be to base India's deterrent on the
nuclear weapons stockpile of China as a planning parameter.

How Many Cities should be Targeted?

The key decision to be made in working out a nuclear force structure for India is regarding the
number of nuclear warheads necessary for a retaliatory strike with a counter value strategy that
emphasises attacks on large cities and industrial centres. At the heart of the planning process is the
question: how many such targets must Indian nuclear forces plan to destroy in order to ensure that
deterrence works? Would it be adequate to target one large, metropolitan-cum-industrial centre
with thermonuclear weapons, or would it be necessary to plan to destroy ten, twenty or more such
complexes? Is the level of deterrence proportionately dependent on the number of targets in the
adversary country that one's nuclear force is capable of destroying or, does the law of diminishing
returns apply after the capability to destroy a certain number of targets has been acquired? These
are complex challenges to resolve and several reputed nuclear strategists have attempted to find
the answers through intuitive as well as mathematical solutions based on econometric models and
the "innovative use of statistics". There is, perhaps, something to be said for the theory of
diminishing returns. Quoting Bernard Brodie, Bharat Karnad has written: 80

Brodie, in one of his most memorable series of insights, noted that in the nuclear age, "the potential
deterrence value of an admittedly inferior force may be sharply greater than it has ever been
before," in the event, that "a menaced small nation could threaten (a big one) with only a single
thermonuclear bomb" directed at its premier city, which he contended "would be a retaliatory
capability sufficient to give the (aggressor) government pause." Further, that ten thermonuclear
tipped ("city busting") missiles aimed at the same number of the enemy's cities "would no doubt
work still greater deterrent effect." But, increase in the deterrent effect, he surmised, would be "less
than proportional to the increase in magnitude of potential destruction" in part because the deter-er
would run out of high-value enemy metropolitan centres to hit. It amounted to saying that too large
a nuclear arsenal would only fetch diminished deterrence.
However, Herman Kahn, another prima donna of nuclear theology, disputed Brodie's logic. He
explained that, as the efficiency of a ballistic missile is the square of its accuracy as represented by
its CEP, 81 ten ballistic missiles aimed at ten cities would not deter an adversary who could be
reasonably sure that given a CEP of one to two km, a large number of them are bound to fall
substantially away from the city centre and may be only partially effective or completely ineffective.
Hence, for credible deterrence to be achieved, the adversary must be certain that India would be in
a position to ensure that three to four nuclear warheads can be delivered with the required accuracy
on every selected target. The comparatively greater density of population per square kilometre in
Asian cities is another factor that must be taken into account while deciding the number of cities
that must be targeted for effective deterrence.

Despite Mao's assertion that "300 million Chinese would survive" nuclear war, it could be argued
that the fear of losing some of its modern showpieces on the eastern coast, combined with the
certainty of horrendous civilian casualties due to extremely high population densities, would be
adequate to deter China from being the first to begin nuclear exchanges that are bound to escalate
to city-busting strikes. The China scholars at IDSA hold sharply divergent views on the number of
Chinese cities that need to be targeted to ensure deterrence. Sujit Dutta is of the opinion that China
would be deterred if its leadership were convinced that its adversary could destroy even three major
cities. 82 M.V. Rappai concurs with this view and argues that the Chinese are taking their economic
development very seriously and would not do anything to jeopardise the future of their thriving
population and industrial centres. 83 Swaran Singh advocates the targeting of five cities for effective
deterrence but feels that rather than the ability to target a number of cities, India's overall nuclear
capability should be built up for effective deterrence. 84 However, Srikanth Kondapalli holds the view
that perhaps even the credible targeting of 15 to 20 Chinese cities may not be adequate for
deterrence as the Chinese would not hesitate to take whatever military action they might consider
necessary if, in their view, their national security interests were to be seriously threatened. 85

In the context of China, India's major nuclear adversary, the targeting of only three to five cities
may be inadequate as totalitarian regimes are known to have high tolerance levels. In the absence
of hard intelligence about what would deter the Chinese, it would be appropriate for a nuclear
planner to err on the side of caution and plan on overkill to ensure that deterrence does not fail.
Hence, it could be argued that India should plan on the assured destruction of about 10 to 12 major
population and industrial centres (including two to three high priority military or counter force
targets such as SSBN bases and nuclear command and control centres) in a retaliatory strike. This
should definitely be adequate for the purposes of credible deterrence in the 2000-2010 timeframe.
As China develops further into a major industrialised nation, the possible destruction of even three
to five major population-cum-industrial centres would be adequate for deterrence. In the case of
Pakistan, the destruction of an even lesser number of carefully selected targets would mean that
Pakistan would ultimately cease to exist as a nation. An assured destruction capability in respect of
eight to ten major value targets would be recognised in advance by India's adversaries as a
catastrophic disaster of unmanageable proportions. Such a capability would constitute adequate
deterrent threat to qualify the likely damage as unacceptable.

Are Megaton Monsters Necessary? 86

The next major issue that needs to be resolved is whether the Indian deterrent should be built with
'megaton monsters' or be limited to boosted fission kiloton weapons with yields ranging from 20 to
30 Kt with current technology. It can hardly be disputed that the deterrence value of thermonuclear
weapons is much greater than that of fission weapons due to their far greater destruction potential.
However, the key question is whether such destructive potential is militarily necessary. Solly
Zuckerman has stated that "There is built into nuclear weapons greater destructive power than is
necessary for military purposes and their secondary, non-military effects overshadow those which
relate specifically to their military use." 87 A nation with a limited availability of fissile material, that
has opted to suffer what may be a disarming first strike and must, for that reason, stockpile at least
twice the number of warheads than what it may actually need for deterrence, has no choice but to
opt for thermonuclear weapons in the megaton class. Another compelling reason for thermonuclear
weapons in the megaton range is that their larger lethal radius can achieve the desired results with
lesser numbers even when the accuracy of delivery is low, that is, the CEP is one to two km. A
megaton warhead-tipped ballistic missile would cause horrendous damage even if it detonated well
off a city centre and would, therefore, contribute far more to deterrence than fission or even
boosted fission bombs. Dr. G. Balachandran argues succinctly for India to base its deterrence on
high-yield thermonuclear weapons: 88

"... India cannot rely on a nuclear deterrent based on weapons of the types tested, that is, fission
weapons in the range of 20 Kt. Even with accurate long-range missiles, with a CEP of the order of
200 metres, the (fissile) material requirements are far in excess of the current inventory... It should
be understood that increasing the yields of pure fission type of weapons would not solve the
problem. On the contrary, the use of fission devices of higher yield will require larger stockpile of W-
Pu (weapons-grade plutonium). For instance, for a soft point target at large distances, with a CEP of
1,000 metres, one would require either 10 weapons with a yield of 20 Kt (each) or one with a yield
of one megaton. 10 x 20 Kt weapons would require 30 kg of W-Pu... one pure fission weapon with a
yield of one megaton would require 150 kg of W-Pu. A thermonuclear weapon, of course, requires
far less fissile material for high yields with resultant reduction in the weight of the weapon.
Therefore:

• The first requirement for an effective and credible nuclear deterrent is the need for the
Indian nuclear arsenal to be based on high yield thermonuclear weapons.

• The second requirement... is to accelerate the missile development programme, especially

the development of ICBMs... India cannot be said to have a truly effective nuclear delivery
system against China. Its delivery systems are not yet adequately developed.

Citing a Harvard Nuclear Study Group report on the politics of nuclear weapons, Bharat Karnad
writes about a 'nuclear paradox': 89 "Nuclear weapons can prevent aggression only if there is a
possibility that they will be used, but they should not be made so usable that anyone is tempted to
use them... The decision to launch city-busting hydrogen bombs and thermonuclear warheaded
ICBMs in a direct attack on the enemy homeland would, on the face of it, be more onerous and far-
reaching and, hence, will be more difficult to make than, say, a decision to loose off a theatre
nuclear weapon or a tactical nuclear salvo on a peripheral target. And for this reason, thermonuclear
weapons, theoretically speaking, would be under tighter command and control and would more
easily help stabilise the security situation vis a vis a bigger nuclear power." Also, as thermonuclear
weapons do not cost substantially more than fission weapons, it would make sense to optimise
India's meager fissile material stockpile by producing sufficient thermonuclear weapons in the
megaton class to equip at least all ballistic missiles with them. However, though the requirement is
apparently justified, since the demonstrated thermonuclear capability is limited to only 200 Kt
warheads, India will have to make do with 200 Kt weapons till (and if) further testing enables the
development of megaton class warheads. On the other hand, if in future it is possible to improve the
accuracy of India's IRBMs to a CEP of less than 0.01 percent (50 metres at 5,000 km; the
Minuteman-III ICBM of the US is reported to have a CEP of 120 metres at a range of 13,000 km),
though they would still not be ideal, 200 Kt thermonuclear warheads would be adequate to meet the
requirements of deterrence.

The Need for a Triad

Many analysts, particularly those in the West, have interpreted the National Security Advisory
Board's reliance on a triad in the draft Nuclear Doctrine as one of the main areas of concern for a
likely arms race in Southern Asia. Criticism has centred around the view that a doctrine of 'minimum
deterrence' does not need a triad of delivery systems. Their main bone of contention is that SSBNs
with SLBMs are not essential for India's nuclear force. All such criticism is obviously ill informed and
without objective analytical basis. It would be unrealistic to base India's retaliatory strike force
mainly on bomber/fighter-bomber aircraft and land-based ballistic missiles. While all possible
targets inside Pakistan can be fully covered by the deep penetration aircraft in service with the
Indian Air Force (IAF), they lack the range necessary to hit high-value targets deep inside 'Han'
China, including Beijing, and the rapidly modernising cities on the east coast. Air-to-air re-fuelling
capability is also not available.

It is often said that a SU-30 on a one way mission to Beijing can reach its target and that there
would be no dearth of pilots in the IAF to volunteer for such a suicide mission. While that may be
true, it would be foolhardy to base deterrence calculations on such a course of action. Though the
SU-30 is a multi-role aircraft, due to the paucity of numbers presently available and those on order,
a SU-30 deep strike mission would require a large number of specialised air defence and electronic
warfare-capable aircraft as escorts to negotiate vast stretches of the increasingly well defended
Chinese air space. The escort aircraft with the IAF are mostly capable of only tactical ranges and
during the final and the most crucial portion of the flight, the SU-30s would have to fly very much
on their own. If the Su-30s were launched un-escorted, their chances of survival would be rather
slim during war and their contribution to furthering the cause of deterrence would remain
completely doubtful during peace. In view of the fact that an Indian strike would be a retaliatory
one, the risk of SU-30 airbases in eastern India being rendered unusable due to the preceding
nuclear as well as conventional strikes, would also have to be vectored into the planning
parameters.

A substantial proportion of the land-based ballistic missile force is also likely to be destroyed in a
disarming first strike or even a conventional strike during war before the nuclear threshold is
crossed. Missiles of the Agni-I class can be made road-and rail-mobile and can be moved around
over large areas in a random, un-predictable manner without a discernible pattern, though they
would be vulnerable to attacks by terrorists and insurgent groups. They can also be housed in
hardened, over-ground shelters and moved frequently from one shelter to the other or emplaced in
fixed silos designed to withstand the overpressures likely to be generated by nuclear explosions of
20 to 30 Kt. Hardened shelters can be easily spotted by modern satellites and can all be destroyed
in a disarming first strike. To ensure that not all the missiles are so destroyed, such shelters will
need to be constructed at the scale of at least two to three per missile, including some realistic
dummy shelters that may not be hardened but must be equipped with dummy missiles mounted on
actual tractor erector launchers (TELs) being moved into and out of them so as to enhance their
credibility as real missile shelters. Though mobile missiles are harder to locate and track and are
less vulnerable at present, surveillance and target acquisition technologies are improving rapidly
and adversaries planning first strike strategies may be expected to make the required investments
in them.

Fixed silos capable of withstanding a nuclear attack are extremely costly to construct and maintain.
So far it has not been possible even for advanced Western countries to construct shelters capable of
withstanding the blast of thermonuclear weapons in the megaton range, because such silos are a
technological challenge and are prohibitively costly. Should India's adversaries choose to employ
such weapons in future, fixed silos would be virtually useless. Hardened shelters for mobile missiles
and fixed silos for the Agni-II and larger class of missile will have to be constructed over huge areas
with wide gaps between them to ensure that an attack on one shelter or silo does not destroy more
than one missile. They also have to be secured against stand off and commando type ground
attacks by terrorists and insurgent groups. Despite all these measures, it would be fair to assume
that up to 40 to 50 percent of the strategic missile force would still be destroyed in a disarming first
strike as, despite the US failure to destroy Iraqi Scud launchers during the 1991 Gulf War, modern
surveillance capabilities are continuously improving and new military satellites will enable the
constant tracking of an adversary's missile force. There is apparently a need to hedge against the
destruction of land-based ballistic missiles by distributing them between static silos, hardened
shelters and rail-and road-mobile storage. At the same time, there is a need to build into the force
structure sufficient reserves to cater for pre-launch losses. Nuclear deterrence does not come
cheap.

Since air bases are susceptible to destruction in a disarming first strike and India's strategic aircraft
themselves have limited range and are vulnerable to in-flight interception by the enemy's air
defences, and a large proportion of the land-based ballistic missiles may be destroyed before they
can be launched, there is no option for India but to go in for submarine launched ballistic missiles
(SLBMs) on nuclear-powered submarines (SSBNs) as soon as both SSBNs and SLBMs can be
developed. As is well known, SSBNs are fairly safe from detection even with state-of-the-art
reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition (RSTA) means, not vulnerable to a 'zero warning'
surprise attack, and are not affected by increases in the adversaries' missile accuracy except those
that may be anchored in a submarine base at the time of attack. They also have their limitations,
not the least of which include the technological complexity of achieving the desired missile launch
accuracy from a mobile platform that can never be as sure of its location (and depth) as a fixed silo
and the difficulty of communicating targeting information and executive orders to them once they
are submerged. Also, in the Indian context, SLBMs would provide value for money only if they could
be developed to reach ranges in excess of 5,000 km so that they can reach all likely targets from
their patrolling bases well away from the shores. The SSBNs should be capable of operating from
patrolling bases in the Indian as well as the Pacific Oceans and should be equipped for spending at
least 30 to 40 days continuously at sea. As stated earlier, Brigadier Vijay Nair is of the view that
India needs four SSBNs, each with 16 SLBMs; Bharat Karnad wants five SSBNs in India's nuclear
force, each with 12 SLBMs and Rear Admiral Raja Menon has recommended a force of six SSBNs
(with two 'on station' at all times), each equipped with 12 SLBMs. Six SSBNs would obviously be
preferable to four or five as they would provide greater redundancy and flexibility. However, the
difference in capital costs would be considerable and four SSBNs (with a minimum of at least one on
patrol at all times) should meet India's requirements of deterrence well into the first few decades of
the 21st century.

Recommended Nuclear Force Structure

It is now acknowledged in almost all quarters that successful deterrence does not demand
qualitative or quantitative parity in force structures—the ability to inflict unacceptable damage is
adequate. However, an adversary confronted with having to worry only about a retaliatory strike,
would be deterred only if he was convinced that the nuclear warheads aimed at his cities, military
and industrial complexes would, firstly, survive his own first strike in adequate numbers; secondly,
they are powerful enough to destroy vital targets and, thirdly, they can be delivered with the
required accuracies. The problem of survival can be overcome by building in sufficient redundancies
into the force structure, besides dispersion, hardening and concealment. The remaining two,
accuracy of delivery and the warhead yield, are directly dependent on each other — greater the CEP
of a missile, larger the warhead yield required to cause the same damage for a given assurance
level. G. Balachandran's calculations for an assurance level of 90 percent are given at Table 4: 90

Table 4. Number of Missiles Required to be Launched to Destroy a Point Target with a 90 Percent
Assurance Level

Type of Target Soft Semi-hard Hard

(Overpressure) (20 psi) (100 psi) (300 psi)

Yield Missile CEP Missile CEP Missile CEP

200 m 1,000 m 200 m 1,000 m 200 m 1,000 m

20 Kt 1 10 2 39 4 84

1 Mt 1 1 1 3 1 6

It can be seen from Table 4 that to destroy a soft point target, of strength up to 20 psi, 10 ballistic
missiles with a CEP of 1,000 metres and a warhead yield of 20 Kt are required to achieve an
assurance level of 90 percent. This is because the single shot kill probability (SSKP) of such a
missile is only about 0.2. If the CEP of the missile could be improved to 200 metres, only one
missile would be sufficient. On the other hand, if the missile could be tipped with a one-megaton
warhead, one missile would still be adequate even if its CEP was as high as 1,000 metres. Soft area
targets like population and industrial centres (which may have an area in excess of 100 km square),
that are primarily likely to be targeted as part of India's counter value targeting philosophy, would
require a much larger number of missiles to destroy with a 90 percent assurance level. However, in
their case, the Commander, Strategic Forces Command (a tri-Service command to be created under
the CDS) may accept a lesser assurance level (possibly 70 to 80 percent) because the damage
would be horrendous in any case.

For 10 counter value targets in China, a total of 40 nuclear warheads (at the scale of four warheads
per target, at least three of which should be of 1 megaton each) would be adequate to cause
unacceptable damage if the CEP of the delivery systems was 1,000 metres and an assurance level
of about 70 percent was acceptable. 91 If the efficiency or overall reliability of the whole system was
taken as between 0.5 to 0.6, a reasonable assumption for a modern nuclear force, then 80
warheads must actually be launched for about 40 warheads to be effectively delivered and explode
over their targets. Hence, 80 warheads and, of course, their delivery systems must survive a first
strike. If maximum possible concealment and dispersion measures have been taken, including the
emplacement of dummy warhead storage sites and dummy mobile missiles, in the worst case,
approximately 50 percent of the land-based nuclear warheads and delivery systems may be
destroyed in a first strike. 92 Of the SLBMs carried by SSBNs, 80 to 90 percent may be expected to
survive. It would, therefore, be necessary to plan a warhead stocking level of twice the numbers of
land-based warheads and delivery systems required to be launched and cater for the loss of some
sea-based warheads. If approximately 25 percent to one-third of India's deterrence is sea-based, a
total of about 150 warheads must be stocked. That is, 120 land-based warheads and about 30
warheads on SLBMs. The last aspect to be catered for is a prudent level of reserves for larger than
anticipated damage in a first strike and unforeseen eventualities. Escalation control/domination and
war termination strategies would also be dependent on the ability to launch counter-recovery strikes
if necessary and some fresh strikes. Adding one-third the required number of warheads should be
adequate. Hence, the requirement works out to 200 nuclear warheads for a minimum deterrence
policy with a no first use strategy against China if 10 major population and industrial centres are to
be attacked in a retaliatory strike to achieve a 70 to 80 percent assurance level of destruction.

The question naturally arises: what about deterrence against Pakistan? Clearly, India's 200
warheads with the necessary delivery systems would also be more than adequate for deterrence
against Pakistan. Doomsayers will, of course, worry about a collusive Sino-Pak first strike. If such an
incredible eventuality actually transpired, it would be an extraordinary failure not only of deterrence,
but also of the entire diplomatic process and India's nuclear arsenal would prove to be inadequate
even if it was as large as that of China. What could be considered is that, as and when the fissile
material stocks position permits, 20 to 30 x 20 Kt boosted fission warheads could be produced for
short-range, Pakistan-specific, ballistic missiles like Prithvi-plus (400 to 450 km range with strap-on
boosters; 500 kg warhead) to reduce the costs of delivery systems. These missiles could form part
of suitably enhanced reserves.

India is confronted with a unique missile quantity versus warhead quality paradox. Counter value
targets, being massive area targets, require very large numbers of accurate missiles to destroy if 20
to 30 Kt warheads are employed—India can ill-afford the manufacture of a large number of missiles
with CEP less than 200 metres. 93 Also, the fissile material stockpile does not permit the luxury of
producing a large number of warheads. On the other hand, if tried and tested 1 megaton warheads
were available, a much smaller number of missiles (with a relatively larger CEP of up to 1,000
metres) would be adequate for meeting the requirements of deterrence. These twin weaknesses
make the composition of India's present nuclear arsenal unbalanced. After the Pokhran-II tests, at
best it is possible to produce 200 Kt thermonuclear warheads, for which technological capability has
been claimed by Dr. Chidambaram. Also, the non-availability of operationally proven Agni-I and
Agni-II missiles and the fact that SLBMs are still at least a decade away from being inducted into
the Indian Navy, 94 dictate that India's nuclear force structure will need to evolve incrementally to
keep pace with technological advancements. In the initial years there would be no option but to
base deterrence capabilities on air-delivered nuclear warheads and those that can be delivered by
available Prithvi-plus and Agni-I missiles. Similarly, the number of warheads that can be produced
will be limited by the availability of weapons-grade plutonium. For India to produce a total of about
200 warheads, either the production of weapons-grade fissile material will have to be continued,
with corresponding repercussions for joining the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) negotiations
or reactor-grade plutonium stocks will need to be used, for which additional testing may be
necessary.

Taking into account the requirement and the likely availability of nuclear warheads and delivery
systems, it would be advisable that India's nuclear force be raised in a phased manner over a period
of three decades. Mid-course corrections can be applied based on the availability of new
technologies and developments in the diplomatic field. For example, depending on the pace of
development in China and whether that country graduates to a democratic form of government, the
need to plan to target ten cities and industrial complexes for a counter value strategy, could be
reviewed around 2010. In the nuclear era, strategy has never been the sole determinant of force
architecture. This, according to Rajesh Rajagopalan is exemplified by the US decision to opt for the
MIRV programme as the technology for it was available and it would help them to circumvent
nuclear arms reduction negotiations. 95 The technology trajectory will continue to drive nuclear force
structures that should therefore be flexible and adaptable. The recommended nuclear force
structure is given at Table 5.
Table 5. Recommended Nuclear Force Structure: 2000-2030

Delivery System Number(s) Warheads

(Including reserves)

Phase I: 2000-2010

• Prithvi-plus unit 1 (8 launchers) 16 (20 to 30 Kt fission)

• Agni-I unit 1 (8 launchers) 24 (200 Kt thermonuclear)

• Dhanush 4 launchers 8 (20 to 30 Kt fission)

• SU-30s, Mirage-2000s — 32 (200 Kt thermonuclear)

Jaguars

Total 80 warheads

Phase II: 2011-2020

• Prithvi-plus units 2 (16 launchers) 16 (20 to 30 Kt fission)

• Agni-I unit 1 (8 launchers) 24 (200 Kt thermonuclear)

• Agni-II units 2 (16 launchers) 36 (1 Mt)

• 2 x SSBNs 24 (SLBM launchers) 26 (1 Mt)

• SU-30s, Mirage-2000s — 48 (200 Kt thermonuclear)

Total 150 warheads

Phase III: 2021-2030

• Prithvi-plus units 2 (16 launchers) 16 (20 to 30 Kt fission)

• Agni-I units 1 (8 launchers) 24 (200 Kt thermonuclear)

• Agni-II units 3 (24 launchers) 54 (1 Mt)

• Surya ICBM ? ?

• 4 x SSBNs 48 (SLBM launchers) 50 (1 Mt)

• SU-30s — 56 (200 Kt thermonuclear)

Total 200

Thumb rule planning ratios in force structuring are almost invariably wrong and one nation's force
structure details cannot be readily compared with another. However, ratios can sometimes be
indicative of general trends. In the US, at the height of the Cold War, during the mid-1980s, the
distribution of nuclear warheads was as under: 96

• Land-based missiles 4,070.

• Submarine-launched ballistic and cruise missiles 8,712.

• Air-delivered bombs and missiles 1,600.

The ratio of US warheads worked out to approximately 2.5 (land):5.5 (sea):1 (air). In the Indian
force structure recommended above, the ratio is about 2 (land): 1 (sea): 1 (air). There is no doubt
that deterrence based on SLBMs is qualitatively superior. However, SSBNs require very high capital
investments and it is unlikely that India's defence budget, pegged as it is at less than three percent
of the GDP, will be able to support the development and acquisition costs of more than four SSBNs.

There is undoubtedly much more to a nuclear force structure than working out the number of
warheads and delivery systems. Decisions regarding deployment, the custody of nuclear warheads,
alert status, command and control and the need to ensure deterrence stability, present complex
challenges. Jasjit Singh is of the view that India's nuclear arsenal "should be built up gradually and
not deployed as a full-fledged weapon system. This implies keeping delivery systems and warheads
separate, with the latter themselves stored in disassembled form." 97 Others have expressed a view
that there cannot be any credibility without deployment. These issues are not dealt with in this
article as they require more detailed examination. However, there can be no doubt that for India's
no first use doctrine to be credible, India's strategy should be to target high value population and
industrial centres in adversary countries with a high level of assurance after absorbing the full
weight of what would in all probability be a disarming first strike. Only then would the adversaries
be sufficiently deterred to avoid launching nuclear strikes against India. While India's present
capabilities may be limited, these must be gradually built up to a level India considers adequate for
its national security requirements.

Endnotes
Note *: Senior Fellow, IDSA. Back.

Note 1: Kenneth Waltz, "Does India need the Bomb?" The Times of India, January 26, 2000. Back.

Note 2: Bhabani Sen Gupta, Nuclear Weapons: Policy Options for India (New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1983), pp. 88-89. Back.

Note 3: John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 109. Back.

Note 4: Cited by General K. Sundarji, "Nuclear Deterrence Doctrine for India", Trishul, vol. 5, no. 2,
December 1992, pp. 43-60. Back.

Note 5: K. Subrahmanyam, "No More Hibakushas', The Economic Times, June 18, 1998. Back.

Note 6: Gen. Sundarji, n. 4. Back.

Note 7: V. N. Khanna, India's Nuclear Doctrine (New Delhi: Samskriti, 2000), p. 151. Back.

Note 8: K. Subrahmanyam, "Not a Numbers Game: Minimum Cost of N-Deterrence", The Times of
India, December 7, 1998. Back.

Note 9: Gen. Sundarji n. 4. Back.

Note 10: "No Plans for N-Arms Race China: Brajesh", The Times of India, February 7, 2000. Back.

Note 11: "India Capable of Making Neutron Bomb", The Hindustan Times, August 17, 1998. Back.

Note 12: Bharat Karnad, "Going Thermonuclear: Why, With What Forces, at What Cost", U.S.I.
Journal, July-September 1998, p. 315. Back.

Note 13: Ramesh Chandran, "India, Pakistan Increasing Stocks of Weapons Grade Plutonium,
Enriched Uranium: Report", The Times of India, March 8, 2000. Back.

Note 14: Rajendra Prabhu, "US Publication Explodes Western Scientists' Myth", Observer of
Business and Politics, July 25, 1998. (Source: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July-August 1998.)
Back.

Note 15: Cited in India Today, June 1, 1998. Back.

Note 16: W. P. S. Sidhu, "India Sees Safety in Nuclear Triad and Second Strike Potential", Jane's
Intelligence Review, July 1998, pp. 22-25. Back.

Note 17: While the plutonium from commercial reactors producing electricity is not considered ideal
for producing nuclear weapons, the United Kingdom is known to have used it to make nuclear
weapons and some scientists are of the view that India attempted to do the same in the second lot
of tests on May 13, 1998. Back.

Note 18: R. Ramachandran, "Pokhran II: The Scientific Dimensions", in Amitabh Mattoo (ed.),
India's Nuclear Deterrent: Pokhran II and Beyond (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications Pvt. Ltd.,
1999), pp. 35-36. Back.

Note 19: n. 18. Ramachandran has based his calculations on an average plutonium production rate
of 12 kg annually for the Dhruva reactor (at an average of 60 percent of rated capacity) and 4 kg
per annum for CIRUS (at 50 percent of rated capacity). Together, the total fissile material stockpile
is 120 kg from Dhruva (12 kg per year for ten years) and a nearly similar amount from CIRUS (4 kg
per year for almost 40 years). As approximately 8 kg of plutonium is required for each fission bomb,
the total weapon stockpile would be limited to about 30 bombs. Back.

Note 20: Ramachandran, n. 18. Back.

Note 21: Raj Chengappa and Manoj Joshi, "Hawkish India", India Today, June 1, 1998. Back.

Note 22: "Stockpile", The Times of India, May 31, 1998. Back.

Note 23: George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.
428. Back.

Note 24: From Surprise to Reckoning: The Kargil Review Committee Report (New Delhi: Sage
Publications. 2000), p. 260. Back.

Note 25: K. Subrahmanyam, "India's Nuclear Truth", The Times of India, January 26, 2000. Back.

Note 26: Aziz Haniffa, "Nothing Pak About it, Bomb Purely China Baby: Report", The Economic
Times, June 19, 1998. Back.

Note 27: K. Subrahmanyam, "Gospel According to Lucifer", The Economic Times, July 10, 1998.
Back.

Note 28: "China, N Korea Aided Pakistan's Missile Programme, Says CIA", The Times of India,
February 4, 2000. Back.
Note 29: "Pak N-Plan Depends on Foreign Aid: CIA", The Hindustan Times, February 4, 2000.
Back.

Note 30: "H-Bomb Whenever Govt Wishes: Khan", The Economic Times, June 9, 1998. Back.

Note 31: Frank Barnaby, "Discrepancies Claimed in Islamabad's Nuclear Tests", Jane's Defence
Weekly, June 10, 1998. Back.

Note 32: Aziz Haniffa, "Pak Can Make 16-20 Nukes Even After Tests: ISIS", Observer of Business
and Politics, June 5, 1998. Back.

Note 33: Sidhu, n. 16. Back.

Note 34: Chengappa and Joshi, n. 21. Back.

Note 35: n. 22. Back.

Note 36: Ramchandran, n. 18. Back.

Note 37: Brigadier Vijay K. Nair (Retd.), "The Structure of an Indian Nuclear Deterrent", n.18.
Back.

Note 38: Ramesh Chandran, "Pak N-Might Bigger Than India's, Says US", The Times of India, June
8, 2000. Back.

Note 39: Manoj Joshi, "The Nuclear Maharaja has no Clothes", The Times of India, June 9, 2000.
Back.

Note 40: "Pakistan Calls its Nuclear Arsenal 'Modest", The Times of India, June 9, 2000. Back.

Note 41: Dr. Sanjay Badri-Maharaj, "Nuclear India's Status: Examination of the Claims in the NBC
Report", Indian Defence Review, April-June 2000. Back.

Note 42: R. Prasannan, "Stealing a March", The Week, July 9, 2000. Back.

Note 43: Ibid. Back.

Note 44: SIPRI Yearbook 1999: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 555. Back.

Note 45: Source: Extracts from a Paper by Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, The Hindustan Times, June 8, 1998.
Back.

Note 46: Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis, Interpreting China's Grand Strategy: Past, Present
and Future (Santa Monica, California: RAND, 2000), p. 123. Back.

Note 47: China has 100 x DF-11 and 300 x DF-15 short-range missiles. The Military Balance 1999-
2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 175-177. Back.

Note 48: Brahma Chellaney, "Missile Muscle is the New Definition of World Power", Asian Age, April
16, 1999. Back.

Note 49: K. Subrahmanyam, "Agni-II: Modern Divya Astra", The Economic Times, April 15, 1999.
Back.

Note 50: K. Subrahmanyam, "Agni-Ghauri Tests no Cause for Alarm", The Times of India, April 14,
1999. Back.
Note 51: Jasjit Singh is of the view that "nearly three dozen tests would be necessary before a
missile can be considered operationally reliable... our aim should be to undertake at least two dozen
tests of the Agni class missile over the next five years..." India's Defence Spending: Assessing
Future Needs (New Delhi: Knowledge World, in association with Institute for Defence Studies and
Analyses, p. 191. Back.

Note 52: Lieutenant General V. R. Raghavan (Retd.), India's Need for Strategic Balance (New Delhi:
Delhi Policy Group), p. 22. Back.

Note 53: Srinand Jha, "Serial Production of IRBMs by 2000", Observer of Business and Politics,
August 12, 1998. Back.

Note 54: N.C. Menon, "Pak N-Arms Superior to India: Report", The Hindustan Times, June 9, 2000.
Back.

Note 55: Pravin Sawhney, "Missile Control in South Asia and the Role of Cooperative Monitoring
Technology", CMC Occasional Papers (Albuquerque, New Mexico: Cooperative Monitoring Centre,
Sandia National Laboratories, 1998), p. 36. Back.

Note 56: While Richard Barlow, a CIA operative in Pakistan, first reported Pakistan's nuclear
weaponisation in 1987, in 1997, Gordon Oehler resigned as Director of the CIA's non-proliferation
centre and reported that Pakistan had developed the Ghauri missile with Chinese help. See K.
Subrahmanyam, "Ghauri Against Prithvi", The Economic Times, December 22, 1997. Back.

Note 57: Paul Bracken, "The Second Nuclear Age", Foreign Affairs, Vol. 79, No. 1, January-February
2000. Back.

Note 58: Vijay Kumar, "What is Agni-II All About", The Times of India, April 13, 1999. Back.

Note 59: Dinesh Kumar, "India Can't Thwart Chinese Nuclear Strike: Report", The Times of India,
March 18, 1999. Back.

Note 60: Ramesh Chandran, "India Under Chinese N-Shadow: US Daily", The Times of India, March
16, 1999. Back.

Note 61: Group Captain A. K. Sachdev, "Pakistani Missiles: Their Pertinence to the Indo-Pak
Conflict". Quoted with the author's permission from the Paper presented at IDSA Fellows Seminar
on July 1, 2000. Back.

Note 62: K. Subrahmanyam, "India's Response", in K. Subrahmanyam (ed.), India and the Nuclear
Challenge (New Delhi: Lancer International in association with Institute for Defence Studies and
Analyses, 1986), p. 276. Back.

Note 63: Subrahmanyam, n. 8. Back.

Note 64: K. Subrahmanyam, "Nuclear Force Design and Minimum Deterrence Strategy for India", in
Bharat Karnad (ed.), Future Imperilled: India's Security in the 1990s and Beyond (New Delhi: Viking
Penguin India, 1994), pp. 189 and 193. Back.

Note 65: K. Subrahmanyam, "China and Nuclear Rationale", The Economic Times, July 26, 1997.
Back.

Note 66: Subrahmanyam, n. 8. Back.

Note 67: Jasjit Singh, "A Nuclear Strategy for India", in Jasjit Singh (ed.), Nuclear India (New
Delhi: Knowledge World, in association with Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 1998), p.
315. Back.
Note 68: Maharajkrishna Rasgotra, "Countering Nuclear Threats", in Brahma Chellaney (ed.),
Securing India's Future in the New Millennium (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1999), pp. 238-239.
Back.

Note 69: General K. Sundarji, "Imperatives of Indian Minimum Deterrence", Agni, May 1996, p. 21.
Back.

Note 70: Brigadier Vijay K. Nair (Retd.), Nuclear India (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1992), pp.
170-182. Back.

Note 71: Rear Admiral Raja Menon, A Nuclear Strategy for India (New Delhi: Sage Publications,
2000), pp. 177-234. Back.

Note 72: Ibid. Back.

Note 73: Rear Admiral Raja Menon, "The Nuclear Doctrine: Yoking a Horse and Camel Together",
The Times of India, August 26, 1999. Back.

Note 74: Karnad, n. 12. Back.

Note 75: Karnad, n. 12. Back.

Note 76: "India Can Produce N-Bomb of 200 Kiloton: Chidambaram", The Times of India, May 23,
1998. Back.

Note 77: Interview with the author, July 1, 2000. Back.

Note 78: Lieutenant General Pran Pahwa (Retd.), "Organisation and Employment of Strategic
Rocket Forces", USI National Security Series 1998 (New Delhi: United Service Institution of India,
1999), pp .294-296. Back.

Note 79: Kenneth N. Waltz, "What will the Spread of Nuclear Weapons do to the World?" in John K.
King (ed.), International Political Effects of the Spread of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C.:
United States Government publication, 1979), p. 188. Cited by General K. Sundarji, n. 4. Back.

Note 80: Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1959), pp. 275-276. Cited by Bharat Karnad, "A Thermonuclear Deterrent", n. 18. Back.

Note 81: Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (New York: The Free Press, 1969), pp. 482-483.
Back.

Note 82: Interview with the author, July 30, 2000. Back.

Note 83: Interview with the author, July 20, 2000. Back.

Note 84: Interview with the author, July 20, 2000. Back.

Note 85: Interview with the author, July 10, 2000. Back.

Note 86: For a detailed analysis of the efficacy of megaton warheads, see Herman Kahn, n. 81.
Back.

Note 87: Solly Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusion and Reality, p. 69. Cited by Bharat Karnad, n. 18.
Back.

Note 88: G. Balachandran, "Nuclear Weaponisation in India", Agni, vol. V, no. 1, January-April
2000, p. 37-50. Back.
Note 89: The Harvard Nuclear Study Group: Albert Carnesale, Paul Doty, Stanley Hofmann, Samuel
P. Huntington, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., and Scott Sagan, Living With Nuclear Weapons (New York:
Bantam Books, 1983), p. 34. Cited by Bharat Karnad, n. 18. Back.

Note 90: Balachandran, n. 88. Back.

Note 91: G. Balachandran has estimated that to destroy eight soft area targets a total of 800
missiles would be necessary if the missiles were armed with a 20 Kt fission warhead and had a CEP
of 1,000 metres (100 missiles per target). The plutonium required for such an attack would be
nearly 2,500 kg. n. 88. Back.

Note 92: Balachandran, n. 88. Back.

Note 93: One method of reducing the number of missiles necessary to achieve the required
assurance levels would be to develop multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV)
technology. Each missile could then carry four to six warheads. However, at present India lacks the
technological sophistication necessary to develop MIRV warheads; nor is a suitable missile on the
way. Back.

Note 94: Raj Chengappa has quoted Defence Minister George Fernandes to have stated in 1999
that "the (nuclear) submarine project would take another four years to build". Even if that turns out
to be a realistic timeframe, SLBMs having ranges in excess of 5,000 km are still likely to take much
longer to develop. Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 436.
Back.

Note 95: Rajesh Rajagopalan, "The Advocates of Armageddon: Nuclear War and the Victory
Theorists", Strategic Analysis, vol. XI, no. 8, November 1987, pp. 935-936. Back.

Note 96: Donald R. Carter, "Peacetime Operations: Safety and Security", in Ashton B. Carter, John
D. Steinbruner and Charles A. Zracket (eds.), Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington, D.C.: The
Brookings Institution, 1987), p. 26. Back.

Note 97: Jasjit Singh, "Ensuring Peace and Development with N-Capability", Tribune, August 15,
1998. Back.

Indian History in Rocketry

Rockets were invented in medieval China (Circa 1044 AD) but it's first practical use
for serious purpose other then entertainment took place in 1232 AD by the Chinese
against the Mongols at the siege of Kai-Feng-Fue. Thereafter from 1750 AD to 1799
AD Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan [1] (Sultan of Mysore, in south India) perfected the
rocket's use for military purposes, very effectively using it in war against British
colonial armies. Tipu Sultan had 27 brigades (called Kushoons) and each brigade had
a company of rocket men called Jourks. In the Second Anglo-Mysore war, at the
Battle of Pollilur (10 September 1780), Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan achieved a grand
victory, whereby the whole British detachment lead by Colonel Baillie was destroyed
and 3820 soldiers were taken prisoner (including Colonel Bailli). the contributory
cause being that one of the British ammunition tambrils was set on fire by Mysorean
rockets.

At the Battle of Seringapatam in 1792, Indian soldiers launched a huge barrage of

rockets against British troops, followed by an assault of 36,000 men. Although the
Indian rockets were primitive by modern standards, their sheer numbers, noise and
brilliance were said to have been quite effective at disorienting British soldiers.
During the night, the rockets were often seen as blue lights bursting in the air. Since
Indian forces were able to launch these bursting rockets from in front of and behind
British lines, they were a tremendous tool for throwing the British off guard. The
bursting rockets were usually followed by a deadly shower of rockets aimed directly
at the soldiers. Some of these rockets passed from the front of the British columns to
the rear, inflicting injury and death as they passed. Sharp bamboo was typically
affixed to the rockets, which were designed to bounce along the ground to produce
maximum damage [2]. Two of the rockets fired by Indian troops in 1792 war are on
display at the Royal Artillery Museum in London [3].

Portrait of Tipu Sultan

Sultan of Mysore, present day Karnataka, India

Later at the battle of Srirangapattana (4th Anglo-Mysore war) in April 1799, British
forces lead by Colonel Arthur Wellesley (Duke of Wellington) ran away from the
battlefield when attacked by rockets and musket fire of Tipu Sultan's army. Unlike
contemporary rockets whose combustion chamber was made of wood (bamboo),
Tipu's rockets (weighing between 2.2 to 5.5 kg) used iron cylinder casings that
allowed greater pressure, thrust and range (1.5 to 2.5 Km) [4]. The British were
greatly impressed by the Mysorean rockets using iron tubes. At the end of war more
then 700 rockets and sub systems of 900 rockets were captured and sent to
England. William Congreve thoroughly examined the Indian specimens to reverse
engineer and making its copies that were later used successfully in naval attack on
Boulogne [5] (1806), siege of Copenhagen [6] (1807) and also against Fort
Washington (New York) during the American Independence War, that is recounted as,
rockets' red glare in the U.S. National Anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner." [7]
Figure 1. Indian troops rout the British. The English confrontation with
Indian rockets came in 1780 at the Battle of Guntur. The closely massed,
normally unflinching British troops broke and ran when the Indian Army laid
down a rocket barrage in their midst. Source:
http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/rocketry/11.html

After the defeat of Tipu Sultan (04 May 1799) and other Indian kingdoms, major
parts of India either fell to British colonialist or accepted British hegemony. Indian
independence was largely compromised and the country was systematically exploited
and suppressed by the British colonialism. Lack of political and economic
independence stymied Indian science and military technology for 150 years till 1947
when it finally threw away the yoke of foreign occupation, to transition back as an
independent sovereign nation state.

Rocketry in Modern India

After regaining independence in 1947, India focused all its energy in nation building,
primarily on economic and industrial development fully understanding the key role of
science and technology. Indian rocketry was reborn thanks to the technological vision
of Prime Minster Jawaharlal Nehru. Professor Vikram Sarabhai took the challenge of
realizing this dream. Professor Sarabhai was an able leader and visionary who gave
shape to modern Indian rocketry and space endeavours. President Dr A.P.J. Kalam,
who played a key engineering role in realizing both the Indian SLV-3 space launcher
as well as the Prithvi and Agni missiles, once said: "Many individuals with myopic
vision questioned the relevance of space activities in a newly independent nation,
which was finding it difficult to feed its population. Their vision was clear if Indians
were to play meaningful role in the community of nations, they must be second to
none in the application of advanced technologies to their real-life problems. They had
no intention of using it as a mean to display our might."

Realization of economic development for Indian masses also requires safeguarding

its borders and interests. During the 1971 War that saw India liberating Bangladesh,
the US attempted coercion by force projection by sending the USS Enterprise of the
7th Fleet into the Bay of Bengal. This combined with nuclear weapon developments
in China impaired Indian security and that accelerated Indian strategic weapon
programs including indigenous missile programs. Initial missile programs like Project
Devil (a theatre ballistic missile) and Project Valiant (an intercontinental ballistic
missile) were scattered and stymied by many issues, which included technology
development, financial resources and manpower.

Indian parliamentary democracy requires total civilian control of all defence forces
and defence related organizations. The independent Comptroller & Auditor General
(CAG) of India oversees financial accounting of all government expenses and serves
as a watchdog which monitors the use of public funds for defence expenses.

Integrated Guided Missile Development Program (IGMDP)

The Integrated Guided Missile Development Program (IGMDP) was formed in 1983
with the aim of achieving self-sufficiency in missile development & production and
today comprises of five core missile programs: the strategic Agni ballistic missile, the
tactical Prithvi ballistic missile, the Akash and Trishul surface-to-air missiles and the
Nag anti-tank guided missile. The program has given India the capability to produce
indigenous missiles in other key areas as well. Indigenous development was required
to overcome attempts by Western nations, to impose their will on developing nations,
by enforcing pacts like the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) to control
access to and availability of advanced weapon systems. Undaunted, hats off to all the
brilliant Indian scientists who have toiled so hard in their dedicated efforts to make
the program successful and being on the cutting edge of missile technology.

In the Service of the Country

Frontline, Vol. 14 : No. 25 : 13 - 26 December 1997
By Anand Parthasarathy, a scientist who worked with Dr. Kalam on the IGMDP

The call usually came late in the evening. "Kalam here," it always began,
followed by the standard question, "What's happening?" One never knew
how to respond, for a day's work at the missile-test bed, on the periphery of
Hyderabad, meant a hectic 10 hours with everything seeming to go wrong.
After preliminary queries came the real business, a key report had to be sent to
the Government the next day. "Eat your dinner in peace and come after you
have finished," Kalam always hastened to add. He himself had not yet left the
laboratory for the day. This was how Kalam rounded up the usual suspects; an
informal group of scientists and engineers, when some crucial work was at hand.
It might be a no-holds-barred session to thrash out some issues of navigation
and guidance before a Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs paper emerged, or
to solve a problem dogging the elaborate quality assurance testing cycle to
which a key missile component was being subjected.

The sessions were always held at a small round table - a table without a head,
for protocol-free discussion. Sometimes the sessions would last till the next
morning. For discussions during earthly hours, there was a bigger room across
the corridor. But here too, failure to reach a decision was not a recognised
option. Kalam attracted fierce loyalties from all those who came into contact with
him. He was able to instil a sense of participation at every level, from the shop
floor to the high-tech laboratory. His legion of admirers include some children to
whose lives he added a special touch. For nine-year-old Swarna, a polio victim
from birth, the Composites Production Centre of the Defence Research &
Development Laboratory (DRDL) had designed an ultra lightweight, prosthetic
foot support. Another child, a primary school student whose model of the Prithvi
missile won the first prize in a contest in Secunderabad was taken to DRDL in
Kalam's staff car so that he could see the real Prithvi being assembled.

Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, who was awarded the Bharat Ratna -
India's highest civilian honour on November 25th, was born on 15 October 1931
in the temple town of Rameswaram in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Kalam went to the Schwartz High School in Ramanathapuram. After graduating
in science from St. Joseph's College in Tiruchi, he took a diploma in aeronautical
engineering from the Madras Institute of Technology in the mid-1950s. The then
Director of MIT, Professor K.A.V. Pandalai (whom Kalam acknowledged recently
as one of his most valued teachers, the other being his school teacher, Siva
Subramani Iyer), gave fascinating details about this phase in Kalam's life in a
letter to The Hindu dated 15 March 1994. Kalam joined the Defence Research &
Development Organisation (DRDO) in 1958 and served as a senior scientific
assistant, heading a small team that developed a prototype hovercraft. Defence
Minister Krishna Menon rode in India's first indigenous hovercraft with Kalam at
the controls. But for reasons never explained, the project which would have been
a considerable international achievement in those days, was not encouraged.
This was probably one of the reasons why he moved out of DRDO in 1962 and
joined India's space program. At the Indian Space Research Organisation
(ISRO), Kalam initiated Fibre Reinforced Plastics activities, then after a stint with
the aerodynamics and design group, he joined the satellite launch vehicle team
at Thumba, near Trivandrum and soon became Project Director for the SLV-3.
The project managed to put Rohini, a scientific satellite, into orbit in July 1980.
He was honoured with a Padma Bhushan in 1981. Kalam was something of a
curiosity at Thumba.

A bachelor, his spartan lifestyle as a vegetarian

and teetotaller who lived in a single room in a
lodge in Trivandrum earned him the nickname
Kalam Iyer. He then moved back into the
Defence Research Complex at Kanchanbagh, on
the periphery of Hyderabad's Old City, as
Director of DRDL. He had came to Hyderabad
at a time when the morale was low at the
laboratory as a result of the foreclosure of its
ambitious missile project, codenamed Devil. He
brought a whiff of ISRO informality to a
laboratory that was used to an Army
atmosphere. He refused to move into the
bungalow allotted to the Director, preferring to
stay in one of the 8 suites in the Defence Labs
Mess. The suite, with a small study and a tiny
bedroom, was his home for the next decade.
He was instrumental in the re-emergence of DRDL. This was made possible, as
Kalam and the then Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, Dr. V.S.
Arunachalam (who brought him back to Defence Research), have always
acknowledged, by the crucial role played by R. Venkataraman, who was then
Defence Minister.

IGDMP Ballistic Missiles: Prithvi, Agni-I and Agni-II

Note: Please click on thumbnail, at right, to see a bigger picture

Kalam was asked to prepare a blueprint to make India into a missile nation. After
working with DRDL veterans for over six months, followed by consultations with
Dr. Arunachalam, Kalam gave a proposal to Venkataraman. It was a staggered
scheme under which five missile development programs were to be taken up one
after the other. "Take it back!" said Venkataraman who, though unfamiliar with
the technical nitty gritty, had an instinctive feel for larger strategic issues.
Venkataraman suggested that Kalam and Arunachalam recast the plan in such a
way as to develop all five missile types under one program. They did it, as they
now admit, by adding zeroes all over the place. Kalam's immediate concern was
that he would have to tell his colleagues back in Hyderabad that he had
committed them to five formidable tasks instead of one with a time frame of 10
years. Out of this audacious initiative was born the Integrated Guided Missile
Development Program (IGMDP), India's most successful military research task to
date.

Kalam's codenames for the program's five components were;

• Nag, an anti-tank guided missile

• Prithvi, a surface-to-surface battlefield missile
• Akash, a swift, medium-range surface-to-air missile
• Trishul, a quick-reaction surface-to-air missile with a shorter range
• Agni, an intermediate range ballistic missile, the mightiest of them all

The Trishul has the unique distinction of being capable of serving all three
services.

From his SLV-3 experience, Kalam had learned the advantages of team work and
of sharing the tasks with partners in private and public sector industries. In the
new management structure of the missile program, Kalam, as the Chairman of
the Programme Management Board, delegated almost all executive and financial
powers to five carefully selected Project Directors and kept himself free to
address the core technology issues. His task was to inspire and monitor over 20
institutions and partners outside - ranging from large public and private sector
suppliers to small specialist firms that needed seed money to take up the
precision tasks. Kalam's contribution in this scheme has been acknowledged by
all who worked with him. He set for himself a gruelling schedule. The first half
hour of the day was reserved for what was called the morning meeting, where
administrative heads met him to take decisions on routine functions. During this
period any employee could walk in and discuss administrative problems, which
were usually sorted out the same day. Rest of the day was devoted to hands-on
interaction with project teams working on a campus spread over 40 hectares.
The missiles went up more or less on schedule: Trishul in 1985, Prithvi in 1988,
Agni in 1989 and the others in 1990. And the Kalam legend had grown. He is
well-versed in Tamil and has written poetry. Seventeen of his poems were
translated into English by Manidarshi, and published as a book titled My Journey
in 1994.

Scientists greet Abdul Kalam after the

successful launch of Agni on 22 May
1989.

The establishment of the Research Centre

Imarat (RCI), a campus 8km from DRDL, in
1988 was perhaps the most satisfying
achievement for Kalam during the missile
years. He received generous funding from
the Government to build the futuristic
centre, which is totally geared for work in advanced missile technologies. Its
state-of-the-art facilities are set in a unique ambience and the level of comfort
accorded to the individual worker is matched by few R&D institutions. And
Kalam's interest in the environment saw RCI emerge as an oasis in a rocky
wasteland. It has a small farm that meets the food requirements of those who
stay in the RCI quarters. Kalam was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1990.
After 10 years in DRDL, he went to New Delhi to take over from Arunachalam as
Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister - reluctantly, many in DRDL missed his
presence. But the system created by Kalam had taken a firm hold in that decade
and the missile programme passed on smoothly into its final phase of production
and induction. In Delhi, Kalam as head of the DRDO had to deliver other
prestigious projects, such as the Arjun MBT and the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA)
projects. While management practices he adopted for the missile program have
inevitably rubbed off on these projects, there are no miracles to be had in
strategic development areas. There have been technical problems. Even in the
missile program, work on the SAMs and the ATM is slower than anticipated. But
Trishul's recent multiple test flights have demonstrated that the system Kalam
put in place has inherent strengths. As Dr. V.S. Arunachalam put it, "We are now
mature, we learn from mistakes and push on ahead."

"Strength respects strength." This is Kalam's usual response to the question why
India needs its own missiles or a battle tank or a combat aircraft. But Kalam is a
technocrat. Although there are suggestions that he should use his status, which
has been enhanced by the award of Bharat Ratna, to push for the active
induction of Agni, it would be uncharacteristic of him to press his view too much
in geopolitical matters. He is the happiest at the drawing board, in discussion
with his scientists on how their dreams for the next millennium can be fulfilled.
The projects envisaged include an air breathing hyper-plane spacecraft that
draws oxygen from the atmosphere rather than carry it all the way from the
ground, reusable missiles and stealth technology. Kalam has shown that with
adequate funding, freedom from procedural hold-ups and a people-oriented
management, India can make products of internationally acceptable technical
standards in a demanding arena like defence. Kalam is by no means a miracle
man. As the head of a vast network of laboratories - whose products include
avalanche-controlling structures in Kashmir, water desalination kits for the Thar
desert, a world class sonar submarine finder for the latest warship - INS Delhi,
and infra-red night vision goggles for the Indian Army - Kalam's attention is
necessarily a bit diffused. His self-effacing persona cloaks a formidable catalyst
who can make people work.
 -

Footnotes

[1] Every stone in Srirangapatna speaks of its great Sultan: The Tiger of Mysore,
(http://home.btconnect.com/tipusultan/site.htm).

[2] Remarkably, two of the rockets fired by Indian troops in 1792 are on display at the Royal Artillery Museum in
London. One of these rockets is made up of an iron case 10 inches long by 2.3 inches wide. It is bound to a metal
sword that is 40 inches long.

[3] http://www.spaceline.org/history/1.html

[4] The Story of Indian Rockets, From Srirangapattana to Sriharikota, (www.VigyanPrasar.com).

[5] More than 2000 derived versions of Mysorean rockets were fired against the city of Boulonge. These rockets
reportedly so stunned the French that not one shot was returned. (http://www.spaceline.org/history/1.html)

[6] Ibid. In 1807, Copenhagen was severely damaged by fires caused by the launching of 25,000 Mysorean-
derived versions of rockets.

[7] Ibid. On 13 & 14 September 1814, a 25-hour barrage of Congreve rockets (derived from the Mysorean
rocket) was fired from the British ship Erebus against Fort McHenry in Baltimore. Each of the rockets fired against
Fort McHenry weighed about 30 pounds, and carried an incendiary charge. A number of American ships were
destroyed by Congreve rockets during the War of 1812 during the siege. The battle was witnessed by a young
lawyer named Francis Scott Key, who mentioned the Congreve rockets' red glare in his song "The Star Spangled
Banner". The song later became the U.S. National Anthem, paying tribute to the tenacity of the American forces
under siege. Congreve rockets launched by British ground troops reportedly terrified the American soldiers. These
rockets typically weighed 3 to 12 pounds each, and carried case-shot carbine balls that flew out like shrapnel
when a charge of gunpowder exploded. The rockets surprised a rifle battalion led by U.S. Attorney General
William Pinkney at the Battle of Bladensburg on 24 August 1814. After his victory at this battle, British
Commander Lt. George R. Gleig wrote of the American soldiers, "Never did men with arms in their hands make
better use of their legs."

Copyright © BHARAT RAKSHAK. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in

part in any form or medium without express written permission of BHARAT
RAKSHAK is prohibited.

Ballistic Missile Cruise Missile (Land Attack)

Experimental BrahMos Operational
Agni-TD (Complete)
Nirbhay Development
Agni-I Operational
AVATAR
Agni-II, IIAT Development
Operational (HSTDV)
Agni-III Flight Trials
Agni-IV Development
Prithvi-I, II Operational
Dhanush Operational
Sagarika Flight Trials

Anti-Aircraft Missile Anti-Ballistic Missile

Akash IOC AAD Flight Trials
Astra Flight Trials PAD Flight Trials
Experimental
Trishul (Complete)
 Anti-Ship Missile Anti-Missile Missile
BrahMos Operational Barak-NG Development
[External Link!]
Experimental
Trishul (Complete)
October 18, 2005

These days, the top brass of India's defence ministry and k

Get news updates: What's this? scientists from the Defence Research and Development Org
often get together to discuss how far an Indian missile can g

The discussions seem to be bearing fruit.

Flush with the success of the medium-range ballistic missile

is now developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, better
an ICBM.

rediff.com delves deep into this unique -- and perhaps the m

prestigious -- missile programme that India has embarked u
indigenously.

What is this ICBM programme that India is working on?

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Typing work.
It is a three-stage ballistic missile that DRDO, along with a n
Typing jobs offered by most onlinecompanies defence agencies in the country, is working hard on.
consists of typing andplacing ads on the Internet.
The missile will have solid fuel rockets in the first and secon
and a liquid propellant rocket in the third stage.
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The nature of the typing job involvesabsolutely no The launch weight of the missile may reach 270 to 275 tonn
missile could have a 5,480 pound to 7,680 pound releasable
amount of pressure orworkload. section with two to three warheads of 15 kilo tonne to 20 kilo
each.
Typists have to simply type ads.
Rediff P4C Classifieds The ICBM is being developed by combining the technology
II with that of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. It is expecte
a range of more than 8,000 km.
When did India moot the production of such a missile?

In May 1998, DRDO and its then chief A P J Abdul Kalam, now the President of India, became symbols of national pride
the Pokhran nuclear tests.

Four months later, the government entrusted DRDO with the Rs 20 billion (Rs 200 crore) ballistic missile defence projec

This is perhaps the most ambitious programme that DRDO has embarked upon. It would need to integrate the Russian
aircraft and anti-ballistic missile systems, which the army and air force are planning to induct, with an Israeli fire control

India's ace missile to get leaner

Is the project part of the India's integrated guided missile development programme?

Yes, development of the ICBM is part of the integrated guided missile development programme and the nuclear subma
programme that DRDO has engaged in over the years.

It is meant to lay India's foundation of strategic missile programme and security stability.

What does the integrated guided missile development programme comprise?

It comprises five core systems. The Agni IRBM and Prithvi series of missiles have already been developed in close ass
with India's space industry.

Other programmes are the surface to air missile Trishul, the medium-range missile Akash and the anti-tank guided miss

In addition, India is developing the Sagarika, a submarine-launched cruise missile with a range of about 300 km. The bi
project among these is the development of the ICBM.

India test fires medium-range, surface-to-air missile

What is the ICBM going to be called?

DRDO scientists have code-named it Surya.

When will the ICBM be ready?

According to officials involved in the project, the ICBM is likely to be test-fired by 2008. They expect it to be added to th
armed forces' deterrence arsenal by 2015.

India, Pakistan to sign missile launch pre-notification pact

Why does India want to test-fire the Surya as early as possible?

First, there is consensus among India's political parties on the need to enhance the country's missile defence capabiliti
say future warfare will be heavily dependent on missiles.

Second, India's neighbouring nations are bristling with missiles. Pakistan has developed and tested a number of missil
the Hatf-1 and Hatf-2 missiles. China has an arsenal of short and long-range missiles. China is far ahead of others in th
race in the region as it has already done two-test flights of the Dong-Feng-31 and Julang-2, a combined ICBM and subm
launched ballistic missile.

India successfully test fires Trishul

Given DRDO's slow pace in executing major defence works, will the deadline stand?

Given DRDO's track record, not many believe the ICBM project will meet the deadline.

For instance, for the last 20 years, DRDO has been building two types of anti-aircraft missiles -- Trishul and Akash.

According to the government's defence plans, these surface-to-air missiles were to have replaced the Russian-supplied
and Kvadrat systems by the early 1990s. But the DRDO has been unable to meet the deadlines.
The Trishul project began in 1983. The original deadline was 1992.

DRDO has spent more than Rs 2.6 billion (Rs 260 crores) on the missile, but it is still undergoing trials.

THE INDIAN MISSILES

Name Type/propulsion Warhead Payload Range Status

Ballistic/ Single-stage/ Liquid- Conventional/
Prithvi-1/ SS-150 1,000 kg 150 km Operation
engine nuclear
Ballistic/ Single-stage/ Liquid- Conventional/ Undergoin
Prithvi-2/ SS-250 500 kg 250 km
engine nuclear trials
Dhanush/ Prithvi-3/ Ballistic/ Single-stage/ Liquid- Conventional/ Undergoin
Undisclosed 350 km
SS-350 engine nuclear tests
Agni Technology Ballistic/ Two-stage hybrid/ solid- 1,200 km to Small num
Nuclear 1,000 kg
Demonstrator motor/ Liquid-engine 1,500 km available
Ballistic/ Single-stage/ Solid- 700 km to 800 Undergoin
Agni-I Nuclear 1,000 kg
motor km tests
2,000 km to Complete
Agni-II Ballistic/ Two-stage/ Solid-motor Nuclear 1,000 kg
2,500 km tests
3,000 km to Flight test
Agni-III Ballistic Nuclear Undisclosed
4,000 km this year
Cruise/ Two-stage/ Solid- 200 kg to 300 280 km to 300 Serial pro
BrahMos/ PJ-10 Conventional
booster/ Liquid-sustainer engine kg km begin this
Expected
Sagarika Class contested Conventional/nuclear Undisclosed Undisclosed
operation
India is pumping its arms

India and weapons of mass destruction

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 Weapons of mass destruction

By type

Biological warfare
Chemical warfare
Nuclear weapons
Radiological weapons

Treaties

By country
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France Germany
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United Kingdom United States
This box: view • talk • edit
India is believed to possess an arsenal of nuclear weapons and maintains intermediate-range ballis
missiles to deliver them. Though India has not made any official statements about the size of its nuclear ar
different estimates indicate that India has anywhere between 50 to 250 nuclear weapons[1] [2][3][4]. Weapons-g
plutonium production is believed to be taking place at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, which is h
the CIRUS reactor acquired from Canada, to the indigenous Dhruva reactor, and to a plutonium se
facility.

According to a January 2001 U.S Department of Defense report, "India probably has a small stockpil
nuclear weapon components and could assemble and deploy a few nuclear weapons within a few days to
2001 RAND study by Ashley Tellis asserts that India does not have or seek to deploy a ready nuclear arsenal.

According to a report in Jane's Intelligence Review (4), India's objective is to have a nuclear arsenal tha
"strategically active but operationally dormant", which would allow India to maintain its retaliatory capability
matter of hours to weeks, while simultaneously exhibiting restraint." However, the report also maintains that,
future, India may face increasing institutional pressure to shift its nuclear arsenal to a fully deployed status.[2]

Contents

[hide]

• 1 Nuclear Weapons
o 1.1 Brief Historical Overview
o 1.2 Current Arsenal and Estimates of Force
Inventory
o 1.3 Doctrine
o 1.4 Command and Control
o 1.5 International Treaties
o 1.6 Delivery Systems
 1.6.1 Ballistic Missiles
 1.6.2 Cruise Missiles
 1.6.3 Air to Air Missiles
• 2 Nuclear Submarines
o 2.1 Advanced Technology Vessel
o 2.2 Leasing of Soviet/Russian submarines
o 2.3 INS Sindhuvijay
• 3 Defensive Missiles
o 3.1 Air Defense
o 3.2 Anti Ballistic Missiles
• 4 Foreign assistance
• 5 Chemical Weapons
• 6 Biological Warfare
• 7 Gallery
• 8 References

• 9 External links [edit] Nuclear Weapons

[edit] Brief Historical Overview

The AGNI III in 2003

As early as June 26, 1946, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, soon to be India's first Prime Minister, annou
 As long as the world is constituted as it is, every country will have to devise and use the latest devices
“ for its protection. I have no doubt India will develop her scientific researches and I hope Indian scient
will use the atomic force for constructive purposes. But if India is threatened, she will inevitably try to
defend herself by all means at her disposal.[5]
India's first Nuclear test occurred on 18 May 1974. Since then India has conducted another series of test at
Pokhran test range in the state of Rajasthan in 1998. India has an extensive civil and military nuclear pro
which includes at least 10 nuclear reactors, uranium mining and milling sites, heavy water productio
facilities, a uranium enrichment plant, fuel fabrication facilities, and extensive nuclear research capabilities.

[edit] Current Arsenal and Estimates of Force Inventory

Nuclear capable Agni-III missile

• It is widely estimated that India currently has approximately 200 warheads.[1] It is known that about 7
warheads are assembled and the rest are in a sub-assembled position, and the number is expected to gr
time.[2].

• David Albright's report published by Institute for Science and International Security on
estimates that india at end of 1999 had 310 kilograms of weapon grade plutonium which is enough
nuclear weapons. He also estimates that India has 4200 kg of reactor grade unsafeguarded plutonium w
enough to build 1000 nuclear weapons.[3][4]. By the end of 2004, he estimates India has 445 kilograms
weapon grade plutonium which is enough for around 85 nuclear weapons considering 5 kg of plut
required for each weapon[6]

• Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) believes that India has a stockpile of about 30 to
nuclear warheads and claims that India is producing additional nuclear materials.[7]

• Former RAW official J.K. Sinha claimed that India has capability to produce 130 kilograms of weap
grade plutonium from six unsafeguarded reactors not included in nuclear deal between India and Un
 States.[8]

• Joseph Cirincione at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (3) estimates that In
produced enough weapons-grade plutonium for 50-90 nuclear weapons and a smaller but unknown qu
weapons-grade uranium[citation needed]

[edit] Doctrine

India has a declared nuclear no-first-use policy and is in the process of developing a nuclear doctrine based on
minimum deterrence." In August 1999, the Indian government released a draft of the doctrine which asserts th
weapons are solely for deterrence and that India will pursue a policy of "retaliation only." The document also
that India "will not be the first to initiate a nuclear first strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation shoul
deterrence fail" and that decisions to authorize the use of nuclear weapons would be made by the Prime Minis
'designated successor(s).'"

According to the NRDC, despite the escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan in 2001-2002, India re
committed to its nuclear no-first-use policy. But an Indian foreign ministry official told Defense News in 200
"'no-first-use' policy does not mean India will not have a first-strike capability."

[edit] Command and Control

India's Strategic Nuclear Command was formally established in 2003, with an Air Force officer, Air M
Asthana, as the Commander-in-Chief. The joint services SNC is the custodian of all of India's nuclear weap
missiles and assets. It is also responsible for executing all aspects of India's nuclear policy. However, the civ
leadership, in the form of the CCS (Cabinet Committee on Security) is the only body authorized to order a nu
strike against another offending strike: In effect, it is the Prime Minister who has his finger "on the button"

[edit] International Treaties

India is not a signatory to either the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive
Ban Treaty (CTBT), but did accede to the Partial Test Ban Treaty in October 1963. India is a member
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and four of its 13 nuclear reactors are subject to IAEA
safeguards.

India announced its lack of intention to accede to the NPT as late as 1997 by voting against the paragraph of a
General Assembly Resolution[9] which urged all non-signatories of the treaty to accede to it at the earliest
date.[10]

India voted against the UN General Assembly resolution endorsing the CTBT, which was adopted on Septe
10, 1996. India objected to the lack of provision for universal nuclear disarmament "within a time-bou
framework." India also demanded that the treaty ban laboratory simulations. In addition, India opposed the pr
Article XIV of the CTBT that requires India's ratification for the treaty to enter into force, which India argued
violation of its sovereign right to choose whether it would sign the treaty. In early February 1997, Foreign Mi
Gujral reiterated India's opposition to the treaty, saying that "India favors any step aimed at destroying nuclea
but considers that the treaty in its current form is not comprehensive and bans only certain types of tests."

Controversially the United States is now willing to provide India access to civilian nuclear technology thr
2006 United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act, despite India not being a m
the NPT which normally precludes such international cooperation. This is the direct result of the fact that Ind
recognized by the US and many other developed regions of the world as an important ally in the war on terror
further testifies to the fact that the West believes that the nuclear technology is intended for peaceful purposes
needed]

[edit] Delivery Systems

[edit] Ballistic Missiles

India is only the fourth country that has Anti Ballistic capability called in India as the Indian Ballistic M
Defense Program or the AAD. The Integrated Guided Missile Development Program (IGMDP
Indian Ministry of Defence program for the development of a comprehensive range of missiles, including the
intermediate range Agni missile (Surface to Surface), and short range missiles such as the Prithvi ballistic mis
(Surface to Surface), Akash missile (Surface to Air), Trishul missile (Surface to Air) and Nag Missile (Anti Ta
program was headed by Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), with former President of
Abdul Kalam, being one of the chief engineers involved in the project.[1]

India has methodically built an indigenous missile production capability, using its commercial space-launch p
develop the skills and infrastructure needed to support an offensive ballistic missile program. For example, du
1980s, India conducted a series of space launches using the solid-fueled SLV-3 booster. Most of these launche
satellites into near-earth orbit. Elements of the SLV-3 were subsequently incorporated into two new programs
first, the new polar-space launch vehicle (PSLV) was equipped with six SLV-3 motors strapped to the PSLV's
stage. The Agni IRBM technology demonstrator uses the SLV-3 booster as its first stage.

The key missile applications and types are given below:

• Prithvi.
Prithvi-1 Test Flight
The Prithvi I is mobile liquid-fueled 150 kilometer tactical missile currently deployed with army units. It is cl
this missile is equipped only with various conventional warheads (which stay attached to the missile over the
flight path). The missile is of particular interest to the United States (and potential buyers) in that has the capa
maneuvering in flight so as to follow one of several different preprogrammed trajectories. Based on the same
modified Prithvi, the Prithvi II, is essentially a longer-ranged version of the Prithvi I except that it has a 250-k
range and a lighter payload. It is suspected that any nuclear missions will be executed by the Prithvi II. Curre
Prithvi II has completed development and is now in production. When fielded, it will be deployed with air for
for the purpose of deep target attacking manoeuvres against objectives such as air fields. For the Indian Nav
kilometer version of the Prithvi is under development. The new system is being called the Dhanush, testing
to begin in December 1998. It is unclear whether or not this system will be deployed on India's new nuclear m
submarine (under construction).

The Prithvi missile project encompassed developing 3 variants for use by the Indian Army, Indian Air Force a
Indian Navy. The initial project framework of the Integrated Guided Missile Development Program outlines t
in the following manner.

• Prithvi I - Army Version (150 km range with a payload of 1,000kg)

• Prithvi II - Air Force Version (250 km range with a payload of 500kg)
• Prithvi III - Naval Version (350 km range with a payload of 500kg)
• Dhanush- Dhanush is reportedly a naval version of Prithvi which can be launched from Ships.. Some
claim that Dhanush is

a System consisting of stabilization platform and missiles, which has the capability to launch both Prithvi II a
III from Ships[1] while others report that Dhanush is a variant of Prithvi-II Ballistic Missile.

Over the years these specifications underwent a number of changes. While the codename Prithvi stands for an
inducted by India into its armed forces in this category, the later developmental versions are codenamed as Pr
and Prithvi III.

• Agni.

Agni Missile on Display

The 1500-kilometer Agni I technology demonstrator uses the SLV-3 booster for its first stage and a liquid-fue
for its second stage. Three test shots were conducted before the U.S. successfully pressured India into suspend
testing (1994). Of particular interest, the Agni tests demonstrated that India can develop a maneuvering warhe
incorporates endo-atmospheric evasive maneuvers and terminal guidance in the reentry vehicle. India has also
developed the carbon-carbon composite materials needed for long-range missile components and reentry vehi
ablative coatings. India has also inducted Agni II missiles that have a range of the 2500 to 3500-kilometers. U
Agni I, the Agni II will have a solid-fueled second stage. It is believed that the Agni can only be equipped wit
conventional warhead. India recently tested the Agni III IRBM with a range between 5000 and 18000 kilome
which has two stages. Though this range only depends on the load. With a load of 1800Kg the Agni can trave
but with 400kg load it can travel 18000.[citation needed] With a usual 1000kg it can travel 8000km. It is clear that
major constraints for this program is the lack of a proven nuclear warhead. Nuclear testing is a key related iss
developed its own thermonuclear design which was tested in the 1998 Pokhran nuclear tests and yielded 45 K
is working on a Submarine Launched Version of the Agni-III missile, which will provide India with a credible
second strike capability.[12] The SLBM version is a miniaturized version of the Agni-III which is expected to
fired shortly.[13]

• Surya.

The Surya ICBM is an ICBM program that has been discussed repeatedly in the Indian press. Surya (meani
Sun in Sanskrit and Many Indian Languages) is the codename for the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile th
reported to be developing. The DRDO is believed to have begun the project in 1994. Officials of the Indian g
have repeatedly denied the existence of the project. According to news reports, the Surya-1 is an intercontinen
surface-based, solid and liquid propellant ballistic missile. The Surya-1 and -2 will be classified as strategic w
extending the Indian nuclear deterrent force to targets around the world. India currently is limited by the rang
Agni-3 missile. The development of a true ICBM would make strikes against almost any strategic target arou
world possible and reduce India’s relative weakness. This would develop a credible global deterrent for India
Surya-1 will have an expected range of 10,000 km. It reportedly has a length of 40 m and a launch weight of
(some reports indicate as much as 275,000 kg. As the missile has yet to be developed, the payload and warhea
yet unknown. It is believed to be a three-stage design, with the first two stages using solid propellants and the
stage using liquid. The Surya-2 is a longer-ranged variant of the Surya-1. It has a reported range of 20,000 km
test flight is expected in 2008, and it is expected to be operationally ready by 2015.

• Sagarika.
Sagarika
Sagarika is a nuclear capable submarine-launched ballistic missile with a range of 750 km. This miss
length of 8.5 meters, weighs seven tonnes and can carry a pay load of up to 500 kg.[14]. The development of t
started in 1991. The first confirmation about the missile came in 1998[15] The development of the underwate
launcher know as the Project 78 (P78) was completed in 2001. This was handed over to the Indian Navy fo
The missile was successfully test fired thrice. The Indian Navy plans to induct the missile into service soon. T
is likely to arm the nuclear submarine which is expected to be launched in 2008. Sagarika will form part of th
India's nuclear deterrence and will provide with retaliatory nuclear strike capability.[16]

The defence scientists are also near breakthrough in test firing the Sagarika, the country's first underwater lau
ballistic missile. Sagarika has already been test-fired from a pontoon, but now DRDO is planning a full-fledg
the missile from a sub-marine and for this purpose may use the services of a Russian Amur class sub-marine w
expected to happen in September, which is in the same period as the Anti Ballistic Missile test which is jointl
developed by Israel and India.[17]

[edit] Cruise Missiles

• BrahMos

BrahMos on Display
BrahMos is a supersonic cruise missile that can be launched from submarines, ships, aircraft or land. The acro
BrahMos is perceived as the confluence of the two nations represented by two great rivers, the Brahmaputra o
and the Moskva of Russia. It is a joint venture between India's Defense Research and Development Organizat
Russia's NPO Mashinostroeyenia who have together formed the BrahMos Corp. Propulsion is based on the R
Yakhont missile, and guidance has been developed by BrahMos Corp. At speeds of Mach 2.5 to 2.8, is the wo
fastest cruise missile. At about three and a half times faster than the American subsonic Harpoon cruise missil

[edit] Air to Air Missiles

• Astra
Astra(Sanskrit: असा, Astrā "Weapon") is an active radar homing Beyond visual range air to air missile (BVR
a Beyond Visual Range missile being developed by Defence Research and Development Organisation (
India. This is the first air-to-air nuclear capable missile developed by India. Most other air-to-air missiles of I
bought from Russia.

The range of Astra is 80 km in head-on chase and 15 km in tail chase. The missile's onboard radio-frequency
been designed in India. It will have an active homing range of 15 km. The missile has a pre-fragmented warhe
fitted with a proximity fuze. A radar fuze already exists for the Astra, but the DRDO is currently working on a
fuze.The first test to happen with a nuclear warhead on board the missile is to take place in 2008.A successful
of ASTRA will plunge India into a select group of nations to have such a technology. Only US, France, Russi
China have so far produced such advance missiles, which enables fighter pilots to lock-on and shoot down en
aircraft almost 90-120 km away.[17]

[edit] Nuclear Submarines

Brahmos Missiles on display in Moscow

the leased former cruise missile Submarine INS Chakra

According to some accounts India plans to have as many as five nuclear submarines capable of carrying miss
nuclear warheads. Currently, India is building 3 nuclear submarines under the Advanced Technology Vessel p
Indian nuclear powered attack submarine design is said to have a 6,000-ton displacement and a single-shaft n
power plant of Indian origin.[18] Once the vessel is completed, it may be equipped with nuclear capable Dhan
Sagarika missiles and an advanced sonar system. However, according to some analysts the most probable m
the Indian submarine would be the nuclear capable Brahmos anti-ship cruise missile designed jointly by Ind
Russia, based on the Yakhont missile by NPO Mashinostroyeniya.

[edit] Advanced Technology Vessel

The Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) is a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarin

constructed for the Indian Navy at Visakhapatnam, India.[19][20] The ATV is an SSBN and will be armed
ballistic missiles like the Sagarika missile, or the submarine variant of the 5000 km range Agni-III mis
As of July 2007, the Sagarika/K-15 missile was reported to have undergone three successful tests.

[edit] Leasing of Soviet/Russian submarines

In 1988 INS Chakra, a Charlie-class submarine was leased by the Indian Navy for three years from t
Union, until 1991. From 2000, negotiations between India and Russia were conducted into the leasing of two
uncomplete Akula class. The Akulas are to be delivered to the Indian Navy in 2008 on a lease of at least se
and up to ten years. The acquisition is to help the Indian Navy prepare for the induction of the ATV. The cost
acquiring two Akula submarines and their support infrastructure along with training of the crews had been est
$2 billion.[21]

[edit] INS Sindhuvijay

The INS Sindhuvijay diesel-electric submarine capable of launching Club-S missile tests and the nuclear capa
BrahMos missile

[edit] Defensive Missiles

[edit] Air Defense

• Akash

An Akash missile being test fired from the Integrated Test Range (ITR).
Akash is a surface-to-air missile with an intercept range of 30 km. It has a launch weight of 720 kg, a diam
cm and a length of 5.78 metres. Akash flies at supersonic speed, reaching around Mach 2.5. It can reach an a
18 km. An on-board guidance system coupled with actuator system makes the missile maneuverable up to 15
and a tail chase capability for end game engagement. A digital proximity fuse is coupled with a 55kg pre-frag
warhead, while the safety arming and detonation mechanism enables a controlled detonation sequence. A self
device is also integrated. It is propelled by Integrated Ramjet Rocket Engine. The use of ramjet propulsion s
enables sustained speeds without deceleration throughout its flight.[22] The Missile as command guidance in i
flight.[23]

The design of the missile is somewhat similar to that of SA-6 with four long tube ramjet inlet ducts mounted
between wings. For pitch/yaw control four clipped triangular moving wings are mounted on mid-body. For ro
four inline clipped delta fins with ailerons are mounted before the tail. However, the internal schema shows a
layout with an onboard digitial computer, no Semi-active seeker, different propellant, different actuators and c
guidance datalinks. The Akash carries an onboard radio-proximity fuse.

[edit] Anti Ballistic Missiles

• PAD and AAD

India is only the fourth country that has Anti Ballistic capability

The testing of an AAD

The Indian Ballistic Missile Defense Program is an initiative to develop and deploy a multi-la
Ballistic missile defense system to protect India from missile attacks.[24][25]India is only the fourth country t
Anti Ballistic capability called in India as the Indian Ballistic Missile Defense Program.PAD was t
November 2006, followed by AAD in December 2007. With the test of the PAD missile, India became the fou
country to have successfully developed an Anti-ballistic missile system, after United States, Russia and I

Prithvi Air Defence (PAD) is an anti-ballistic missile developed to intercept incoming ballistic missiles outsi
atmosphere (Exoatmosphere). Based on the Prithvi missile, PAD is a two stage missile with a maximum in
altitude of 80 km. The first stage is a liquid fuelled motor that uses two propellants and oxidizers while secon
solid fuelled.[27]. It has divert thrusters which can generate a lateral acceleration at more than 5 Gs at 50 km a
Guidance is provided by intertial navigation system, mid-course updates from long range tracking radar (LRT
active radar homing in the terminal phase.PAD has capability to engage 300 to 2,000 km class of ballistic mis
speed of Mach 5.

Long Range Tracking Radar is the target acquisition and fire control Radar for PAD Missile. It is an active ph
radar having capability to track 200 targets at a range of 600 km.

PADE (Prithvi Air Defence Exercise) was conducted on November 2006 in which PAD Missile successfully i
a modified Prithvi-II Missile at an altitude of 50 km. Prithvi-II Ballistic Missile was modified to mimic the tra
M-9 and M-11 missiles.

Advanced Air Defence (AAD) is an anti-ballistic missile designed to intercept incoming ballistic missiles in
endoatmosphere at an altitude of 30 km. AAD is single stage, solid fuelled missile. Guidance is similar to tha
Inertial Navigation System, midcourse updates from ground based radar and active radar homing in terminal
7.5 metres tall, weighs around 1.2 tonnes and a diameter of less than 0.5 metres.[28]Long Range Tracking Rad
target acquisition and fire control Radar for PAD Missile. It is an active phased array radar having capability
200 targets at a range of 600 km.

PAD was tested in November 2006, followed by AAD in December 2007. With the test of the PAD missile, In
became the fourth country to have successfully developed an Anti-ballistic missile system, after United States
and Israel.

[edit] Foreign assistance

• India's nuclear program has said to have received significant assistance and contribution by the Sovie
according to CIA reports.[29]

[edit] Chemical Weapons

This section does not cite any references or sources.

Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be chall
removed. (December 2007)
India has an advanced commercial chemical industry, and produces the bulk of its own chemicals for domesti
consumption. In 1992 India signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, stating that it did not have chemical w
and the capacity or capability to manufacture chemical weapons. India became one of the original signatories
Chemical Weapons Convention [CWC] in 1993, and ratified it on 2 September 1996. Since, unlike the n
non- proliferation treaty and the comprehensive test ban treaty, this treaty's provisions were equally applicabl
countries, including the powerful countries, India had readily accepted it. The treaty came into force on April
1997. The full destruction of the weapons grade chemicals will take place only at the end of a 10-year period
has one of the largest chemical industries in the world, this industry will benefit from unrestricted trade and te
access which would be denied to non-members of the treaty. Although India had endorsed the treaty in Septem
becoming the 62nd country to do so, when it appeared as though the United States might not approve it, India
declared that it might review its earlier decision endorsing the treaty. Indian observers were of the view that, s
America itself fail to approve the treaty, there would be diminished pressure on China and Pakistan against pr
chemical weapons. According to India's ex-Army Chief General Sunderji, a country having the capability of m
nuclear weapons does not need to have chemical weapons, since the dread of chemical weapons could be crea
in those countries that do not have nuclear weapons. Others suggested that the fact that India has found chem
weapons dispensable highlighted its confidence in the conventional weapons system at its command.

When the Third UN Disarmament Conference, held in 1988, decided that the next logical step in the disarmam
process would be measures to halt production of chemical weapons, Indian diplomats responded by claiming
had no chemical weapons. Foreign Minister K Natwar Singh repeated this claim in 1989 in the Paris Conferen
State Parties to the Geneva Protocol of 1925, as did Minister of State Eduardo Faleiro repeated at the January
Paris Conference CWC signing ceremony. However, India declared its stockpile of chemical weapons to the C
Weapons Convention in Geneva on 26 June 1997, the deadline for all signatories to the pact. New Delhi p
declared that, in keeping with the stipulations arising from the ratification of the Chemical Weapons Conventi
had filed initial declarations on "testing and development of chemical weapons and their related facilities whi
developed only to deal with the situation arising out of possible use of chemical warfare against India."

In its required declarations under the CWC, India acknowledged the existence of a chemical warfare program
disclosed the details of its stockpiles and the availability of manufacturing facilities on a very small scale. Ne
has pledged that all facilities related to its CW program would be open for inspection. The declaration kept In
chemical armory under wraps, since the CWC Secretariat maintains the confidentiality of the declaration. citat

The published literature detailing India's chemical weapons capabilities is extremely sparse. According to one
report, India's stockpile of chemical weapons consists of mustard gas shells left by the British of World War I
These shells, fired from a 25 pounder gun, are said to be in storage and not under the operational control of th
Army. India is also reported to have manufacturing facilities for production of agents in small quantities.

The Indian government has set up Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) warfare directorates in the Servic
besides an inter-Services coordination committee to monitor the programme. The Indian Army established a N
Biological and Chemical (NBC) cell at Army HQ to study the effects of NBC warfare. The Defence Research
Development Organisation (DRDO) is also participating in the program. Research on chemical weapons has c
in various establishments of the military and DRDO research labs. In addition, work is carried out by DRDO
and fabricate protective clothing and equipment for troops on the battlefield in case of a chemical weapons at
Defence Research and Development Establishment (DRDE) at Gwalior is the primary establishment for studi
toxicology and biochemical pharmacology and development of antibodies against several bacterial and viral a
addition, research is carried out on antibodies against chemical agent poisoning and heavy metal toxicology. C
agents such as Sarin and nerve gas are produced in small quantities to test on protective equipment.

Protective clothing and equipment are designed and manufactured amongst other places at the Defence Mater
Stores Research and Development Establishment at Kanpur. India has developed five types of protective syst
equipment for its troops as a safeguard against nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) hazards. The developm
five types of protective systems and equipment has been completed and their induction into the service has be
formally approved. The five types of protective systems and equipment are: NBC individual protective equipm
NBC collective protection system, NBC medical protection equipment, NBC detection equipment and the NB
decontamination system.

It is reported that even after India ratified the Chemical Weapons Treaty in September 1996, efforts continued
manufacturing and stockpiling chemical weapons for use against Pakistan. India's Prithvi surface-to-surface m
(SSMs) can carry five different types of warheads. Two types of warheads have already been deployed, and th
warheads, presumably nuclear, chemical and biological, are under development. On 25 June 1997, the Ind
government stated that "India will disclose to Pakistan stocks of its chemical weapons". The decision was tak
a unilateral disclosure on the instruction of Prime Minister I.K. Gujral.

[edit] Biological Warfare

This section does not cite any references or sources.

Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be chall
removed. (April 2008)
[show]
v•d•e
Indian missiles

PrithviI · II · III · Dhanush

AgniI · II · III · V

SLBMSagarika K-15

India is a signatory to the BWC of 1972. India has a well-developed biotechnology infrastructure that inclu
numerous pharmaceutical production facilities bio-containment laboratories (including BSL-3 and BSL-4) fo
with lethal pathogens. It also has highly qualified scientists with expertise in infectious diseases. Some of I
facilities are being used to support research and development for BW defense purposes. The Defence Researc
Development Establishment (DRDE) at Gwalior is the primary establishment for studies in toxicology and
biochemical pharmacology and development of antibodies against several bacterial and viral agents. Work is
to prepare responses to threats like Anthrax, Brucellosis, cholera and plague, viral threats like smallpo
haemorrhage fever and biotoxic threats like botulism. Researchers have developed chemical/biological prot
gear, including masks, suits, detectors and suitable drugs. India has a 'no first use' policy.

[edit] Gallery
BrahMos at the Indian Republic Day Parade
Nuclear capable Agni-
III missile

Nuclear Submarine
Missile Sagarika

An Akash missile being test fired from the

Integrated Test Range (ITR), Chandipur, Orissa. The
launch platform is a BMP-2 vehicle

List of missiles

[edit] References

1. ^ a b Norris, Robert S. and Hans M. Kristensen. "India's nuclear forces, 2005", Bulletin of the Atomic S
61:5 (September/October 2005): 73–75,[1]
2. ^ a b c d Nuclear Weapons - India Nuclear Forces
3. ^ a b [2]India's and Pakistan's Fissile Material and Nuclear Weapons Inventories, end of 1999
4. ^ a b India's Nuclear Weapons Program - Present Capabilities
5. ^ B. M. Udgaonkar, India’s nuclear capability, her security concerns and the recent
Indian Academy of Sciences, January 1999.
6. ^ India’s Military Plutonium Inventory, End 2004 [3]
7. ^ The Consequences of Nuclear Conflict between India and Pakistan [4]
 8. ^ India can make 50 nuclear warheads a year[5] [6]
9. ^ United Nations General Assembly Verbatim meeting 67 session 52 on 9 Decemb
(retrieved 2007-08-22)
10. ^ United Nations General Assembly Resolution session 52 page 16 (retrieved 2007-08-2
11. ^ http://www.bharat-
rakshak.com/MISSILES/Images/Graph_payload_vs_range_r2A_700pixle.jpg
12. ^ DRDO working on 5,500 Km Agni
13. ^ Agni-III test-fired successfully
14. ^ Sagarika missile test-fired successfully
15. ^ India ready for new missile test
16. ^ India gets sub-marine missile power
17. ^ a b Coming from India's defence unit: ASTRA missile
18. ^ Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) on GlobalSecurity.org
19. ^ The secret undersea weapon
20. ^ a b "Indian nuclear submarine", India Today, August 2007 edition
21. ^ Project 971 Shuka-B Akula class www.globalsecurity.com
22. ^ The Hindu article dated 11 December 2005, accessed 18 October 2006.
23. ^ AKASH AIR DEFENCE WEAPON SYSTEM
24. ^ India expects to use missile interception system as a weapon, top scientist say
25. ^ India developing new missiles Towards destroying hostile missiles
26. ^ Ministry of Defence (India) (28 December 2007). "Development of Ballistic Missi
Defence System: Year End Review". Press release. Retrieved on 2008-01-26.
27. ^ India Plans Second Anti-Ballistic-Missile Test in JuneThe interceptor rocket has a liqui
first stage that uses two propellants and oxidizers, and a solid-fuel second stage with a gas thruster th
turn the rocket at more than five Gs. The missile carries sensors to guide it to its target.
28. ^ Interceptor missile scores ‘direct hit’
29. ^ Russia helped India's nuke programme: CIA

[edit] External links

• Nuclear Notebook: India's nuclear forces, 2005, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept/Oc
• Indian Nuclear Weapons program A good article with very detailed information
• Nuclear Files.org India's nuclear conflict with Pakistan- background and the current situation
• Nuclear Files.org Current information on nuclear stockpiles in India
• Missile testing ranges of India
• Video interviews taken at the 2008 NPT PrepCom on the United States-India Pea
Atomic Energy Cooperation Act
 [show]
v•d•e
Military of India

Indian Army History · Academies · Ranks and insignia (Army · Air Force ·
Indian Navy Special Forces · Indian Peace Keeping Force · Paramilitary f
Indian Air Force Strategic Forces Command · Strategic Nuclear Command ·
Indian Coast Guard missiles · Weapons of mass destruction

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction"

Categories: Independent India | Military of India | Nuclear technology in India | Weapons
destruction
Hidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced stateme
since December 2007 | Articles with unsourced statements since July 2008 | Articles with
unsourced statements since July 2007 | Articles needing additional references from Dec
2007 | Articles needing additional references from April 2008

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India Missile Milestones: 1947-2005

The Risk Report
Volume 11 Number 6 (November-December 2005)

1947: Dr. Vikram Sarabhai establishes the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), which will later become a na
center for space research, supported primarily by India's Department of Space.

1962: The Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), established one year earlier as an extens
Special Weapon Development Team (SWDT), is moved to Hyderabad to work on missile design and develop

1962: The Indian Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) is established under the auspices of the Depar
Atomic Energy.

1963: INCOSPAR establishes the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS).

November 1963: A U.S.-produced, solid-propellant Nike-Apache rocket is launched from Thumba Equatorial
Launching Station. The launch is part of an international effort under the United Nations. It is later followed b
U.S. French, Soviet and British rockets launched between 1963 and 1975.

1964: The Centre National d' Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) conc
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for CNES to supply four Centaure rockets with payloads for vapor cl
experiments. For its part, DAE will manufacture in India, under license, the Belier and Centaure types of soun
rockets.

1965: India establishes the Space and Technology Center (SSTC) in Thumba.

1967: The Satellite Telecommunication Earth Center is established in Ahmedabad.

1967: India launches its first sounding rocket, Rohini-75.

1969: The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is formed under the Department of Atomic Energy.

1970: India and the Soviet Union sign a MoU on Collaboration in the Organization of Rocket Sounding of the
Atmosphere by Soviet Meteorological Rockets at Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station.

1972-1982: DRDL establishes missile-related infrastructure, including aerodynamic, structural and environm
facilities, liquid and solid propulsion facilities, fabrication engineering facilities, control, guidance, FRP, and
facilities.June 1972: The Space Commission and Department of Space is established and ISRO is brought und
Department of Space.

1975: India launches its first satellite, Aryabhata.

1977: India and France sign a Cooperation Agreement in the Field of Space Affairs.

1978: India and the United States conclude a MoU and an Exchange of Notes Constituting an Agreement Rel
Launching and Associated Services for Indian Satellites.

1979: Bharat Dynamics Ltd. becomes India's guided missile headquarters.

March 1979: A Centaure-2 type rocket is launched from Thumba, as part of an agreement and program begun
The rocket carries Bulgarian and Indian equipment for exploration and measurement of in space of proton and
fluxes.

1980: India conducts the second experimental launch of its SLV-3 after its failed initial launch in 1979, and su
placing the Rohini satellite into orbit.

1982: The Vikram Sarabhai Space Center (VSSC) successfully launches a Centaure rocket under the joint coo
of India, West Germany, and Austria.
1983: India's Integrated Guided Missile Development Program (IGMDP) begins, with more than 60 public an
organizations involved.

April 1984: India and the Soviet Union conduct a joint manned space mission.

September-October 1984: A senior Indian delegation led by the Deputy Minister for Electronics, Dr. Sanjeevi
visits the Soviet Union to purchase high-powered computers for India's defense and nuclear industry. The Sov
agrees to supply its latest-generation "Elbrus" computer system to India after 1986.

1986: India's Scientific Advisor to the Defense Minister Dr. V.S. Arunachalam announces that scientists at DR
successfully developed and tested a high-thrust, liquid-fueled rocket engine that generates a thrust of 30 tons
capable of lifting a payload to a height of 600 km into space.

1987: After debate since 1985, an interagency group of U.S. officials from the Departments of Defense, State
Commerce issue a communiqué that India is permitted to purchase from the United States "the Cyber 205, a C
approximately the same vintage, a single-processor Cray X-MP or some 'other machine of equivalent capabili

February 1988: India conducts the first test flight of its surface-to-surface Prithvi ballistic missile, under a pro
headed by the DRDL.

March 1988: India launches its first operational remote sensing satellite, IRS-1A.

April 1988: ISRO signs a cooperation agreement with the European Space Agency.

1989: India conducts a test launch of its first medium-range ballistic missile, called the Agni. Prime Minister
Gandhi states "The Agni is an R&D vehicle, not a weapons system. However, the technologies proved in Agn
deeply significant for evolving national security options."

1991: ISRO and Russia's Glavkosmos reach an agreement for the supply of engines and cryogenic technologi
India. Under U.S. pressure and sanctions imposed on ISRO in 1992, the agreement will be limited to the sale
KhimMach KVD-1 engines, each of which produces 7.5 metric tons of thrust.

1992: India acquires the ability to manufacture liquid hydrogen.

May 1992: India conducts a successful test of the third-stage motor for its PSLV, ignited under simulated high
conditions.

May 1992: India stages its first successful launch of the four-stage ASLV, carrying its SROSS-C satellite into
following two failed attempts in 1987 and 1988.

1993: ISRO signs a cooperation agreement with the European Space Agency.

1994: The periodical Flight International reports that India's Aeronautical Development Establishment (ADE)
the past two years been engaged in designing a ramjet-powered, submarine-launched missile dubbed the Saga

1995-1996: India suspends development of the Agni missile project.

January 1996: India conducts the first test flight of the Prithvi-II surface-to-surface ballistic missile with a ran
kilometers, far enough to reach Islamabad.

March 1996: India successfully conducts its third and final developmental launch of the four-stage PSLV, dep
1-ton Indian satellite into 500-mile polar orbit.

May 1997: India completes development of two variants of the Prithvi ballistic missile. A 150-kilometer rang
with a heavier warhead is ready for introduction into the Army, while the 250-kilometer version with a lighter
destined for the air force is ready for user trials.

June 1997: A fewer than a dozen Prithvi missiles are moved close to the Pakistani border. Prime Minister I. K
denies the deployment, but Western officials affirm in November that the missiles were moved from storage t
near the Pakistan border.

August 1997: The Agni missile program is revived in response to Pakistan's test of the Hatf-III missile in July

September 1997: India conducts the first operational launch of its PSLV-C1, deploying a 1200-kilogram India
Sensing Satellite (IRS-1D) into orbit. In reaching 817 km circular polar sun-synchronous orbit, the PSLV was
by four stages of alternating solid and liquid propellant.

1998: India conducts five underground nuclear tests at Pokhran, ranging in yield from less than 1 kiloton to ab
kilotons. Defense Minister George Fernandes reportedly says that India will "inevitably" arm itself with nucle
warheads. The United States proceeds to implement sanctions, in place by November 1998, on a large numbe
research, development, and production entities relating to space and missile technology.

February 1999: Indian Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif meet in Lah
Pakistan. They agree to exchange strategic information about their nuclear arsenals, to give each other advanc
of ballistic missile tests, and to increase efforts to resolve the Kashmir issue.

April 1999: India conducts its first test of the nuclear-capable Agni-II missile. The two-stage solid fuel missil
can carry a 1,000 kg payload, was successfully fired to a range of 2,000 kilometers.

May 1999: India launches a PSLV and successfully deploys an Indian remote sensing satellite and two other p

July 1999: India successfully tests the Nishant, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to conduct aerial
reconnaissance of battlefields.

October 1999: Scientists from the DRDO announce they are developing the Surya, an intercontinental ballisti
(ICBM) with a range exceeding 5,000 kilometers.

April 2000: India tests the medium-range Dhanush missile, a naval version of the Prithvi.

August 2000: India's Agni-II missile reportedly reaches the operational stage. India's Defense Minister, Georg
Fernandes, states that re-entry, guidance, and maneuverability have been tested.

February 2001: Dr. Vasudev Aatre, head of India's DRDO and scientific adviser to the Indian Minister of Def
announces that India is developing the Agni-III ballistic missile. The Agni-III is anticipated to have a range of
km, improving upon the "range and capability" of the 2,100 km-range Agni-II.
March 2001: India's Defense Minister, George Fernandes, announces that the Agni-II ballistic missile is opera
is ready for mass production after its second successful test launch in January. The 2,500 km range missile ma
launched from a static launch pad or mobile launcher and offers India a nuclear second-strike capability.

March 2001: The periodical Defense News reports that India and Russia's Central Scientific and Research Ins
Automatics and Hydraulics (TsNIIAG) are negotiating the sale of a variant of an electro-optical guided missil
originally developed for Scud-B ballistic missiles, which could drastically improve the accuracy of India's ba
missiles.

March 2001: India aborts the first attempt to launch its GSLV, when computers detect that one of its four liqu
strap-on booster engines is not generating the required 90 percent thrust.

April 2001: After tracing the March 2001 malfunction to a defective oxidizer line, India's GSLV successfully
setting the 3,000 lb experimental GSAT-1 communication satellite into orbit.

June 2001: According to the periodical Defense News, India successfully launches the PJ-10, also known as t
BrahMos cruise missile, developed by DRDO and Russia's NPO Mashinostryenia (NPOM) under a secret 199
Russian accord. The missile has a range of 280 kilometers and may be fired from Indian and Russian mobile
ships, submarines and aircraft.

July 2001: India and France reportedly sign a MoU to co-develop and co-produce battlefield surveillance rada
ballistic missiles, and for India to domestically build Scorpene submarines.

August 2001: According to Jane's Defence Weekly, the Indian Army is to create a second missile regiment, th
Rocket Regiment, to induct the Agni-II intermediate-range ballistic missile.

September 2001: U.S. President George Bush lifts sanctions against India and Pakistan imposed under the Ar
Control Act.

December 2001: An unclassified summary of the U.S. National Intelligence Council's (NIC) National Intellig
Estimate claims most components required for an ICBM are found in India's indigenous space program. India
"convert its polar space launch vehicle into an ICBM within a year or two of a decision to do so." However, t
cautions that while India is striving for self-sufficiency, it still relies "heavily" on foreign assistance. The NIC
that India will probably not deploy its Sagarika submarine-launched ballistic missile until 2010 or later.

December 2001: India successfully test-fires a 250 km extended-range version of the Prithvi missile, develop
Indian Air Force. The indigenously developed surface-to-surface missile is one of the five missiles being deve
under the IGMDP. The earlier version of the Prithvi is already in service with India's Army.

March 2002: India's Ministry of Defense announces that the Agni-II ballistic missile has entered into producti
and will soon be inducted into the Army.

March 2002: Scientists at India's LPSC successfully fire an upper-stage cryogenic engine for 12 minutes, the
will fire during actual flight. On the same day, ISRO successfully tests an improved variant of the two-meter
solid-propellant motor that powers the third stage of the PSLV. Improvements include "optimization of the mo
and nozzle and increased propellant loading." ISRO plans to use the motor in its PSLV launch later in 2002, w
would be the first time that a PLSV will be used to place a payload in geostationary orbit.
April 2002: Jane's Defence Weekly reports that, according to U.S. intelligence sources and contrary to the cla
Indian officials, the first test of a single-stage variant of the Agni was a failure. The missile flew its anticipate
700 km, but the warhead failed to separate.

June 2002: The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisi
Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions states that Indi
lacks engineering or production expertise in some key missile technologies." The report adds that during 2001
and Western Europe remained the main sources of missile-related and dual-use technology to fill these gaps.

July 2002: According to Jane's Defense Weekly, Indian defense officials claim that India has acquired two Gr
radar systems from Israel, but say they have had little success in developing a missile defense capability again
possible Pakistani attack.

December 2002: The CIA in its Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to
of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions states that India was among the countries supply
assistance to Libya's ballistic missile program.

January 2003: India has allocated $1 billion to the DRDO for the development of hypersonic missile systems,
by an indigenously developed cryogenic engine fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

January 2003: The Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) approves the creation of a Strategic Forces Comma
to manage and administer all nuclear and strategic forces. The Nuclear Command Authority (NCA), comprisi
Political Council and an Executive Council, will be responsible for India's nuclear arsenal.

January 2003: India reportedly places under its SFC two operational missile groups of the Indian Army, whic
the 150-250 km-range Prithvi and the 2,500 km-range Agni nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

February 2003: According to a DRDO official, India has begun a 10-year development program of a two-stag
vehicle called Avatar that can take-off and land like an aircraft and place a 1,000 kg payload into a low-earth
vehicle would be capable of performing about 100 re-entries into the atmosphere. According to the DRDO of
primary function of the vehicle is to act as a "reusable missile launcher, one which can launch missiles, land …
loaded again for more missions."

February 2003: An unnamed official from India's Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that India has agreed to in
approximately $150 million in Israel's Arrow-2 anti-missile system. The proposed investment must still be ap
the United States. Aerospace Daily claims that Israel has emerged as the second-largest supplier of weapons a
equipment to India.

March 2003: The Times of India reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair's dossier on Iraq alleged that I
NEC Engineers Private Limited had "extensive links in Iraq," including to Iraq's Al-Mamoun missile product
and had illicitly supplied ammonium perchlorate to Iraq.

April 2003: According to Indian Defense Minister, George Fernandes, India is developing and making efforts
Agni-III, a long-range surface-to-surface missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead more than 2,000 kilom

May 2003: India conducts the second launch of its GSLV, lifting a 1,800 kg experimental communications sat
Unlike the first flight, when the GSLV's Russian-made cryogenic upper stage burned out four seconds too soo
launch occurred without incident. ISRO announces that once declared operational, the GSLV will "make the I
space program a self reliant one."

May 2003: The Indian periodical Vayu announces that with the lifting of "restrictions imposed by collaborato
Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL) has been cleared for missile exports. BDL manufactures a variety of missile
including the Prithvi-I and Prithvi-II surface-to-surface missiles.

July 2003: The Washington Post reports that a coalition of pro-India and pro-Israel lobbyists, including the U
Political Action Committee (USINPAC), America Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), and American
Committee (AJC), have joined forces to gain U.S. approval for the sale of Israel's Arrow ballistic missile defe
system to India.

August 2003: R. N. Agarwal, the former Director of the Agni missile project and currently the Director of the
Systems Laboratory (ASL), states that the carbon composite content of the new Agni variants will be increase
to 80 percent making them lighter and able travel longer distances. Agarwal says that the Agni's re-entry heat
entirely made up of carbon composite.

October 2003: India clears the short-range Agni-I and medium-range Agni-II surface-to-surface missiles for t

October 2003: Defense News, citing defense officials in Washington and New Delhi, reports that in August In
"formally asked" the United States for multiple Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) anti-missile systems.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in September also requested inclusion in the U.S.-led global missile defe
shield.

December 2003: Indian Defense sources indicate that the BrahMos cruise missile has been configured for lau
submarines. Submarine-to-surface launch is one of the four BrahMos designs, which are anticipated to includ
surface, ship-to-surface, and surface-to-surface. The missile was launched successfully from a surface ship an
290 km to its target.

January 2004: India and the United States agree under the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership with India (NSS
expand cooperation in civilian nuclear programs, civilian space programs, and high-technology trade, includi
expanded dialogue on missile defense. This agreement initiates three major steps: removal of ISRO from the
Department of Commerce Entity List, removal of export license requirements for items subject to Export
Administration Regulations EAR99, and establishment of a presumption of approval for all items not controll
nuclear proliferation reasons.

February 2004: ISRO chairman, G. Madhavan Nair unveils plans for the Ammonium Perchlorate Experiment
expand ammonium perchlorate (AP) production from 300 metric tons to 800 metric tons by 2005.

March 2004: At the Sixth Joint Technical Group between India and the United States, Indian defense scientist
the United States about possible cooperation in developing optronics, electro-optics, encryption, and sensor a
jamming technologies.

March 2004: India successfully test-fires an "improved" version of its Prithvi-II surface-to-surface ballistic m
an extended-range of 250 km and "much higher accuracy," according to a defense ministry official.

September 2004: India conducts the first operational flight of its GSLV, lifting a 1,950 kg spacecraft.
October 2004: India conducts a launch of its single-stage, Prithvi-III missile.

November 2004: India successfully test-fires the 350 km-range Dhanush missile, marking the induction of the
into the Navy. Dhanush is the naval version of the Prithvi-II.

December 2004: The Russian Federal Space Agency says that it will continue cooperation with India in the
development of an oxygen-hydrogen booster for space rockets.

December 2004: India and Russia sign 10 agreements on space, defense, and aviation, including an agreemen
cooperate on satellite manufacture and launch under the Russian Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONA
Russia's Federal Space Agency head, Anatoly Perminov, states that India's military use of the GLONASS syst
could help improve the accuracy of Indian missiles, has not been ruled out.

February 2005: President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam states before Parliament that the BrahMos missile "has been su
tested ... and is ready for induction" into India's military.

May 2005: ISRO's four-stage solid and liquid propellant PSLV-C6 successfully propelled two satellites into p
synchronous orbit. The Spacecraft Control Centre of ISTRAC at Bangalore will continuously monitor the CA
1, which is a cartographic satellite mounted with two cameras with 2.5 meter spatial resolution and 30 km cov
and the HAMSAT, which is a micro-satellite intended for radio transmission.

May 2005: India's Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, passes the Weapons of Mass Destruction and
Delivery Systems (Prohibition of Unlawful Activities) Bill, which bans proliferation of mass destruction weap
missile technology. Once signed by India's President Abdul Kalam, the bill will become law and will apply to
India and abroad, as well as foreigners residing in India.

May 2005: India has reportedly added the short-range Agni-I and intermediate-range Agni-II to its Strategic F
Command arsenal.

May 2005: Agni program director, Dr. R. N. Agarwal says that the Agni-III, India's long-range ballistic missil
to be capable of hitting targets 3,000 to 3,500 km away, will be ready for flight testing by the end of 2005.

June 2005: As part of the "New Framework for the U.S.-India Defense Relationship," signed by U.S. Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the United States has offered India a briefi
Patriot PAC-3 missile system, as well as increased opportunities for technology transfer, collaboration, co-pro
and research and development with the understanding that U.S. technology-related sanctions on India will be

June 2005: India's VSSC has begun work on its first hypersonic wind tunnel (HWT).

July 2005: A joint venture between Russia's Mashinostroenie Scientific Industrial Association and India's DR
begun mass production of the BrahMos cruise missile. The Indian Navy has placed the first order for the miss
is also anticipated to be fielded by the Russian Navy. The baseline version is an anti-ship missile, which also
fired from air platforms.

July 2005: The United States and India release a joint statement during a visit by India's Prime Minister Manm
Singh to the White House. Initiatives to be implemented include signature of a Science and Technology Fram
Agreement, establishment of closer ties in space exploration, satellite navigation and launch, and cooperation
commercial space arena through such groups as the U.S.-India Working Group on Civil Space Cooperation.

August 2005: India's Defense Secretary Yogendera Narain states that India has acquired a Green Pine radar fr
for "advanced research," after three to four years of discussions.

August 2005: The U.S. Department of Commerce removes from the Entity List ISRO subordinates: ISRO Tel
Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC), ISRO Intertial Systems Unit (IISU), and Space Applications Ce

October 2005: India and Pakistan's Foreign Secretaries sign a formalized agreement on notification at least 72
ahead of ballistic missile tests. Contained within the agreement is a bilateral pledge not to set up any missile t
site within 40 km of the Line of Control or the international border.

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Pakistan's Missile Capabilities
Even though India's ballistic missile programme is older than
Pakistan's, the latter has gone one major step ahead by acquiring
ballistic missiles from China and deploying them. It also has an
ongoing indigenous ballistic missile development programme. India in
contrast had virtually frozen its guided missile programme and
continues to hesitate to start their series production or to deploy its
indigenous tactical missile, the Prithvi.

Pakistan's quest for surface-to-surface missiles has kept pace with its
nuclear weapons ambitions. This issue came to light once again when The
Washington Post reported in early June this year that the Sargodha Air
Base in West Pakistan held 30 crates of M-11 missiles received from
China. According to this story, the US intelligence community was in no
doubt that, notwithstanding denials from Beijing, this confirms its delivery
of missiles to Pakistan. Actually this missile transfer was detected by US
spy satellite intelligence as early as in Spring 1994. The British intelligence
agencies too had given similar reports.

All this is hardly surprising given that Pakistan has been in search of a
launch vehicle for its bomb at least from the early 1980s when its nuclear
weapon programme appeared to be near completion. One option was the F-
16 aircraft. The first batch of 40 was obtained from the United States in the
early 1980s. According to the Chief of the Pakistan Army Staff, General
Mirza Afzal Beg, the M-11 was another viable option. A contract was
apparently signed with the China Precision Machinery Import and Export
Corporation in 1988 to acquire these. The deal included supply of missiles,
launchers and support equipment, as well as training and possibly
technology transfer for indigenous production. The exact number of
missiles sold to Pakistan is not known. Estimates vary from about 30 to 86.
The more likely figure is around 70.

Pakistan probably took delivery of these missiles at Karachi in end 1992.

This is when US aerial and human intelligence confirmed the transfer.
Pakistan made a part payment of US $ 83 million at the time for the deal.

The M-11 is a solid fuel variant of the Soviet Scud missile. It has a range
of 300 kilometres with a 500 kilogram warhead. The missile can carry
either nuclear or conventional high explosive munitions. By this transfer,
China violated the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) norms, to
which it had agreed to 'adhere' in 1991. In September 1993, the US was
obliged to impose Category II sanctions under the MTCR on both the
Chinese and Pakistani companies involved in this deal. Pakistan had earlier
begun a programme of developing other short-range missiles with French
and Chinese assistance. These are the Hatf series 1, 2 and 3. Their ranges
with a 500 kilogram warhead are 80, 300 and 600 kilometres respectively.
Though trails of Hatf 1 and Hatf 2 have been conducted, their exact
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