Weapons: Future Fire

The nuclear tests may have give a boost to India's defence arsenal, but the country cannot ignore the enormous cost of weaponisation.

The blast sites of India's latest nuclear tests at Pokhran look like innocuous craters. But if one of the bombs tested was exploded above ground, let's say at a city centre, then this is what would happen: the first effect would be a flash of light so intense that people 50 km away could suffer from permanent retinal damage if they looked at it. The light is emitted by a rapidly expanding, intensely hot fireball. Those within a 3 km radius would either be incinerated or die of severe burns.

Missiles	Submarines	Fighters
THE AGNI: Ballistics are the surest means to carry a nuclear weapon on target, specially over long ranges. India shelved the Agni in 1994. What is needed is Agni II with a 5,000-km range. A test is expected soon but several are needed before deployment.	THE NUCLEAR SUBMARINE: Missiles and aircraft are vulnerable but nuclear subs can stay submerged for a long time. India does not have such a sub. The navy needs to accelerate this project which is based on a reverse-engineering of the ex-Soviet Charlie-II design, christened Sagarika by the media.	LONG RANGE BOMBER: Are more accurate than missiles; can be recalled at the last minute. This version of the Sukhoi 30 may enter service after 2000. With the IAF concentrating on World War II type battles with Pakistan, a doctrine for use of long-range air-power is needed.

That's just the beginning. Within seconds, a blast wave -- similar to that of a chemical explosion but many hundred times more powerful -- radiates out with hurricane force, crushing buildings, uprooting trees and killing all life forms in the area. As the blast reduces in intensity, a huge mushroom cloud of dust and smoke rises and the cloud containing highly radioactive material begins to drift. The fallout can give a lethal dose of radiation to people living within 50 to 100 km from the blast. If an atom bomb of 15 to 20 kilotons of yield -- about the size of one of the weapons that India tested -- is exploded over a populous city, it will kill 1.3 million people, at least half of them within seconds of the blast.

When he conducted the world's first nuclear test, Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, observed: "The world will never be the same again." After conducting an astonishing five nuclear tests within three days and declaring that it is a nuclear weapons power, India will never be the same again. For, by joining the big league, it would now be adding to its defence arsenal the Brahmastra of modern-day weaponry. "By these tests we have demonstrated in an unambiguous fashion that we can make any kind of nuclear weapon," says Dr P.K. Iyengar, former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman and one of the key scientists involved in the 1974 Pokhran nuclear explosion.

Yet, there is still plenty to be done. India needs a range of delivery systems that, if ever required, can drop these bombs speedily and accurately. It has to develop a triad of nuclear weapons delivery systems: deployable long-range missiles of the Agni class and beyond, fighter aircraft of the recently acquired Sukhoi 30 class and nuclear-powered submarines that stay underwater for months and can launch missiles (see box).

Equally important, India has to develop what is known in defence parlance as C3I (pronounced "see cube eye"), standing for command, control, communications and intelligence. It is a highly-sophisticated system of radars, early warning systems and intelligence gathering that anticipate possible attacks from aggressors and tell you how to retaliate. It involves, among other things, setting up of a strict chain of command to ensure that a nuclear weapon is not triggered off by accident or by over-ambitious army commanders. As General V.N. Sharma, former chief of army staff, points out, it entails setting up a special tri-services strategic command directly under the prime minister's authority with enough precautions to ensure that no one person can order the launch of a nuclear weapon.

Besides, if India has to upgrade the quality of its nuclear weapons without further testing, it would require super-computers that can do the necessary modelling and simulations. All this, of course, involves enormous budgetary allocations: conservative estimates put it anywhere between Rs 15,000 crore and Rs 20,000 crore, or half the annual defence budget, but spread over a number of years. It is expected to jack up defence costs by an average of 15 per cent annually. While India may be able to reduce the manpower in its forces by going nuclear, costs in terms of modernising the army would offset any saving.

None of these, however, takes into account the cost of developing and manufacturing the nuclear bomb itself -- a figure that gets amortised into the vast sums of money needed to run India's nuclear establishment with its range of laboratories and reactors. Nor has the question of just how many bombs we require been settled. General K. Sundarji, another former chief of staff, argues for a minimum deterrent of 30 to 40 bombs to target hostile neighbours. The idea being that an aggressive nation knows that India has enough nuke power to cause unacceptable damage to some of its principal cities, thereby reducing the chances of war. In nuclear parlance, it is called reaching a mad, or mutual assured destruction, point. General Sharma believes that around 50 bombs should do, but calls for "going the whole hog" in delivery systems.

Having exploded a nuclear device in 1974, could India have done without the latest series of tests? No, say nuclear experts like M.R. Srinivasan, another former AEC chief: "If we have to build up a credible nuclear deterrent, then we can't have a frozen design that is out-of-date." While the 1974 blast told the world that India could make a bomb, the country had to develop designs that could be married to various delivery systems.

Basically, what was needed were bombs with more bang and less weight that could be tailored to specific military needs. Especially because the weapons-grade plutonium generated by the erratic Dhruva research reactor at Trombay is estimated to be sufficient to make just about 20 bombs of the 1974 Pokhran type. In the current series of explosions, India is also believed to have tested plutonium generated by its power reactors and possibly even enriched uranium. All this to augment its stocks of nuclear explosive material.

But why did it take 24 years to conduct another round of tests? There are several reasons. After 1974, India developed cold feet in the face of international pressure and put its weapons programme on hold. Since then, it has been taken up in fits and starts. Iyengar maintains that by 1982 India was ready for conducting a major round of tests, but Indira Gandhi backed off at the last minute. There were several windows of opportunity, the most recent being in 1995 when India came close to testing. But after news of the impending tests was leaked, the then prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao yielded to international pressure and did not give the green signal.

Pokhran 1998 was different not just for the number of explosions but also the range of weapons systems it helped to test: bombs with enormous yields of energy caused by advanced thermonuclear reactions, weapon-compatible, medium-impact bombs and, if needed, tactical ones too (see graphics). At least three of the tests have helped India generate data for what is known as sub-critical testing -- in which, short of the explosive yield, the entire design of the bomb is validated. It is a controversial means of testing the reliability of nuclear weapons adopted by the five nuclear powers to get around the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The Pokhran tests revealed another well-kept secret: that the AEC team lead by Chairman R. Chidambaram works closely with the DRDO headed by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. It was a clear indication of India's intention of moving towards a weaponised nuclear capability.

While India's announcement of a thermonuclear explosion led many to initially believe that it had exploded the more powerful hydrogen bomb, this may not be true. Iyengar thinks the test was more in the nature of a "boosted fission bomb" where a thermonuclear reaction is used to increase yield in conventional atom bombs by about 10 times. While it does give India the technical capability of making or exploding a hydrogen bomb, scientists believe that the country does not need such enormous explosions. There was no need, as one of them put it, to get that mad.