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Gary Samore, who served from 2009 to 2013 as the White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, said there was little misunderstanding. “I believe that India intends to build thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China,” said Samore. It is unclear, he continued, when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful arsenal, but “they will.”
...
Robert Kelley, who served as the director of the Iraq Action Team at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1992-1993 and 2001-2005, is a former project leader for nuclear intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He told CPI that after analyzing the available satellite imagery, as well as studying open source material on both sites, he believes that India is pursuing a larger thermonuclear arsenal. Its development, he warned, “will inevitably usher in a new nuclear arms race” in a volatile region.
...
Western knowledge about how India’s weapons are stored, transported, and protected, and how the radiological and fissile material that fuels them is guarded and warehoused — the chain of custody — remains rudimentary. After examining nuclear security practices in 25 countries with “weapons-usable nuclear materials,” the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, in January 2014 ranked India’s nuclear security practices 23rd, above only Iran and North Korea. An NTI analyst who asked to remain unnamed told CPI that India’s score stemmed in part from the country’s opacity and “obfuscation on nuclear regulation and security issues.”
...But the group also noted the prevalence of corruption in India and the insecurity of the region
...
India was also negotiating a deal with the United States to expand nuclear cooperation.
...
The agreement, which the two sides signed in 2007, was highly controversial in Washington. While critics warned it would reward India for its secret pursuit of the bomb and allow it to expand its nuclear weapons work, supporters emphasized that it included language in which India agreed to identify its civilian nuclear sites and open them to inspection by the IAEA.
India also said that it would refrain from conducting new atomic weapons tests. And in return for waiving restrictions on India’s civil nuclear program, the U.S. president was required to determine that India was “working actively with the United States for the early conclusion of a multilateral treaty on the cessation of the production of fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons.” In April 2006, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the deal would not trigger an arms race in the region or “enhance [India’s] military capacity or add to its military stockpile.” Rice added: “Moreover, the nuclear balance in the region is a function of the political and military situation in the region. We are far more likely to be able to influence those regional dynamics from a position of strong relations with India and indeed with Pakistan.”
Opponents of the deal complained, however, that it did not compel India to allow inspections of nine reactor sites known to be associated with the country’s military, including several producing plutonium for nuclear arms. The deal also allowed 10 other reactor sites subject to IAEA inspection to use imported uranium fuel, freeing up an indigenously mined supply of uranium that was not tracked by the international community — and could now be redirected to the country’s bomb program.
By May 2009, seven months after Congress ratified the U.S.-India nuclear cooperation deal, the Karnataka state government had secretly leased 4,290 acres adjacent to the villages of Varavu Kaval and Khudapura in the district of Chitradurga to the DRDO and another 1,500 acres to the Indian Institute of Science, a research center that has frequently worked with the DRDO and India’s nuclear industry, documents obtained by lawyers showed.
In December 2010, the state government leased a further 573 acres to the Indian Space Research Organisation and the BARC bought 1,810 acres. Councilor Karianna said the villagers were not told at the time about any of these transactions and that the documents, which the advocacy group obtained two years later in 2012, “were stunning. We were being fenced in behind our backs.”
Srikumar Banerjee, then-chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, first offered an official glimpse of the project’s ambitions in 2011, when he told CNN’s India channel that the enrichment plant could be used to produce nuclear fuel, or slightly enriched uranium, to power India’s heavy- and light-water reactors. However, Banerjee added that the site would also have a strategic use, a designation that would keep international inspectors away. (India’s nuclear agreement with Washington and others provides no access to military-related facilities.)
...
Serena Kelleher-Vergantini, an analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nonprofit, scoured all the available satellite imagery in the summer of 2014. Eventually, she zeroed in on the construction site in the kavals. The journal IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review was separately doing the same in London, commissioning Kelley, formerly of the IAEA, to analyze images from the Mysore plant.
What struck both of them was the enormous scale and ambition of the projects, as well as the secrecy surrounding them. The military-nuclear park in the kavals, at nearly 20 square miles, has a footprint comparable in size to the New York state capital, Albany. After analyzing the images and conducting interviews with atomic officials in India, Kelleher-Vergantini concluded that the footprint for enrichment facilities planned in the new complex would enable scientists to produce industrial quantities of uranium (though the institute would only know how much when construction had progressed further). As Kelley examined photos of the second site, he was astonished by the presence of two recently expanded buildings that had been made lofty enough to accommodate a new generation of tall, carbon-fiber centrifuges, capable of working far faster to enrich uranium than any existing versions.
Nuclear experts express the productiveness of the enrichment machines in Separative Work Units (SWUs). Kelley concluded that at the second site, the government could install up to 1,050 of these new hyper-efficient machines, which, together with about 700 older centrifuges, could complete 42,000 SWUs a year — enough, he said, to make roughly 403 pounds of weapons-grade uranium. A new hydrogen bomb, with an explosive force exceeding 100,000 tons of TNT, requires only between roughly 9 and 15 pounds of enriched uranium, according to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group of nuclear experts from 16 countries that seek to reduce and secure uranium stocks.
...
India has already received roughly 4,914 tons of uranium from France, Russia, and Kazakhstan, for example, and it has agreements with Canada, Mongolia, Argentina, and Namibia for additional shipments. In September 2014, then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott signed an agreement to make Australia a “long-term, reliable supplier of uranium to India” — a deal that has sparked considerable controversy at home.
...
The International Panel on Fissile Materials estimates that the Arihant-class submarine core requires only about 143 pounds of uranium, enriched to 30 percent — a measure of how many of its isotopes can be readily used in weaponry. Using this figure and the estimated capacity of the centrifuges India is installing in Mysore alone — not even including Challakere — Kelley concluded that even after fueling its entire submarine fleet there would be 352 pounds of weapons-grade uranium left over every year, or enough to fuel at least 22 H-bombs. (His calculation presumes that the plant is run efficiently and that its excess capacity is purposeful and not driven by bureaucratic inertia — two large uncertainties in India, a senior U.S. official noted. But having a “rainy day” stockpile to deter the Chinese might be the aim, the official added.)
...
A retired official who served inside the nuclear cell at the Indian prime minister’s office, the apex organization that supervises the military nuclear program, conceded that other uses besides submarines had been anticipated “for many years.” He pointed to a “thermonuclear bomb program” as “a beneficiary” and suggested India had had no choice but to “develop a new generation of more powerful megaton weapons” if it was to maintain “credible minimum deterrence.”
Previously, this meant the bare minimum required to prevent an attack on India, but a new Indian doctrine in 2003 — in response to Pakistan’s increasingly aggressive nuclear posture — altered this notion: “Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” China, the retired official said, “has long had a thermonuclear capability, and if India is to have a strategic defense worth its salt, and become a credible power in the region, we need to develop a similar weapon and in deployable numbers.” U.S. and British officials affirmed that they have been aware of this discussion among Indian scientists and soldiers for years.
Previously, this meant the bare minimum required to prevent an attack on India, but a new Indian doctrine in 2003 — in response to Pakistan’s increasingly aggressive nuclear posture — altered this notion: “Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” China, the retired official said, “has long had a thermonuclear capability, and if India is to have a strategic defense worth its salt, and become a credible power in the region, we need to develop a similar weapon and in deployable numbers.” U.S. and British officials affirmed that they have been aware of this discussion among Indian scientists and soldiers for years.
...
The retired British official added: “India needs to constantly rethink what deterrence means, as it is not a static notion, and everyone understands that. But the balance of power in the region is so easily upset.” The official said that in choosing to remain publicly silent, the United States was taking a risk, evidently to try and reap financial and strategic rewards.
...
Officials at the Pentagon argued privately before Washington reached its 2008 nuclear deal with India that lifting sanctions would lead to billions of dollars’ worth of sales in conventional weapons, according to a U.S. official privy to the discussions. That prediction was accurate, with U.S. exports of major weapons to India reaching $5 billion from 2011 to 2014 and edging out Russian sales to India for the first time.
“But the U.S. is also looking for something intangible: to create a new strategic partner capable of facing down China,” and so India has taken advantage of the situation to overhaul its military nuclear capability, the British official noted. Pushing back China, said the official, who has worked for 30 years in counterterrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and nonproliferation, especially in Southern Asia, is regarded as being “in everyone’s interest.”
White House officials declined to comment on this claim on the record. But Robert Einhorn, the State Department’s former top nonproliferation official, told the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in March that some officials in the Bush administration had the ambition, in making a nuclear deal with India, to “work together to counter China, to be a counterweight to an emerging China.” He added that, in his view, that ambition has not been realized, due to India’s historic insistence on pursuing an independent foreign policy. He also said the nuclear deal had unfortunate repercussions, because other nations concluded that Washington was playing favorites with India.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/16/india_nuclear_city_top_secret_china_pakistan_barc/
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/16/india_nuclear_city_top_secret_china_pakistan_barc/
Should we conclude that the powers who have made India a nuclear state in the first place, are making it a thermonuclear state this time?
And what should Pakistan and China to some extent do about it?
...
Robert Kelley, who served as the director of the Iraq Action Team at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1992-1993 and 2001-2005, is a former project leader for nuclear intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He told CPI that after analyzing the available satellite imagery, as well as studying open source material on both sites, he believes that India is pursuing a larger thermonuclear arsenal. Its development, he warned, “will inevitably usher in a new nuclear arms race” in a volatile region.
...
Western knowledge about how India’s weapons are stored, transported, and protected, and how the radiological and fissile material that fuels them is guarded and warehoused — the chain of custody — remains rudimentary. After examining nuclear security practices in 25 countries with “weapons-usable nuclear materials,” the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, in January 2014 ranked India’s nuclear security practices 23rd, above only Iran and North Korea. An NTI analyst who asked to remain unnamed told CPI that India’s score stemmed in part from the country’s opacity and “obfuscation on nuclear regulation and security issues.”
...But the group also noted the prevalence of corruption in India and the insecurity of the region
...
India was also negotiating a deal with the United States to expand nuclear cooperation.
...
The agreement, which the two sides signed in 2007, was highly controversial in Washington. While critics warned it would reward India for its secret pursuit of the bomb and allow it to expand its nuclear weapons work, supporters emphasized that it included language in which India agreed to identify its civilian nuclear sites and open them to inspection by the IAEA.
India also said that it would refrain from conducting new atomic weapons tests. And in return for waiving restrictions on India’s civil nuclear program, the U.S. president was required to determine that India was “working actively with the United States for the early conclusion of a multilateral treaty on the cessation of the production of fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons.” In April 2006, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the deal would not trigger an arms race in the region or “enhance [India’s] military capacity or add to its military stockpile.” Rice added: “Moreover, the nuclear balance in the region is a function of the political and military situation in the region. We are far more likely to be able to influence those regional dynamics from a position of strong relations with India and indeed with Pakistan.”
Opponents of the deal complained, however, that it did not compel India to allow inspections of nine reactor sites known to be associated with the country’s military, including several producing plutonium for nuclear arms. The deal also allowed 10 other reactor sites subject to IAEA inspection to use imported uranium fuel, freeing up an indigenously mined supply of uranium that was not tracked by the international community — and could now be redirected to the country’s bomb program.
By May 2009, seven months after Congress ratified the U.S.-India nuclear cooperation deal, the Karnataka state government had secretly leased 4,290 acres adjacent to the villages of Varavu Kaval and Khudapura in the district of Chitradurga to the DRDO and another 1,500 acres to the Indian Institute of Science, a research center that has frequently worked with the DRDO and India’s nuclear industry, documents obtained by lawyers showed.
In December 2010, the state government leased a further 573 acres to the Indian Space Research Organisation and the BARC bought 1,810 acres. Councilor Karianna said the villagers were not told at the time about any of these transactions and that the documents, which the advocacy group obtained two years later in 2012, “were stunning. We were being fenced in behind our backs.”
Srikumar Banerjee, then-chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, first offered an official glimpse of the project’s ambitions in 2011, when he told CNN’s India channel that the enrichment plant could be used to produce nuclear fuel, or slightly enriched uranium, to power India’s heavy- and light-water reactors. However, Banerjee added that the site would also have a strategic use, a designation that would keep international inspectors away. (India’s nuclear agreement with Washington and others provides no access to military-related facilities.)
...
Serena Kelleher-Vergantini, an analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nonprofit, scoured all the available satellite imagery in the summer of 2014. Eventually, she zeroed in on the construction site in the kavals. The journal IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review was separately doing the same in London, commissioning Kelley, formerly of the IAEA, to analyze images from the Mysore plant.
What struck both of them was the enormous scale and ambition of the projects, as well as the secrecy surrounding them. The military-nuclear park in the kavals, at nearly 20 square miles, has a footprint comparable in size to the New York state capital, Albany. After analyzing the images and conducting interviews with atomic officials in India, Kelleher-Vergantini concluded that the footprint for enrichment facilities planned in the new complex would enable scientists to produce industrial quantities of uranium (though the institute would only know how much when construction had progressed further). As Kelley examined photos of the second site, he was astonished by the presence of two recently expanded buildings that had been made lofty enough to accommodate a new generation of tall, carbon-fiber centrifuges, capable of working far faster to enrich uranium than any existing versions.
Nuclear experts express the productiveness of the enrichment machines in Separative Work Units (SWUs). Kelley concluded that at the second site, the government could install up to 1,050 of these new hyper-efficient machines, which, together with about 700 older centrifuges, could complete 42,000 SWUs a year — enough, he said, to make roughly 403 pounds of weapons-grade uranium. A new hydrogen bomb, with an explosive force exceeding 100,000 tons of TNT, requires only between roughly 9 and 15 pounds of enriched uranium, according to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group of nuclear experts from 16 countries that seek to reduce and secure uranium stocks.
...
India has already received roughly 4,914 tons of uranium from France, Russia, and Kazakhstan, for example, and it has agreements with Canada, Mongolia, Argentina, and Namibia for additional shipments. In September 2014, then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott signed an agreement to make Australia a “long-term, reliable supplier of uranium to India” — a deal that has sparked considerable controversy at home.
...
The International Panel on Fissile Materials estimates that the Arihant-class submarine core requires only about 143 pounds of uranium, enriched to 30 percent — a measure of how many of its isotopes can be readily used in weaponry. Using this figure and the estimated capacity of the centrifuges India is installing in Mysore alone — not even including Challakere — Kelley concluded that even after fueling its entire submarine fleet there would be 352 pounds of weapons-grade uranium left over every year, or enough to fuel at least 22 H-bombs. (His calculation presumes that the plant is run efficiently and that its excess capacity is purposeful and not driven by bureaucratic inertia — two large uncertainties in India, a senior U.S. official noted. But having a “rainy day” stockpile to deter the Chinese might be the aim, the official added.)
...
A retired official who served inside the nuclear cell at the Indian prime minister’s office, the apex organization that supervises the military nuclear program, conceded that other uses besides submarines had been anticipated “for many years.” He pointed to a “thermonuclear bomb program” as “a beneficiary” and suggested India had had no choice but to “develop a new generation of more powerful megaton weapons” if it was to maintain “credible minimum deterrence.”
Previously, this meant the bare minimum required to prevent an attack on India, but a new Indian doctrine in 2003 — in response to Pakistan’s increasingly aggressive nuclear posture — altered this notion: “Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” China, the retired official said, “has long had a thermonuclear capability, and if India is to have a strategic defense worth its salt, and become a credible power in the region, we need to develop a similar weapon and in deployable numbers.” U.S. and British officials affirmed that they have been aware of this discussion among Indian scientists and soldiers for years.
Previously, this meant the bare minimum required to prevent an attack on India, but a new Indian doctrine in 2003 — in response to Pakistan’s increasingly aggressive nuclear posture — altered this notion: “Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” China, the retired official said, “has long had a thermonuclear capability, and if India is to have a strategic defense worth its salt, and become a credible power in the region, we need to develop a similar weapon and in deployable numbers.” U.S. and British officials affirmed that they have been aware of this discussion among Indian scientists and soldiers for years.
...
The retired British official added: “India needs to constantly rethink what deterrence means, as it is not a static notion, and everyone understands that. But the balance of power in the region is so easily upset.” The official said that in choosing to remain publicly silent, the United States was taking a risk, evidently to try and reap financial and strategic rewards.
...
Officials at the Pentagon argued privately before Washington reached its 2008 nuclear deal with India that lifting sanctions would lead to billions of dollars’ worth of sales in conventional weapons, according to a U.S. official privy to the discussions. That prediction was accurate, with U.S. exports of major weapons to India reaching $5 billion from 2011 to 2014 and edging out Russian sales to India for the first time.
“But the U.S. is also looking for something intangible: to create a new strategic partner capable of facing down China,” and so India has taken advantage of the situation to overhaul its military nuclear capability, the British official noted. Pushing back China, said the official, who has worked for 30 years in counterterrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and nonproliferation, especially in Southern Asia, is regarded as being “in everyone’s interest.”
White House officials declined to comment on this claim on the record. But Robert Einhorn, the State Department’s former top nonproliferation official, told the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in March that some officials in the Bush administration had the ambition, in making a nuclear deal with India, to “work together to counter China, to be a counterweight to an emerging China.” He added that, in his view, that ambition has not been realized, due to India’s historic insistence on pursuing an independent foreign policy. He also said the nuclear deal had unfortunate repercussions, because other nations concluded that Washington was playing favorites with India.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/16/india_nuclear_city_top_secret_china_pakistan_barc/
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/16/india_nuclear_city_top_secret_china_pakistan_barc/
Should we conclude that the powers who have made India a nuclear state in the first place, are making it a thermonuclear state this time?
And what should Pakistan and China to some extent do about it?
