40 years way too long for me to predict with any sort of confidence. At most I look at 5 years with 10 years as a weapons procurement life cycle. Thorium would have no impact during this period and thus 123 access to Ur is currently a must if India is do both - a civie energey program and a nuke weapons platform.
We dont need 123 to increase our Nuke weapons programme, Please read tellis et al and I have explained this before. With whatever we have if we want we can have thousands of warhead, but sir our arsenal I believe is much less than what we can do.
sir saying thorium will have no impact within a decade is mistaken, we are manufacturing our second stage Thorium programme and we are soon to begin manufacturing the third stage thorium programme. By manufacturing I mean all designs are complete and manufacturing reactors.
The need of 123/LWR's is to provide a smooth transition in developement-deployment phase of Thorium based reactors, thus developers can take their time and transit things smoothly instead oh hurrying through for the immediate need of power.
Sir we are into over 40 years of thorium research.
If AGNI-III is to come on as a MIRV platform in 10 years, then your warhead development must be now. They must go hand-in-hand or the AGNI-III will be a single warhead rocket (which is more likely).
Agni 3 is not MIRV but Agni 3++/3SL/4
will be MIRV, We dont need to design a 'new' Warhead the RV MK4 with the existing warhead is more than enough. Sir the MIRV system in Indias case wont be like the older generation MIRV, The RV's are completely and completely independent of the Launcher. There will be a payload faring in sub-orbital trajectory which will carry the MIRV's attached to it.
There are several reasons to keep testing. One is development. The other is the reliability of the arsenal. Open source materials suggests a 40% failure rate of the world's nuclear arsenals from failure to launch to failed initialization of the device. Before the moratorium on testing by the N5, all five N5 powers rushed to complete a series of tests - not to develop new weapons but to determine the viability of their arsenals.
Sir I'm not doubting the reliability of weapons off N5, let me state these things,
1. We dont have anything that will give us MT yields nor we need something of that sort.
2. Our Primary S1 device that was tested the first stage yielded some around 25 to 30 KT (have to check) the total yield with second stage was somewhere around 40KT (have to check again), it is very simple nuclear science with that payload you can easily take your yield to 200 KT (just with the first stage yield even if it is less than 20KT), similarly if you test a 200 KT yield you can easily have a 1MT yield using the same design. Remember Sir our second generation warheads (the second gen is what I vaguely put) was a 200 KT device which was not tested but a more smaller efficient design was later tested, Also incase you dont know we still produce Tritium which boosts yields by a LOT margin Please read it, It is actually from Janes.
Tritium from Power Plants gives India an H-bomb capability
3. There is no question about what we tested being not-reliable, We had our own supercomputer that time and there was some questions raised by some of NPI's (non ploriferation idiots), Each of them was at that time systematically proven wrong bu DAE's writeups themselves, If there was a need for more tests we could have done that before. If you read Russian izvestia newspaper that time, they had lots of interesting articles regarding Indias test from Russian scientists opinions et al.
4. What we tested was our third gen warhead design, the second gen warhead design was not tested, first generation was tested in 1974.
India has not even began to do that and maybe won't need to for another 10 years since the arsenal is relatively young but in 10 years time, the arsenal's reliability will come into question and India will have to answer that somehow.
Sir I did not quite get this are you stating that Do we need to test in future? If yes and If we do we will make sure 123 having very little effect on us. We need to test if and only if we need yields more than 200~300 KT's.
Sir Please read
Agni [Strategic Ballistic Missile] relating to missile. I think your not informed of Indias warhead developements, we dont need to deploy a new warhead as of now at all for having MIRV.