Haridas wrote:If only someone can get the proper context of Tesse Thomas statement.
Supratik wrote:In any case coming back to the original argument the long range Indian missiles have a range and the lower range is stated e.g. there is no official report that Agni 5 is anything but 5000 kms missile but Chinese sources have stated that it is 5000-8000 kms range.
dinesh_kimar wrote:Haridas wrote:If only someone can get the proper context of Tesse Thomas statement.
This from Hindu talks abt Agni 4, not Agni 3. I guess you are right , Saar.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/missile-woman-urges-her-fraternity-to-fly-high/article17443613.ece/amp/
but for the AC, subs, and boats he might be correct. Supratik wrote:In any case coming back to the original argument the long range Indian missiles have a range and the lower range is stated e.g. there is no official report that Agni 5 is anything but 5000 kms missile but Chinese sources have stated that it is 5000-8000 kms range.
Even as thorny issues of force-modernisation, budget-prioritisation and joint command structures engage the attention of our newly anointed Chief of Defence Staff, he will, sooner than later, in his capacity as the first-ever Military Adviser to the National Command Authority (NCA), have to address India’s nuclear deterrent. When he does so, he might ponder over US strategist Bernard Brodie’s prescription for preventing a nuclear conflict: “Thus far, the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.”
SSridhar wrote:India is building nuclear submarines and ICBMs. That’s a $14 billion mistake.
The four types include approximately 10 Agni-III missiles, which have a range of up to 5,000 kilometers, stationed in Assam in northeast India; around 16 Agni-II missiles, eight of which are stationed in India’s northeast and another eight stationed in central India, each with a range of around 2,000 kilometers; about 20 short-range Agni-I missiles; and 24 short-range Prithvi-II missiles stationed close to the Pakistan border.
India’s global opportunity. The decay and collapse of diplomatic arms control restraints are unshackling nuclear weapons capabilities the world over.This presents an opportunity for India to lead a global resistance to this trajectory,bolstered by its strategic sufficiency against Pakistan and China.
The Indian government might begin with unilateral restraints in range and deployment numbers, starting with a pledge not to deploy missiles with a longer range than that of the Agni-III, or about 5,000 kilometers. A voluntarily restrained Indian nuclear force would place India in a strong position to lead global calls for reviving and strengthening arms control talks, including among itself, Pakistan, and China.
Taking upon itself a voluntary leadership role on nuclear restraint would confer additional benefits. First, it would allow India to reassert the credible minimum deterrence nature of its nuclear force, which is increasingly under domestic and international question.
Second, it would place the global spotlight upon China and Pakistan. Despite its larger nuclear arsenal, China claims that its less-caveated no-first-use policy demonstrates that its nuclear practice is closer to nuclear minimalism than that of India.
Finally, as India seeks to join both the UN Security Council and the Nuclear Suppliers Group as a permanent member, such an initiative would also support its foreign policy goals of strengthening global nonproliferation efforts outside the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signaling its nuclear restraint, and highlighting its status as a responsible rising power.
Mollick.R wrote:
India’s global opportunity. The decay and collapse of diplomatic arms control restraints are unshackling nuclear weapons capabilities the world over.This presents an opportunity for India to lead a global resistance to this trajectory,bolstered by its strategic sufficiency against Pakistan and China.
The Indian government might begin with unilateral restraints in range and deployment numbers, starting with a pledge not to deploy missiles with a longer range than that of the Agni-III, or about 5,000 kilometers. A voluntarily restrained Indian nuclear force would place India in a strong position to lead global calls for reviving and strengthening arms control talks, including among itself, Pakistan, and China.
Taking upon itself a voluntary leadership role on nuclear restraint would confer additional benefits. First, it would allow India to reassert the credible minimum deterrence nature of its nuclear force, which is increasingly under domestic and international question.
Second, it would place the global spotlight upon China and Pakistan. Despite its larger nuclear arsenal, China claims that its less-caveated no-first-use policy demonstrates that its nuclear practice is closer to nuclear minimalism than that of India.
Finally, as India seeks to join both the UN Security Council and the Nuclear Suppliers Group as a permanent member, such an initiative would also support its foreign policy goals of strengthening global nonproliferation efforts outside the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signaling its nuclear restraint, and highlighting its status as a responsible rising power.
Authors are high on weed, writing purely from their agenda pov. They want to see India in Nehruvian era.
Only the Indians supposed to follow and honour all 3 or 4 letter international treaties and our enemies gives a f()ck about them.
Also we have not forgotten USA chose to look other way during paki nuclear program due to their own strategic interest at Afghanistan & after two decades once again did same when Xerox Khan's deeds were open in public.
When A-6 comes into testing, India should tell A-6 has a range of 5011 km range only and troll them on their face.
A February 2020 speech by Lt. Gen. (retd) Khalid Kidwai, the former head of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, is noteworthy in this regard.
In remarks focused mainly on the Balakot crisis, Kidwai hammered repeatedly on the centrality of nuclear weapons to escalation calculations. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, Kidwai asserted, “deterred India from expanding operations beyond a single unsuccessful airstrike” at Balakot, through the “cold calculation that nuclear weapons come into play sooner rather than later.” He warned that “while it may be easy [for India] to climb the first rung on the escalatory ladder, the second rung would always belong to Pakistan, and that India’s choice to move to the third rung would invariably be dangerously problematic in anticipation of the fourth rung response by Pakistan.” Finally, he cautioned that the Indian air strike “was playing with fire at the lower end of the nuclear spectrum and Armageddon at the upper end.”
If nuclear deterrence sounded the base notes in Kidwai’s speech, his observations on India’s “irrational, unstable and belligerent internal and external policies” provided the shrill tones. He railed against the “extremists and religious fanatics of the RSS and the BJP [who] are the real time state and the government,…and in firm control of India’s nuclear weapons, with a track record of strategic recklessness and irresponsibility.” He also castigated Indian military leaders as “too meek, or equally reckless, to offer sound professional advice” and for giving in to the “irrational pressures of their political masters.”
Warnings of “Hindustan’s quest for regional domination” could be read as part of the battle for international public opinion in South Asia. However, the juxtaposition of Kidwai’s arguments for the success of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence with his charges of “strategic recklessness” by India’s “ideologically driven leadership” suggests real concern about the “irrationality” of Indian actors in future crises. Modi appears to personify the threat on which Pakistani strategic culture is built and perpetuated by Pakistan’s security establishment. Indeed, Modi features prominently in the Pakistan Army’s 2020 Green Book, which from the first page argues, “Mr Modi has not only endangered the immediate neighbourhood, but has also raised the ante for the entire World.”
Since 2002, and perhaps earlier, military planners in Pakistan could count on Indian leaders exercising crisis restraint. There seemed to be consensus in New Delhi that engaging in military conflict with Pakistan, regardless of the cause, was detrimental to India’s larger economic and global status-building project. (Pakistanis may not agree with this assessment, but the record of crises between 2002-2016 appears to bear it out, as do many Indian narratives, including from critics of the current ruling party.) Indian restraint made the effectiveness of Pakistan’s deterrent a relatively foregone conclusion, no matter how Pakistan postured its nuclear arsenal.
Pakistani analysts argued that “full spectrum deterrence” – the posturing of nuclear weapons for use in tactical, operational, and strategic roles – had closed the space for India to conduct even limited (proportionate) military operations against Pakistan. However, Indian restraint in countering terrorist attacks even as provocative as the Lashkar-e-Taiba assault on Mumbai in November 2008, may have owed more to the outlook, priorities, and disposition of Indian leaders than to Pakistan’s deterrent. Indian governments prior to Modi sought to avoid war for many reasons and used the risks of escalation to a nuclear conflict to justify their restraint. The military space for Indian reprisals always existed, which India’s very limited Balakot air strike demonstrated,even if the strike was neither as successful or paradigm-making as Indian advocates of the “new normal” profess.
Yet the real fear in Pakistan is that Modi’s rhetoric and domestic policies during and after his May 2019 re-election indicate a level of zealotry and irrationality that might lead to deterrence failure. Modi’s campaign-trail allusions to a Qatal Ki Raat (night of the murder) and blustery warnings that India isn’t saving its nuclear weapons for Diwali could be dismissed as electioneering. But subsequent decisions by Modi to change the legal and political status of disputed territory in Kashmirand to target the citizenship of Indian Muslimsare interpreted as state-directed bigotry that will also infuse India’s national security institutions.
Islamabad can be responsible and measured in its responses in the face of Indian recklessness, yet the world continues to side with India. Though Pakistan’s nuclear weapons may, as Kidwai argues, “bring the international community rushing into South Asia to prevent a wider conflagration,” they do little to dissuade an aggressive, bigoted, and ideologically motivated Indian leadership from taking calibrated military actions against Pakistan.
Nuclear weapons will continue to deter major war with India and catalyze international crisis intervention, as they have always done. Yet, if the “new normal” is not substantially more dangerous and prone to a nuclear exchange than the old normal, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons do little to diminish or deter the endemic threats lurking on Pakistan’s doorstep – economic failure, political disarray, international isolation. Such weaknesses are far easier for India to attempt to exploit than any perceived gaps in Pakistan’s military capabilities.
Over at Popular Science, Peter W. Singer and Ma Xiu draw attention to China’s DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM). The DF-26 is not only notable for being a system tailor-made for payload delivery to the U.S. territory of Guam, but for its dual capability. It is currently the longest-range system in the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force explicitly designed for compatibility with conventional and nuclear payloads alike.
As Singer and Ma note, this creates more than a few dangerous scenarios: for instance, in a conflict, the United States would be tempted to target DF-26 battalions to ensure that it could sustain operations into the Western Pacific and past the First Island Chain from its military facilities on Guam. But conducting such an attack would amount to nuclear counterforce given that any given DF-26 launcher could play a role for nuclear retaliation by China.
A separate scenario concerns China launching a conventional DF-26 during a conflict. With space-based early warning sensors able to notify the United States of a launch, planners may reason that such a launch could be a nuclear one. Here, China’s stated posture of No First Use might have little to do in shaping U.S. assumptions, especially as many in the U.S. government (certainly in the Trump administration) already view China’s No First Use declaration with skepticism.
This “pre-launch ambiguity” problem is very much a feature for the DF-26, however, and not a bug, per se (see a recent monograph on this topic by James Acton for more). Singer and Ma draw attention to a fascinating CCTV report from a few years ago that boasts of the dual-capable nature of a missile presumed to be the DF-26. According to their translation of Zhou Lusheng, a brigade political commissar, cited in the report: “Our mission is the two major operations, the two major deterrences [a reference to both nuclear and conventional capabilities]… A nuclear-conventional dual-use brigade must train to simultaneously possess two different operational postures… meaning that personnel of such a brigade have a higher workload.”
Even more interesting is the training procedure described in the article. According to the authors, “The article even describes a drill in which the brigade practices firing a precision missile, then rapidly switches over to a nuclear posture for a counter-strike mission.” People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) training protocols are known to only involve nuclear exercises that simulate retaliatory strikes (to keep No First Use credible) so the implication in this exercise is that a conventional DF-26 strike might invite nuclear use from an adversary.
In the end, the co-mingling of conventional and nuclear capabilities is designed to create a calculated form of ambiguity that might cause the United States to think twice. There’s some evidence that American planners are taking these risks seriously. The U.S. Department of Defense’s 2019 report on Chinese military capabilities emphasized the ambiguity problem, including by drawing attention to internal debates on how China’s doctrine might need to be modified.
“Some PLA officers have written publicly of the need to spell out conditions under which China might need to use nuclear weapons first; for example, if an enemy’s conventional attack threatened the survival of China’s nuclear force or of the regime itself,” the 2019 report notes, adding, “There has been no indication that national leaders are willing to attach such nuances and caveats to China’s existing NFU policy.”
“China’s commingling of some of its conventional and nuclear missile forces, and ambiguities in China’s NFU conditions, could complicate deterrence and escalation management during a conflict,” the 2019 report added. “Once a conflict has begun, China’s dispersal of mobile missile systems to hide sites could further complicate the task of distinguishing between nuclear and conventional forces and, thus, increase the potential for inadvertent attacks on the latter.”
It remains unknown how the Chinese leadership precisely views the question of retaliating for conventional, long-range precision strike on dual-capable strategic systems like the DF-26, but the capability for the system itself is an important feature. The United States and China remain no closer to the sort of dialogue on strategic stability that would allow for an authoritative qualification by the Chinese side on how it views this important question.
..The DF-26 is not only notable for being a system tailor-made for payload delivery to the U.S. territory of Guam, but for its dual capability
ramana wrote:Don't know what Kidwai is bolivating about Paki deterrence. They don't have more than half a dozen large bombs and mostly ping pong balls.
The Trump administration considered whether to conduct the first US nuclear test explosion in 28 years in a recent meeting with top security officials, according to the Washington Post.
The prospect of restarting testing reportedly came up in a meeting with officials from top national security agencies on Friday, May 15, after Russia and China were accused of performing low-yield nuclear tests — allegations both countries have denied.
An anonymous senior administration official told The Post that a US "rapid test" could offer leverage in arms negotiations with Russia and China, as the White House pushes for a trilateral arms control deal.
It would be the first time in 28 years since the US conducted a nuclear test explosion.
America has already accused Russia and China of possibly conducting positive yield tests over the course of the last 12 months. As such, grounds for America's own withdrawal from the CTBT are being laid...
Of late, America has been developing new plutonium pits for emerging warhead designs such as the W87-1 (for GBSD) & has also been looking to certify the W80-4 warhead that will arm LRSO. Sub-critical testing will suffice for both. But there are other designs that require more.
This growing aversion towards the CTBT in America, Russia and China is driven by the need to develop & therefore 'test' warheads of new design for the new generation of hypersonic weapons under development. Simulations, hydronuclear testing etc. won't cut it.
Look, CTBT is dead. All three, i.e. America, Russia and China are now more or less ready to give up on it. India should also give up its 'voluntary moratorium' and do what needs to be done.
Ultimately, thwarting China requires a renewed focus on India's nuclear deterrent.
Arms control envoy Marshall Billingslea announced Thursday he is in nascent talks with his Russian counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. The news comes a month after Moscow signaled readiness to include some of its latest nuclear weapons in the last remaining arms control pact between the two countries, if the U.S. agrees to extend the treaty.
Arms control advocates and some lawmakers have worried that the Trump administration could let the 2010 New START arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia expire in 2021, leaving no limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.
Speaking at a Hudson Institute event, Billingslea emphasized the talks must be based on U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision for a trilateral arms control agreement that includes China along with the U.S. and Russia.
During a call with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on April 17, Ryabkov said that Russia’s new Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missile and the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle could be counted along with other Russian nuclear weapons under the treaty.
Key point: India has a good nuclear arsenal. But they want to upgrade it to ensure their deterrence is credible.
India has 130 to 140 nuclear warheads—and more are coming, according to a new report.
“India is estimated to have produced enough military plutonium for 150 to 200 nuclear warheads, but has likely produced only 130 to 140,” according to Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. “Nonetheless, additional plutonium will be required to produce warheads for missiles now under development, and India is reportedly building several new plutonium production facilities.”
In addition, “India continues to modernize its nuclear arsenal, with at least five new weapon systems now under development to complement or replace existing nuclear-capable aircraft, land-based delivery systems, and sea-based systems.”
Unlike the missile-centric U.S. and Russian nuclear forces, India still heavily relies on bombers, perhaps not unexpected for a nation that fielded its first nuclear-capable ballistic missile in 2003. Kristensen and Korda estimate India maintains three or four nuclear strike squadrons of Cold War-vintage, French-made Mirage 2000H and Jaguar IS/IB aircraft targeted at Pakistan and China.
“Despite the upgrades, the original nuclear bombers are getting old and India is probably searching for a modern fighter-bomber that could potentially take over the air-based nuclear strike role in the future,” the report notes. India is buying thirty-six French Rafale fighters that carry nuclear weapons in French service, and presumably could do for India.
India’s nuclear missile force is only fifteen years old, but it already has four types of land-based ballistic missiles: the short-range Prithvi-II and Agni-I, the medium-range Agni-II and the intermediate-range Agni-III. “At least two other longer-range Agni missiles are under development: the Agni-IV and Agni-V,” says the report. “It remains to be seen how many of these missile types India plans to fully develop and keep in its arsenal. Some may serve as technology development programs toward longer-range missiles.”
“Although the Indian government has made no statements about the future size or composition of its land-based missile force, short-range and redundant missile types could potentially be discontinued, with only medium- and long-range missiles deployed in the future to provide a mix of strike options against near and distant targets,” the report noted.
India is also developing the Nirbhay ground-launched cruise missile, similar to the U.S. Tomahawk. In addition, there is Dhanush sea-based, short-range ballistic missile, which is fired from two specially-configured patrol vessels. The report estimates that India is building three or four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, which will be equipped with a short-range missile, or a bigger missile with a range of 2,000 miles.
It’s an ambitious program. “The government appears to be planning to field a diverse missile force that will be expensive to maintain and operate,” the report points out.
What remains to be seen is what will be the command and control system to make sure these missiles are fired when—and only when—they should be. And, of course, since Pakistan and China also have nuclear weapons, Indian leaders may find that more nukes only lead to an arms race that paradoxically leaves their nation less secure.
ramana wrote:Maj Gen Mrinal Suman built those two shafts/tunnels in the 1980s with primitive equipment and without being detected. Kudos to you for determining the actual depth based on Nordyke's formula.
I think the scientists didn't expect the depth to be calculated when they told Raj Chengappa the square foot of the steel liner.
Should never reveal such things.
Yes, Applied Physics can get you very far.
If I didn't get into engineering I would prefer to be an Applied Physicist.
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