In a year, India will have nuclear triad: Navy chief

NEW DELHI: Only three countries, US, Russia and China, can be said to have fully-operational nuclear weapon triads -- the capability to fire nuclear-tipped missiles from land, air and sea. India will gatecrash into this highly-exclusive club by 2012.

Navy chief Admiral Nirmal Verma, not given to making dramatic statements, said the triad will be complete once its crucial underwater leg, the country's first indigenous nuclear submarine aptly named INS Arihant or the "destroyer of enemies", is commissioned towards late-2011 or early-2012.

The land and air legs are already in place with the Agni family of road and rail-mobile ballistic missiles as well as fighter jets like Mirage-2000s and Sukhoi-30MKIs jury-rigged to deliver nuclear weapons.

"When INS Arihant goes to sea, it will be on a deterrent patrol (read armed with nucelar-tipped missiles). The triad will then be in place... the aim is to make it as effective as possible," Admiral Verma said on Thursday, in the run-up to Navy Day on December 4.

This comes barely a day after Wikileaks revealed that American and European diplomats were greatly alarmed about Pakistan's feverish production of nuclear weapons. Estimates show Pakistan already has around 70 to 90 warheads, higher than India's 60 to 80. China, of course, is way ahead with around 240 warheads.

While Pakistan is nowhere near getting a nuclear submarine, China has 10 of them in its 62-submarine fleet, with three of them being SSBNs (armed with long-range strategic missiles). India, in contrast, has just 15 conventional and ageing diesel-electric submarines.

Consequently, INS Arihant is crucial to India's nuclear deterrence doctrine, which revolves around a clear "no-first use" policy. A robust and survivable second-strike capability is hugely dependent on having nuclear-powered submarines, armed with SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles), which can operate silently underwater for several months at a time.

Admiral Verma said INS Arihant, which was "launched" at Vizag in July 2009, would have potent SLBM capabilities to complete the triad. With INS Arihant's miniature 83 mw pressurised light-water reactor slated to go "critical" within a month or two for sea-acceptance trials, Navy also seems quite confident about ongoing undersea tests of the 700-km K-15 and 3,500-km K-4 SLBMs.

The 6,000-tonne INS Arihant, which has four silos on its hump to carry 12 K-15s or four extended range K-4s, is to be followed by another two nuclear submarines under the secretive Rs 30,000 crore Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) project.

Navy, on its part, wants to have three SSBNs and six SSNs (nuclear-powered attack submarines) in the years ahead. The force will also finally induct the K-152 Nerpa submarine, on a 10-year lease from Russia, towards April-May 2011 after several delays.

While the 12,000-tonne Nerpa will not come armed with long-range missiles due to international treaties, it will help train Indian sailors in the complex art of operating nuclear submarines. It will also be a lethal hunter of enemy submarines and warships, armed with torpedoes and 300-km Klub-S cruise missiles.