India should lift the lid off Nuclear secrecy

We are just weeks beyond the fifteenth anniversary of the 1998 nuclear tests, and less than a year from the fortieth anniversary of India's 1974 "peaceful nuclear experiment." India is justly proud of what its nuclear scientists have accomplished.

We are just weeks beyond the fifteenth anniversary of the 1998 nuclear tests, and less than a year from the fortieth anniversary of India's 1974 "peaceful nuclear experiment." India is justly proud of what its nuclear scientists have accomplished. In the face of an international regime to slow their progress, Indian scientists, engineers, and even bureaucrats and politicians collaborated to find a way to build an increasingly diverse nuclear energy infrastructure and the ability to produce nuclear weapons. To overcome these obstacles, India built a closed, close-knit nuclear enclave. Now that it has done so, will that establishment open up? Fifteen years after Pokhran-II, it is possible the world knows less about India’s nuclear weapons programme than any other nuclear state, except North Korea. This is not proud company for the world’s largest democracy to share. The Indian public has settled mostly for quiescence about the programme, punctuated by a handful of commentators eager to cheer-lead the programme’s accomplishments. Closed organisations develop pathologies that are often harmful to the broader public interest. Whether India’s nuclear stewards have avoided dangerous practices is unclear based on the scant public record. PERMISSIVE ACTION LINKS :: Fears that personnel screening programmes are insufficient have led most nuclear weapons states, including Pakistan, to develop some sort of “permissive action links”. These prevent nuclear weapons from being launched or detonated without authorisation by political leaders. Does India have permissive action links? We do not know. If India has them, are they robust and tamper-resistant? Apart from a cryptic reference in a 1998 press release to “safety interlocks,” there is no public information. Vice-Admiral Verghese Koithara, in his 2012 study of India’s nuclear arsenal, concluded the National Command Authority had a “lack of confidence” in its ability to exercise control over nuclear weapons through electronic means, suggesting that permissive action links are absent or rudimentary. A decade ago, if you had asked scholars studying India’s nuclear programme, they would have told you permissive action links were important, but not necessary in the Indian case. India was believed to store its nuclear weapons in a partially-disassembled, de-mated state that made the weapons immune to unauthorised launch during peacetime. However, without any public justification, this appears to have changed. Bharat Karnad reported in his 2008 study of the programme that part of the arsenal was kept mated in peacetime. DRDO head Avinash Chander said something consistent with Karnad’s claim when he stated, “In the second strike capability, the most important thing is how fast we can react. We are working on cannisterised systems that can launch from anywhere at anytime…. We are making missiles so response can be within minutes.”