[MIRVed Agni-5 launch]
FINALLY, the Multiple Independently-targetable Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) system-armed Agni-5 intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) — the Divyastra was successfully test-fired yesterday. Nearly twenty years late.
The MIRV tech has been collecting dust at the Advanced Systems Laboratory (ASL), Hyderabad, for the last 19 years. It was a project lovingly shepherded to near completion by RN Agarwal, the then Director, ASL. He wanted to complete it by the time he retired in 2004. But the project missed the deadline by a year. In part because Dr Agarwal’s approaches since 2002 to the first BJP government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee for approval of a test launch of a MIRVed Agni did not elicit the response he had hoped for. The Vajpayee PMO, with Brajesh Mishra, the National Security Adviser-cum-Principal Private Secretary to the PM, heading it, repeatedly said NO! But Agarwal’s spirited campaign for the Indian MIRV project cost him a promotion. He was passed over for the post of DRDO chief and Secretary to the Govt of India (GOI), because Mishra feared Agarwal would use the DRDO pulpit to push MIRV, which Mishra did not want. The head of the Arjun Main Battle Tank Project, Dr M Natarajan, was appointed to lead DRDO instead.
The Manmohan Singh regime wouldn’t OK the MIRV test, and Narendra Modi didn’t either until sometime in late 2022 when he greenflagged the Divyastra test launch.
I had long ago called for the militarisation of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), specially its satellite package injection into designated orbit-technology, which is MIRV in embryo. But there is no reason to doubt Agarwal’s contention that ASL developed the more demanding MIRV tech by itself. Because, MIRV cannot tolerate deviation in “injection velocity” exceding 0.1 metre per second; in comparison for satellite placement, 5 to 8 metre deviation is permissible.
The nose cone geometry of the MIRVed Agni-5 (Prime) — Divyastra IRBM, can carry multiple N-warheads. But, like Agni-1 medium range ballistic missile, Agni-2, and Agni-3 — in fact all Agni’s, the Divyastra is configured to carry either a single megaton weapon, or as many as eight smaller yield nuclear warheads and decoys. For the test launch, the three MIRVed warhead variant was, perhaps, used, with each of the warheads releaseable at one second intervals during which time the missile travels 4.4-5 kms. Its elliptical target zone is calculated as roughly 50 kms by 150 kms.
[By the way, all this information and more on the Indian MIRV tech and Agni missiles was featured in my 2008 book — India’s Nuclear Policy published by Praeger in the US and, the South Asian edition, by the local Pentagon Press.]
But, PLEASE NO TALK anywhere and ever OF THE DIVYASTRA USE AGAINST PAKISTAN by any GOI officials and military officers. India’s reputation has suffered irreparable harm as it is over the years by the government’s and armed forces’ fixation with Pakistan as threat. Think of an elephant frightened by a mouse.
MIRV is a strategic attack and nuclear deterrence multiplier — because more nuclear weapons can be carried on a smaller number of missiles. So, why wasn’t MIRV tested before now?
Brajesh Mishra feared that a successful MIRV test would imperil the Vajpayee government’s policy of rapprochement with the United States, which was upset already, firstly, because Washington had no inkling of the 1998 tests, and secondly, because the S-1 test intimated India’s thermonuclear weapon interest. But the George W Bush Administration ensured during Manmohan Singh’s tenure via the 2008 nuclear civilian cooperation deal negotiated — need I repeat again — by the current foreign minister, S Jaishankar, who was then Joint Secretary (Americas) in MEA. It guaranteed that India would not become a thermonuclear power.
This happened because Jaishankar agreed, in essence, to put a lid on Indian nuclear testing as demanded by his lead American counterpart and, in the bargain, strategically sold India out. The political cover for this concession was Vajpayee’s “voluntary” test moratorium announced in Parliament on May 28, 1998. The deal carries the explicit threat of termination of the deal, if India resumed nuclear testing. It achieved America’s express arms control goal of “capping and freezing” India’s strategic weapons at the sub-thermonuclear level.
‘Strategic Sellout’ is, in fact, the title of a book of essays published in 2009 — a compilation of op’eds and such by the late Dr PK Iyengar, former Chairman, atomic energy commission, and Drs AN Prasad, former Director, BARC, Trombay, and the late A Gopalakrishnan, former chair, atomic energy regulatory commission, and myself, written realtime even as this deal was being negotiated, vehemently opposing each and every deleterious provision in it, as it became known. It was prophetic in how things have turned out, nuclear policy-wise for India, since. India has gained little by way of advanced nuclear technology because the really critical stuff like the plutonium reprocessing tech is, in any case, unavailable to India — deal or no deal! And because no Indian PM — not Manmohan and until now not Modi either, has had the guts to ram resumed nuclear testing down the US throat — even when it clearly is in the national interest to do so. Absent new ThN-tests, India is fated to remain in China’s strategic shadow.
The great villains here are R Chidambaram and Anil Kakodkar. Chidambaram, a crystalographer of middling merit, who did some good work early and for the rest of his career coasted on it, who was installed as successor to Iyengar by Dr Raja Ramanna mainly because of his pedigree, IISc, Bangalore, — Ramanna’s alma mater, when Prasad, BARC director, had better credentials because of his hands-on weapons experience. In this respect, Chidambaram’s calculation of the ‘equation of state’ for plutonium wasn’t as great a thing as it is made out to be. A graduate student of Freeman Dyson’s at Princeton University, calculated it correctly, for God’s sake! Chidambaram was unenthusiastic about the Shakti tests in 1998, and thereafter was the main opposer of nuclear test resumption in government circles as Science & Technology Adviser to Manmohan Singh, from which position he was pushed out by Modi.
Chidambaram is the last man standing to still believe that (1) the 1998 fusion test was a success, and (2) computer simulation with the existing limited computing capability is good enough replacement for actual physical explosive testing to rectify any weapon design weaknesses identified by the 1998 tests! And he’s ensconced as Tata Chair in BARC, still ruling the roost, and preventing any movement in official quarters towards a new nuclear testing regime. Shouldn’t Modi eject him from BARC? Hasn’t he done enough harm?
Kakodkar was a weak-willed engineer who replaced Chidambaram and advised Jaishankar during the civil nuclear deal negotiations. At a crucial moment in Washington, when the deal hung in balance, and a befuddled Manmohan Singh on a state visit to the US, asked him for final advice on whether to proceed with it or not, he gave the thumbs up, dooming India’s thermonuclear prospects. Kakodkar was never able to face the likes of Iyengar again.
Indian strategic weapons programmes have all displayed the same disurbing pattern — they all went into government-induced hibernation just when they needed to be most active. India achieved the N-weapons threshold with the plutonium reprocessing plant in the Spring of 1964 — seven months before the first Chinese atomic test. But it went to sleep until the 1974 test when, rather than weaponise, Indira Gandhi sent it back to snoozing, and yet again after the 1998 tests the same thing again, and that winter of hibernation for the thermonuclear weapons projects has still to end.
In the meantime, the programme weathered Shastri’s interegnum when India came closest to accepting the offer of a Western nuclear umbrella — Ukraine’s present conditions as a war-wrecked country is a stark reminder of taking American promises of nuclear security seriously! And the foolish Gandhian idealist, Morarji Desai, who as PM and prodded by the US, all but ordered closure of the nuclear weapons work in Trombay. [Read my 2002 book, with 2nd ed in 2005 — Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security for all the alarming details!]
One of the main reasons the Indian weapons programme is in the dokldrums is because of a lack of quality leadership. By February 1966, the great visionary and driver of the dual-use N-programme, Homi Bhabha, was assassinated by a CIA timed explosive on board an Air India flight he was taking to Geneva, according to a published confession by a former assistant director of clandestine ops of the agency, Robert Crowley. And, to the country’s great ill-luck, the Indian nuclear weapons programme had no strategic-minded scientists appointed to lead the AEC after Iyengar — only Chidambram, who was afflicted with serious strategic myopia and deserves to be in a purgatory, and a lot of engineers without familiarity of nuclear weapons science and technologies who, if they have distinguished themselves at all have done so as slotted functionaries, not leaders.
For Your Information, R Chidambaram is Jaishankar’s uncle (a cousin of the late K Subrahmanyam).
