Hello, Warriors. If recent reports are to be believed, India is building an entire nuclear city in Karnataka to produce thermonuclear weapons. Yes, you read it right, an entire city!
The top secret facility poised for completion in 2017 would be the subcontinent’s largest military-run complex of nuclear centrifuges.
Among the project’s aims are to expand the government’s nuclear research, to produce fuel for India’s nuclear reactors, and to help power the country’s fleet of new submarines.
The secret city is located in Challakere, nearly 260km from Mysore. The facility might upgrade the country as a nuclear power and unsettle the balance of power in the region.
The government has divulged little about the nuclear facility and made no public promises about how the highly enriched uranium to be produced there would be utilized. As a military facility, it is not open to international inspection and it gives India an upper hand to manufacture nukes.
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The facility aims to give India an extra stockpile of enriched uranium fuel that could be used in new hydrogen bombs, also known as thermonuclear weapons, substantially increasing the explosive force of those in its existing nuclear arsenal.
New Delhi has never published a detailed account of its nuclear arsenal, which it first developed in 1974, and there has been little public notice outside India about the construction at Challakere and its strategic implications.
India already possesses between 90 and 110 nuclear weapons, as compared to Pakistan’s estimated stockpile of up to 120. China, which borders India to the north, has approximately 260 warheads. China and Pakistan, could see this move as a provocation and they might respond by ratcheting up their own nuclear firepower. Pakistan, in particular, considers itself a military rival, having engaged in four major conflicts with India, as well as frequent border skirmishes. Nuclear war between India and Pakistan is not as unlikely as it may come to our thinking.
This so called “secret” came under the notice of public when The Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change approved the Mysore site’s construction in October 2012 as “a project of strategic importance” that would cost nearly $100 million, according to a letter marked “secret,” from the ministry to atomic energy officials that month.
The ambition was (is?) to feed new centrifuges with fuel derived from yellowcake — milled uranium ore — shipped from mines in the village of Jadugoda in India’s north, 1,200 miles away from the Rare Materials Plant, and to draw water from the nearby Krishna Raja Sagar dam.
So, what do you think of this? A good move by India or a secret not well kept?
