Sinking billions into N-weapons

BY launching trials of the nuclear-powered submarine Arihant, India has moved towards realising its post-1998 quest for a major nuclear weapons-power status.
When commissioned in a few years, the submarine will give India a "second-strike capability." Even if its land or air-based nuclear weapons are destroyed, India can still fire nuclear-tipped missiles from the sub. It can stay underwater for months and is hard to detect.
The Arihant's launch has been called a great achievement of indigenous technology, which gives "real teeth" to deterrence without threatening others. But the very rationale of nuclear deterrence is mass-destruction threats: You prevent your enemy from nuking you by threatening "unacceptable damage" through an attack that can instantly kill millions of civilians.
Besides, the Arihant isn't an indigenous technological feat. The technology of building the highly compact reactor to propel the sub came from Russia.
Russian engineers and consultants aided the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO) with vital design inputs based on their VM-5 reactor and miniaturising techniques.
As Russia's "cooperation" was publicly acknowledged by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the Arihant launch, 143 Russian engineers were present. So much for the "indigenous" technology claim.
The nuclear submarine project is also a long story of the DAE and DRDO's failures These are the two worst-performing departments of the government, which have never completed a major project on schedule or without huge cost overruns.
The submarine project was sanctioned in 1970. But DAE secretary Raja Ramanna's original 1975 design proved unviable and was abandoned.
The DAE learnt nothing from this. When a reactor engineer critic, Navy Captain B.K. Subba Rao, voiced doubts about its design, he was arrested and charged with espionage -- an accusation he disproved after long years in jail.
The project, codenamed Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV), was re-launched in 1975 under the DRDO-DAE with many public and private consultants. This soaked up Rs.2,500 crores in research and development costs alone. But these agencies couldn't fabricate high-quality components.
In 1988, India tried "reverse engineering" by leasing a Soviet nuclear submarine for three years. This yielded no worthwhile design or fabrication results. The lease wasn't renewed.
Finally, in 1998, construction began on the Arihant's hull. A basically Russian-designed pressurised-water reactor was eventually fitted into it after nine years.
India has spent a humongous Rs.30,000 crores on the ATV, with no side-benefits. This equals the entire budget of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act last year, which generated 45 million person-days of employment.
The government is planning to build 10 nuclear submarines. Work on two has already started. India is also leasing yet another Russian submarine for Rs.350 crores.
However, will the Arihant give India greater security via nuclear deterrence? Deterrence assumes that nuclear adversaries don't attack each other because they want to avert "unacceptable damage" from retaliation, and hence behave rationally at all times. Equally, there's no strategic misperception -- and no accidents.
Reality defies these assumptions. During the Cold War, there were countless misperceptions and accidents. Weather rockets were confused for missiles. Vessels carrying nukes collided with one another. The world was lucky that nukes weren't used.
There were 20,000 false alerts -- despite sophisticated command and control systems on which trillions were spent.
In the India-Pakistan case, no such sophisticated systems exist, and there's a rich history of miscalculation from 1965, 1990, 1999 and 2001-02. Indeed, the Kargil conflict falsified the deterrence premise that nuclear powers don't fight conventional wars.
India had described nuclear deterrence as morally "abhorrent" and strategically irrational for half-a-century. Now, India has embraced it.
Nuclear deterrence is too unstable a basis on which to build security. If India goes down that slippery slope, it'll court disaster while continuing to deprive half its people of minimum needs.
Yet, we're being asked to spend limitlessly on the Holy Cow of "security." And we're only at the first stage of acquisition of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles, including missiles, aircraft and ships, along with command and control systems, and elaborate means to protect so-called nuclear assets, which inevitably become a liability.
As this column has argued since 1998, South Asia's nuclear weapons pursuit will lead to a runaway increase in arms spending -- over and above rising expenditure on conventional weapons.
Since 1998, India's military spending has risen threefold, the highest such increase since independence. The real danger is an arms race in which your adversaries, not you, become the decision-makers.
Throughout the Cold War, India had rightly warned against nuclear deterrence and an arms race. India is repeating that historic folly on a continental scale -- and possibly beyond, given its ambitious plans to develop a blue-waters navy, long-range missiles and "Star Wars"-style anti-ballistic missile systems.
This year has seen a 34% spurt in India's defence budget. This has little to do with fighting terrorism. You don't need amphibian ships, long-range planes and nuclear subs to combat terrorism. Yet, our armed services are pampered with huge budgets without accountability.
Nothing illustrates this better than the Comptroller and Auditor-General's (CAG) report on India's acquisition of the Russian aircraft-carrier Admiral Gorshkov. This was offered in 1994 as a "free gift" if India paid for its refit and bought jetfighters for use on it. A "fixed-price" contract was signed for $974 million.
Soon, Russia demanded an additional $1.2 billion and pushed the delivery date back by four years. Last year, Russia further raised the bill to $2.9 billion. It's unlikely that the final price tag will be under $2.5 billion.
According to the CAG, the supreme, if ugly, irony is that the "navy is acquiring a second-hand refitted carrier that has half the lifespan and is 60% more expensive than a new one."
All major arms deals in our part of the world are marked by allegations of undue favours, huge kickbacks, and dilution of warranty and performance norms. This only underscores the need for greater accountability on the defence services' part and for strict Parliamentary oversight.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.
Email: [email protected].