In July India launched its long-awaited nuclear-powered submarine, Arihant ("destroyer of enemies"), formerly the more-or-less secret Advanced Technology Vehicle. Her main weapon, the Sagarika medium-rangemissile, had already been tested from a submersible barge and pronounced mature. Work on a nuclear-powered submarine began in 1974, and reportedly the reactor design began in 1985. The hull was fabricated in eight sections by Larsen & Toubro, which makes many Indian weapon launchers (and built the barge for the submerged missile firing); it was assembled at the Visakhapatnam naval dockyard. This is a large submarine, reportedly displacing 9,400 tons submerged (124 meters long), perhaps to provide sufficient buoyancy for a reactor that may weigh 600 tons. The Indians had previously leased the Soviet Charlie-class missile submarine Chakra to gain nuclear experience, and used Russian technical assistance to overcome some problems. The submarine was laid down during 2007 and is to run trials in 2010. Her size suggests that frequent reports that she is little more than a Charlie are wrong; the old Soviet submarine was considerably smaller.
Indian reliance on Russian assistance may help explain why India has accepted the escalating price and continually delayed delivery of the carrier they bought from Russia; India has also leased two Akula-class nuclear-powered attack submarines. Unlike the Akulas, the Arihant and her projected sisters offer a strategic counterweight to China, which many Indians (at least in the navy) see as their main future enemy. Despite the country's dependence on sea transportation, and even to some extent on undersea resources, the Indian Navy has long been the poor relation of the army and air force, as Indian policy-makers have seen Pakistan as their main enemy. Although it helped enormously in the 1970-71 war, the Indian Navy justifies its bid for greater resources in terms of a potential Chinese push to dominate the Indian Ocean (this writer once heard a Chinese captain tell several Indian admirals that their country did not figure at all in his navy's calculations; they ignored him).
The Indians still face some real problems. It was noteworthy that no launching photographs were published; the only official photograph showed the Indian president speaking in front of the construction hall. There was speculation that the launching had been arranged only because the sheer duration of the program was becoming embarrassing, and that the hull placed in the water (if indeed that was done) lacked its reactor.
Not Enough Bang
The Sagarika missile certainly works, but late in August a retired Indian nuclear scientist pointed out that the much-touted 1998 tests, which showed to Indians that they were a nuclear power, had been, in effect, fizzles. He said that their yield had been 20 rather than the planned 45 kilotons. Both numbers are embarrassing. The 20 kilotons corresponds to the first U.S. nuclear bombs, and can hardly be equated to the thermonuclear weapons that arm U.S., Russian, and Chinese missiles. Twenty kilotons can certainly do terrible damage to a flimsy city (as it did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but a modern concrete-and-steel metropolis would be more difficult to destroy. That is why both major Cold War powers-and the Chinese-developed thermonuclear weapons with ten or more times the explosive power. The Indian scientist correctly described the 1998 tests as a beginning, rather than the achievement of full technical maturity. He thought that India needed many more tests before becoming satisfied with its nuclear and thermonuclear arsenal (much the same is true of Pakistan).
The problem for the Indians is that the current U.S. government takes nuclear non-proliferation very seriously. It is trying to convince countries to agree not to test nuclear weapons. Although computer simulations may suffice for experienced U.S. and Russian weapon designers, they certainly will not for those without much experience, and without access to the sort of secrets U.S. and Soviet (and Chinese) designers have learned. When the Indians set off their bombs in 1998, they were cut off from U.S. military technology. Apparently the condition for letting them back in is for them to avoid further testing.
They face a cruel dilemma. Because the U.S. government sees India as a key future ally, it is willing, in theory, to sell that country much current technology. However, the equalizer against China, which the new submarine symbolizes, requires exactly the technology needing tests that would, in turn, cut off access to U.S. non-nuclear weapons.
Pakistan's Advantage
The Pakistani government faces its own dilemma. In August, the U.S. government revealed that in April the Pakistanis tested a land-attack missile that U.S. intelligence believes is a modified Harpoon. The agreement under which Pakistan received Harpoons forbade such modifications (the Pakistanis claim the April missile was home-grown, which may mean reverse-engineered from Harpoon). American officials said that they hoped to turn Pakistan from counter-productive efforts such as offensive missiles toward the desired cooperation in the war against terrorism. That ignores Pakistan's very real enmity toward India and their desire at the least to maintain deterrence against the Indians.
In this test of will, the Pakistanis enjoy an interesting advantage. To the Obama administration, the war in Afghanistan is absolutely vital. Most accounts suggest that the force in the country is far too small to achieve success. Unfortunately, Afghanistan is land-locked, and its main borders are with Iran, Russia, and Pakistan. Troops in Afghanistan can be supplied by air, but the main supply effort will have to come by road, and those will be through Russia and Pakistan.
To make matters more interesting, the road from the sea through Pakistan passes through the famous tribal areas (in British times, the Northwest Frontier). The inhabitants of these areas are ethnically related to those we are fighting in Afghanistan (they are Pushtuns), and they generally sympathize with our Taliban enemies. They showed their feelings by burning numerous trucks concentrated near the Khyber Pass a few months ago.
In addition, most Afghans think that the tribal areas are part of their country; the Pakistani government is afraid that any such dismemberment would lead to further disintegration. Given these considerations, just how much leverage does the U.S. government have as it tries to eliminate what the Pakistanis see as a vital equalizer against India, with which their country has fought four wars?
Afghanistan makes it difficult for the United States to irritate the Russians. The need to placate them may explain the current willingness to scale down U.S. missile defense (the Russians want to retain the coercive effect of their weapons). U.S. arms controllers talk of the terrible prospect of an arms race, but anyone reading the Russian press knows that their arms industry is hardly in any position to creep toward more weaponry, let alone race.
For example, their new strategic submarine was designed to carry a missile, Bulava, which has failed more than half its tests. Cynics writing in the Russian press have suggested that its designers deliberately omitted various pre-flight tests (such as those that measure the shock effect on the missile as it emerges from the submerged tube) in the expectation that they would receive large payments to solve the missile's problem. The missile is being referred to derisively as Bulava-30, meaning it cannot enter service until 2030. To some extent, such comments can be dismissed as the efforts of a rival organization to restore its primacy in liquid-fueled missiles with which most Soviet submarines were armed. But the test record of Bulava really is 7 failures in 11 tries.
Also in July, the Burmese government, surely one of the poorest on earth, reportedly was pursuing nuclear weapons with North Korean help. The report may be no more than an attempt to justify overthrow of that government, with its horrendous record on human rights. However, it may also explain why nuclear non-proliferation is unlikely to succeed. The generals who run Burma have shown no inclination to respond to international pressure. They have watched North Korea deflect pressure even more effectively after demonstrating nuclear capability. They probably see the bomb as the final guarantee of their immunity, hence their continued rule.
Their record to date shows that the West cannot provide any comparable incentive to them; it has tried many times to convince them to step down. The only thing likely to stop the Burmese generals is the lack of technology, and the connection with North Korea seems to have solved that. There is, moreover, no local power determined to stop nuclear proliferation by lethal means, as Israel sought to do both in Iraq and in Syria (but is unlikely to do in Iran). And the Burmese have apparently placed most of their nuclear industry in tunnels just in case, as have the North Koreans.
Goodbye to a VisionaryRear Admiral Wayne E. Meyer, who died on 1 September, will long be remembered by the U.S. Navy and its friends as the "father" of the Aegis system. This is still by far the most successful-and most widely used-naval area air defense system in the world, almost three decades after its introduction. The admiral's key contribution was not the conception of Aegis, but rather the sense to realize when it was mature enough to go into service, and the determination to demand sufficient flexibility that the system could grow into such new roles as ballistic-missile defense and multi-platform operation (via the Cooperative Engagement Capability). Admiral Meyer was fond of saying that change should be encouraged where necessary but otherwise avoided, as it was too easy to forget the valid reasons for the vital engineering decisions of the past. If that seems cliched, it isn't; current procurement practice, typified by the Zumwalt class, is to rethink all elements of a system when a new one is procured. In effect, in supervising the creation of the Aegis fleet, Admiral Meyer was arguing that it was urgent to pour resources into a better combat system (Aegis and the Standard Missile), but that little would be gained by heavy investment in hull and machinery technology. The Zumwalt class reflects a belief that the potentials of stealth and electric drive (and technology for low crewing) made it worthwhile to reverse that judgment. In retrospect, the admiral's priorities made much more sense. The effects of the current philosophy are magnified because the interval between systems has grown so much that it is unlikely that those developing new ones are aware of the reasoning behind earlier ones. Admiral Meyer described his philosophy as combat engineering rather than combat system creation. In his view, engineering was a great deal more than applied science. It took into account past experience, and thus the way in which the humans operating the system were likely to work. Today's procurement problems suggest that Admiral Meyer's approach deserves a great deal more credit. It's time to go back to something that worked remarkably well. -Norman Friedman |