Shakhawat Hossain
India is building a top-secret nuclear city to produce thermonuclear weapons, and when completed in 2017, the facility would be the subcontinent’s “largest military-run” complex of nuclear centrifuges, the Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine has claimed.
The top secret facility poised for completion in 2017 would be the subcontinent’s largest military-run complex of nuclear centrifuges. The magazine used a report published by the Centre for Public Integrity – a non-profit investigative news organisation based in Washington DC.
The Indian city is located in Challakere, nearly 260km from Mysore, according to the report by Adrian Levy, author of the widely-acclaimed book on Pakistan’s nuclear program. The facility might upgrade the country as a nuclear power and unsettle the balance of power in the region.
“India’s close neighbours, China and Pakistan, would see this move as a provocation. Experts say they might respond by ratcheting up their own nuclear firepower,” the report said. New Delhi has never published detailed accounts of its nuclear arsenal, which it first developed in 1974. There has been little public notice outside India about the construction at Challakere and its strategic implications.
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 utilised. As a military facility, it is not open to international inspection, the report said.
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, the writer fears.
The writer is a Dhaka-based freelance journalist
Source: Weekly Holiday
