Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Fast, Radioactive, and Out of Control


By Adrian Levy, R. Jeffrey Smith

India is not adequately safeguarding its booming nuclear installations and material, U.S. officials and experts say.
KALPAKKAM, India — On October 8, 2014, Head Constable Vijay Singh awoke before dawn and scurried across the ochre gravel outside the constabulary barracks at the Madras Atomic Power Station “looking like the monsoon was about to break,” as a ground sweeper later recalled. Singh was one of 620 paramilitaries in the country’s Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) assigned to protect the facility’s nuclear-related buildings and materials, but he did not have his usual tasks in mind that morning.
By 4:40 a.m., the 44-year-old officer reached the armory, where he signed out a 9mm sub-machine gun and 60 rounds of ammunition in two magazines. Singh loaded one clip into his weapon, pocketed the other, and entered the portico of a cream-and-red, three-story residential complex. He climbed up one flight to the room where a senior colleague, Mohan Singh, was dozing and abruptly opened fire at him in a controlled burst, to conserve rounds, just as he had been trained.
Then he jogged downstairs, where he shot dead two more men and seriously injured another two. With ten rounds left in his magazine, and an unused 30-round clip in his pocket, he prowled unimpeded across the gravel, with no alert called. A bystander shouted out to him, and suddenly Singh halted and dropped to his knees, an eyewitness recalled later. He was finally surrounded and led away, glassy-eyed, “as docile as anything, a neat guy, his hair still perfectly parted,” the witness said.
The episode was a fresh example of what officials here and outside India depict as serious shortcomings in the country’s nuclear guard force, tasked with defending one of the world’s largest stockpiles of fissile material and nuclear explosives.
An estimated 90 to 110 Indian nuclear bombs are stored in six or so government-run sites patrolled by the CISF, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an independent think tank, and Indian officials. Within the next two decades, as many as 57 reactors could also be operating under the force’s protection, as well as four existent plants where spent nuclear fuel is dissolved in chemicals to separate out plutonium to make new fuel or be used in nuclear bombs.
The sites, some of which are under construction, are spread out over vast distances: from the stony foothills of the Himalayas in the north down to the red earth of the tropical south. Shuttling hundreds of miles in between will be occasional convoys of lightly protected trucks laden with explosive and fissile materials — including plutonium and enriched uranium — that could be used in civilian and military reactors or to spark a nuclear blast.
The Kalpakkam shooting alarmed Indian and Western officials who question whether this country — which is surrounded by unstable neighbors and has a history of civil tumult — has taken adequate precautions to safeguard its sensitive facilities and keep the building blocks of a nuclear bomb from being stolen by insiders with grievances, ill motives, or in the worst case, connections to terrorists.
Although experts say they regard the issue as urgent, Washington is not pressing India for quick reforms. The Obama administration is instead trying to avoid any dispute that might interrupt a planned expansion of U.S. military sales to Delhi, several senior U.S. officials said in interviews.
The experts’ concerns are based in part on a series of documented nuclear security lapses in the past two decades, in addition to the shooting:
  • Several kilograms of what authorities described as semi-processed uranium were stolen by a criminal gang, allegedly with Pakistani links, from a state mine in Meghalya, in northeastern India, in 1994. Four years later, a federal politician was arrested near the West Bengal border with 100 kilograms of uranium from India’s Jadugoda mining complex that he was allegedly attempting to sell to Pakistani sympathizers associated with the same gang. A police dossier seen by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) states that 10 more people connected with smuggling case were arrested two years after this, in operations that recovered 57 pounds of stolen uranium.
  • In 2003, members of a Bangladeshi jihadist group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, were caught in a village on the Bangladesh border with 225 grams of milled uranium — allegedly illicitly purchased from a mining employee — that they said they intended to wrap around explosives. The Indian authorities initially claimed it was from Kazakstan but concluded later it was more likely from India’s uranium mining complex at Jadugoda, in the eastern India state of Jharkhand.
  • In 2008, another criminal gang was caught attempting to smuggle low-grade uranium, capable of being used in a primitive radiation-dispersal device or “dirty bomb,” from one of India’s state-owned mines across the border to Nepal. The same year, another group was caught moving an illicit stock of uranium over the border to Bangladesh, the gang having been assisted by the son of an employee at India’s Atomic Minerals Division, which supervises uranium mining and processing.
  • In 2009, a nuclear reactor employee in southwest India deliberately poisoned dozens of his colleagues with a radioactive isotope, taking advantage of numerous gaps in plant security, according to an internal government report seen by CPI.
  • And, in 2013, leftist guerillas in northeast India illegally obtained uranium ore from a government-run milling complex and strapped it to high explosives to make a crude bomb before being caught by police, according to an inspector involved in the case.
The paramilitary CISF, which has a total of 95,000 personnel under civilian rather than military control and a $785 million budget, is supposed to keep these nuclear materials from leaking from India’s plants. But it is short-staffed, ill-equipped, and inadequately trained, according to a confidential draft Home Ministry report about the force’s future, dated November 2013, seen by CPI.
“Weapons supply is down by 40 percent, and training equipment by more than 45 percent” compared to what officials running the force had sought, the report stated. Its size should be 20 percent larger, it added. “Morale is low as security levels remain high…. There is a danger of the force falling behind in terms of its level of equipment and also competence.”
A former three-star Indian Police Service officer, who ran a large Indian force under the Home Ministry, alongside the CISF, said in an interview that the force’s training, weapons, and technical equipment lagged well behind comparable security forces elsewhere in the world. “From passive night goggles that cannot see in low light to outmoded communications equipment that does not work over long distances, they’re as good as blind and dumb,” said the ex-officer. “The monies promised two years ago to overhaul it … mostly failed to materialize,” he claimed.
This critical account roughly matches what the U.S. intelligence community has stated in its annual classified rankings of global nuclear security risks, based on detailed assessments of safeguards for materials that could be used in explosives or dirty bombs laced with radiation, according to three current or former senior Obama administration officials.
They said that India’s security practices have repeatedly ranked lower in these assessments than those of Pakistan and Russia, two countries with shortcomings that have provoked Western anxieties. In all the categories of interest to the U.S. intelligence experts making the rankings — the vetting and monitoring of key security personnel, the tracking of explosives’ quantities and whereabouts, and the installation of sensitive nuclear detectors at the entry and exit points in key facilities — the Indians “have got issues,” a senior official said, speaking on condition he not be named, due to diplomatic sensitivity.
Cautioning that Washington probably does not know everything that India has done to protect its facilities because of its obsessive nuclear secrecy, the official said that according to “what we can see people doing … they should be doing a lot more.” He added that it is “pretty clear [they] are not as far along as the Pakistanis,” explaining that as with the Russians, India’s confidence in being able to manage security challenges on its own has repeatedly closed them off to foreign advice — not only about the gravity of the threats they face but about how to deal with them.
Poor safeguards against the insider threat
When U.S. officials made their first-ever visit to the restricted Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Mumbai, a complex where India makes plutonium for its nuclear weapons, their observations about its security practices were not reassuring. “Security at the site was moderate,” a Wikileaked cable from November 2008, approved by embassy ChargĂ© d’Affaires Stephen White, told officials in Washington.
Identification checks at the front gate were “quick but not thorough,” and visitor badges lacked photographs, meaning they were easy to replicate or pass around. A security unit at the center’s main gate appeared to be armed with shotguns or semi-automatic Russian-style rifles, the cable noted, but as the U.S. delegation moved towards the Dhruva reactor, where the nuclear explosive material is actually produced, there were no “visible external security systems.”
White’s cable noted that a secondary building where engineering equipment was stored also had “very little security.” While there was a sentry post at a nuclear waste immobilization plant that processes radioactive water, no guards were present, and visitors’ bags were not inspected. No security cameras were seen inside, White added.
A U.S. nuclear safety official, also on the visit, who still works in the field and was not authorized to discuss it, told CPI in an interview that “laborers wandered in and out of the complex, and none of them wore identification.” He said that “the setup was extraordinarily low key, considering the sensitivity,” explaining that guards in one location could not see camera footage from other locations. There is little evidence that conditions have changed much since then, officials say. BARC refused to comment on security at the installation.
U.S. and Indian officials also have privately expressed worry about the security surrounding India’s movement of sensitive nuclear materials and weaponry. An industrialist who provides regular private advice to the current prime minister about domestic and foreign strategic issues said in an interview, for example, that due to India’s poor roads and rail links, “our nuclear sector is especially vulnerable. How can we safely transport anything, when we cannot say for certain that it will get to where it should, when it should.”
The adviser said that as a result, fissile materials in India have been moved around in unmarked trucks that “look like milk tankers,” without obvious armed escorts. He called this “urban camouflage,” meant to avoid the clamor that would ensue if a security convoy attempted to navigate traffic-choked roads like the one leading from a nuclear fuel fabrication plant in Hyderabad, in south-central India, to a test center for India’s nuclear submarines on the coast at Visakhapatnam. An armed convoy, he said, might need 14 hours to traverse that 400-mile distance.
Experts say the movement of the vehicles is tracked by special devices and communications. But two recently retired scientists from BARC echoed the adviser’s concern in interviews. “Using civilian transport is a case of making the best of the worst: Far better not to be noticed at all, if you cannot control the environment you’re traveling in,” one said. Western officials have said that Pakistan uses similar unmarked convoys to move its nuclear materials, without obvious protections.
Official, classified inquiries into the Mumbai attack in 2008, where 10 Pakistan gunmen laid siege to the city after arriving at night by boat, showed that nuclear installations close to the city were staked out as potential targets before the terrorists settled upon a Jewish center, a railway station, and two five-star hotels.
But to date, most of the troubling incidents at nuclear facilities in India have involved insiders, making the presence of aberrant employees the most tangible threat and the focus of intensive government efforts, according to a presentation made by Indian experts at a U.S. National Academy of Sciences workshop on nuclear security in Bangalore in 2012. They said that CISF forces assigned to protect India’s nuclear materials get extra training and are rotated regularly among such sites, possibly to deter corruption. Ranajit Kumar, the head of BARC’s physical protection system section, told the workshop that anyone who takes a new assignment on any classified project is supposed to undergo a new background check.
But an internal government report about the shooting in Kalpakkam, drafted by officials in the Home Ministry, and dated December 2014, noted that many warning signs about Vijay Singh, the perpetrator, were ignored. It said that despite having an explosive temper and telling a doctor he was suffering from stress and exhaustion — issues that forced his withdrawal from weapons duties — Singh was promoted to the rank of head constable due to staff shortages and sent to the Madras Atomic Power Station from another nuclear installation without any psychological assessment or records recounting his problematic behavior.
At his new posting, he was given access to a submachine gun even though colleagues considered him unwell, as they told investigators later. He complained of being picked on by another head constable, and as the Diwali festival approached in October he asked for leave to visit his family. He was refused and instead ordered to serve overtime, due to a public call by al Qaeda’s leader to “raise the flag of jihad” across South Asia by targeting sensitive sites in India. When the CISF officer’s final bid for leave wasturned down, he told a colleague that “he would burst like a firecracker,” a colleague told police, in a witness statement seen by CPI. One day later, he did.
Similar lapses occurred seven years earlier when an employee at the Kaiga nuclear reactor deliberately poisoned several others, subjecting them to a radiation dose 150 times of a chest x-ray. A report completed in December 2009 by the plant’s operator, seen by CPI, pointed to failures in technical monitoring as well as a “human reliability program” that was “ineffective if not misconceived” by the plant operator. Security cameras were not fixed on the key areas of the installation, and some were immobile and incapable of operating in the dark. It said the contamination was “an act of deliberate sabotage,” and that the perpetrator had eluded detection and capture due to numerous security lapses.
Asked about these matters by CPI, India’s Atomic Energy Commission declined to reply, following its usual habit of rebuffing inquiries about sensitive, nuclear-related matters. The Indian Atomic Energy Regulatory Board initially pledged to offer responses but then declined, as did the Home Ministry, which oversees the CISF.
Spurning U.S. offers of help
Since Nov. 30, 2001, when the CIA began investigating rumors that al Qaeda was trying to obtain nuclear materials or finished weapons, the U.S. government has campaigned vigorously around the globe — sometimes unsuccessfully — for heightened vigilance in India and other countries with substantial stockpiles of explosive materials.
According to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, an independent, nonprofit group, India’s stockpile of about 2.4 metric tons of highly enriched (weapons-usable) uranium puts it fifth among all nations, and its stock of approximately 0.54 metric tons of separated (weapons-usable) plutonium ranks ninth. But its lax security practices put it even higher on the list of Western anxieties.
The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit group in Washington, reported last year for example that India’s nuclear security practices ranked 23 among 25 countries that possess at least a bomb’s-worth of fissile materials. Only Iran and North Korea fared worse in the analysis, which noted that India’s stockpiles are growing and said the country’s nuclear regulator lacked independence from political interference and adequate authority.
It said the risks stemmed in part from India’s culture of widespread corruption as well as its general political instability. “Weaknesses are particularly apparent in the areas of transport security, material control, and accounting, and measures to protect against the insider threat, such as personnel vetting and mandatory reporting of suspicious behavior,” the group’s report stated.
But India has rebuffed repeated offers of U.S. help. Gary Samore, President Obama’s coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction from 2009 to 2013, said that at preparatory meetings for international summits on nuclear security in 2010 and 2012, “we kept offering to create a joint security project [with India] consisting of assistance of any and every kind. And every time they would say, to my face, that this was a wonderful idea and they should grasp the opportunity. And then, when they returned to India, we would never hear about it again.”
India also refused to collaborate with the NTI project by sharing or confirming information about its practices, unlike 17 of the other 24 countries in the study. They responded ferociously to its conclusions, according to a researcher connected to the project, who was not sanctioned to talk about it. Officials at the Indian Atomic Energy Commission attacked Ted Turner and Sam Nunn, the NTI’s founders, in articles and conversations with Indian journalists, the researcher said.
In countries such as India that are resistant to hearing direct U.S. advice or opening their programs up to scrutiny, the Obama administration has tried what an official referred to as a “work-around” — the creation of training centers around the globe where Western experts working in collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency can encourage better safeguards. Twenty-three such centers funded partly by the United States, deliberately named Nuclear Security Centers of Excellence in a bid to get local buy-in, have been created so far.
The Indians “are happy to be in a place to have a conversation about nuclear security that is not judgmental,” a senior U.S. Energy Department official said, explaining the concept behind placing such a center in India.
But internal U.S. government cables asserted several years ago that while India initially seemed to embrace the idea, it eventually rejected it, to Washington’s surprise. In a Feb. 22, 2010, cable disclosed later by Wikileaks, then-U.S. ambassador Timothy Roemer said that instead of focusing on nuclear security, India finally decided to set up “a research and development center dedicated to the world-wide deployment of [nuclear reactor] technologies” that the country likes, but experts in Washington consider dangerous on grounds that they could contribute to the use and spread of nuclear-explosive materials.
The center “would be an Indian government body, staffed by the [Department of Atomic Energy], whose primary focus was research and development” on new reactors, Roemer wrote. This approach “did not fully meet the U.S. vision,” he added. India subsequently renamed the facility its Global Centre for Nuclear Energy Partnership, and it began limited operations this year with closed workshops on the physical protection of nuclear materials and facilities scheduled alongside nuclear advocacy seminars entitled “Splitting Atoms for Prosperity” and “Atoms for Progress.”
Despite the celebration of close U.S.-Indian ties during President Obama’s visit to Delhi in January, “there is still no deep technical relationship” between the two countries on nuclear security issues, a White House official conceded in a recent interview, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We only hope that this will slowly change.”
At the moment, India is seeking three favors from Washington: It wants U.S. help to gain membership in the Missile Technology Control Regime, an international forum meant to limit the spread of nuclear-tipped missiles which would give it access to certain otherwise restricted foreign space-launch technologies. And it wants to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group, composed of nations that agree to respect nonproliferation rules when they trade in nuclear-related technologies. Both ambitions reflect India’s desire to be accorded the status of a major world power, U.S. experts say.
It also wants to acquire U.S. defense technologies by co-producing weapons systems in India with key Pentagon contractors — an issue discussed between Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar during the latter’s weeklong visit to Washington in early December.
But the Obama administration decided not to use these issues as leverage to force better security measures for nuclear explosives, the senior U.S. official said, because of its judgment that doing so would only prompt India to walk away.
A former senior U.S. nonproliferation official said this was a mistake. Washington, he said on condition of not being named, “has allowed itself to be put into the position of not wanting to displease India for fear of putting things off-track” in its new, warming relationship, and it has wrongly “allowed the Indians to wall off things they are not interested in talking about.”
An official in Britain’s Foreign Office, who also spoke on condition he not be named, expressed a more jaundiced view of this reluctance to press Delhi harder.
“Nothing can be allowed to get in the way of investment in the capacious Indian market,” the British official said, describing the current American mindset. “India has effectively bought itself breathing space, over a lot of concerning issues, especially nuclear security, by opening itself up for the first time to significant trades with the U.S. and Europe.” The financial gains, he said, are “eye-watering.”
According to the U.S. Commerce Department, trade with India grew from $19 billion in 2000 to more than $100 billion in 2014. U.S. exports exceeded $38 billion — including substantial new U.S. arms shipments — supporting 181,000 U.S. jobs. Indian direct investment in the United States totaled $7.8 billion while U.S. investments reached $28 billion.
Washington, the British official explained, does not wish to provoke a spat over nuclear security simply because doing so could threaten this lucrative trade, which benefits many U.S. companies.
This story was written by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C., and was originally published on its website.


India Is Building a Top-Secret Nuclear City to Produce Thermonuclear Weapons, Experts Say


The weapons could upgrade India as a nuclear power — and deeply unsettle Pakistan and China.
By Adrian Levy
HALLAKERE, India - When laborers began excavating pastureland in India’s southern Karnataka state early in 2012, members of the nomadic Lambani tribe were startled. For centuries, the scarlet-robed herbalists and herders had freely crisscrossed the undulating meadows there, known as kavals, and this uprooting of their landscape came without warning or explanation. By autumn, Puttaranga Setty, a wiry groundnut farmer from the village of Kallalli, encountered a barbed-wire fence blocking off a well-used trail. His neighbor, a herder, discovered that the road from this city to a nearby village had been diverted elsewhere. They rang Doddaullarti Karianna, a weaver who sits on one of the village councils that funnel India’s sprawling democracy of 1.25 billion down to the grassroots.
Karianna asked officials with India’s state and central governments why the land inhabited by farming and tribal communities was being walled off, but they refused to answer. So Karianna sought legal help from the Environment Support Group, a combative ecological advocacy organization that specializes in fighting illegal encroachment on greenbelt land. But the group also made little progress. Officials warned its lawyers that the prime minister’s office was running the project. “There is no point fighting this, we were told,” Leo Saldanha, a founding member of the advocacy organization, recalled. “You cannot win.”
Only after construction on the site began that year did it finally become clear to the tribesmen and others that two secretive agencies were behind a project that experts say will be the subcontinent’s largest military-run complex of nuclear centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories, and weapons- and aircraft-testing facilities when it’s completed, probably sometime in 2017. Among the project’s aims: 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.
But another, more controversial ambition, according to retired Indian government officials and independent experts in London and Washington, is 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.
India’s close neighbors, China and Pakistan, would see this move as a provocation: Experts say 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.
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. The government has said little about it and made no public promises about how the highly enriched uranium to be produced there will be used. As a military facility, it is not open to international inspection.
But a lengthy investigation by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), including interviews with local residents, senior and retired Indian scientists and military officers connected to the nuclear program, and foreign experts and intelligence analysts, has pierced some of the secrecy surrounding the new facility, parts of which are slated to open in 2016. This new facility will give India a nuclear capability — the ability to make many large-yield nuclear arms — that most experts say it presently lacks.
A nuclear stockpile in a dangerous neighborhood
The independent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that 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 successfully tested a thermonuclear weapon — involving a two-stage explosion, typically producing a much larger force and far greater destruction than single-stage atomic bombs — in 1967, while India’s scientists claimed to have detonated a thermonuclear weapon in 1998. But the test site preparations director at the time, K. Santhanam, said in 2009 it was a “fizzle,” rendering the number, type, and capability of such weapons in India’s arsenal uncertain to outsiders.
India, according to former Australian nonproliferation chief John Carlson, is one of just three countries that continue to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons — the others are Pakistan and North Korea. The enlargement of India’s thermonuclear program would position the country alongside the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, Israel, France, and China, which already have significant stockpiles of such weapons.
Few authorities in India are willing to discuss these matters publicly, partly because the country’s Atomic Energy Act and the Official Secrets Act shroud everything connected to the Indian nuclear program and in the past have been used to bludgeon those who divulge details. Spokesmen for the two organizations involved in the Challakere construction, the Defense Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), which has played a leading role in nuclear weapons design, declined to answer any of CPI’s questions, including about the government’s ambitions for the new park. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs also declined to comment.
The secret city emerges
Western analysts, speaking on condition of anonymity, say, however, that preparation for this enrichment effort has been underway for four years, at a second top-secret site known as the Rare Materials Plant, 160 miles to the south of Challakere, near the city of Mysore.
Satellite photos of that facility from 2014 have revealed the existence of a new nuclear enrichment complex that is already feeding India’s weapons program
Satellite photos of that facility from 2014 have revealed the existence of a new nuclear enrichment complex that is already feeding India’s weapons program and, some Western analysts maintain, laying the groundwork for a more ambitious hydrogen bomb project. It is effectively a test bed for Challakere, they say, a proving ground for technology and a place where technicians can practice producing the highly enriched uranium the military would need.
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. Seen by CPI, this letter spells out the ambition to feed new centrifuges with fuel derived from yellowcake — milled uranium ore named after its color — 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.
Finding authoritative information about the scope and objectives of these two massive construction projects is not easy. “Even for us, details of the Indian program are always sketchy, and hard facts thin on the ground,” a circumstance that leaves room for misunderstanding, a senior Obama administration official said in Washington.
But Gary Samore, who served from 2009 to 2013 as the White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, said there was little misunderstanding. “I believe that India intends to build thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China,” said Samore. It is unclear, he continued, when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful arsenal, but “they will.”
A former senior British official who worked on nuclear issues likewise said intelligence analysts on both sides of the Atlantic are “increasingly concerned” about India’s pursuit of thermonuclear weapons and are “actively monitoring” both sites. U.S. officials in Washington said they shared this assessment. “Mysore is being constantly monitored, and we are constantly monitoring progress in Challakere,” a former White House official said.
Robert Kelley, who served as the director of the Iraq Action Team at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1992-1993 and 2001-2005, is a former project leader for nuclear intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He told CPI that after analyzing the available satellite imagery, as well as studying open source material on both sites, he believes that India is pursuing a larger thermonuclear arsenal. Its development, he warned, “will inevitably usher in a new nuclear arms race” in a volatile region.
However, Western knowledge about how India’s weapons are stored, transported, and protected, and how the radiological and fissile material that fuels them is guarded and warehoused — the chain of custody — remains rudimentary.
However, Western knowledge about how India’s weapons are stored, transported, and protected, and how the radiological and fissile material that fuels them is guarded and warehoused — the chain of custody — remains rudimentary. After examining nuclear security practices in 25 countries with “weapons-usable nuclear materials,” the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, in January 2014 ranked India’s nuclear security practices 23rd, above only Iran and North Korea. An NTI analyst who asked to remain unnamed told CPI that India’s score stemmed in part from the country’s opacity and “obfuscation on nuclear regulation and security issues.”
But the group also noted the prevalence of corruption in India and the insecurity of the region: the rise of Islamist jihad fronts in India and nearby Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as well as homegrown leftist insurgencies. “Many other countries, including China, have worked with us to understand the ratings system and better their positions.” But India did not, the NTI analyst said.
A culture of quiet
Like the villagers in Challakere, some key members of the Indian Parliament say they know little about the project. One veteran lawmaker, who has twice been a cabinet minister, and who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the topic, said his colleagues are rarely briefed about nuclear weapons-related issues. “Frankly, we in Parliament discover little,” he said, “and what we do find out is normally from Western newspapers.” And in an interview with Indian reporters in 2003, Jayanthi Natarajan, a former lawmaker who later served as minister for environment and forests, said that she and other members of Parliament had “tried time and again to raise [nuclear-related] issues … and have achieved precious little.”
Nonetheless, Environment Support Group lawyers acting for the villagers living close to Challakere eventually forced some important disclosures. The region’s parliamentary representative heard about plans for the park from then-Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony as early as March 2007, according to a copy of personal correspondence between the two that was obtained by the group and seen by CPI. (Antony declined to comment.)
This was the very moment India was also negotiating a deal with the United States to expand nuclear cooperation. That deal ended nearly three decades of nuclear-related isolation for India, imposed as a punishment for its first atom bomb test in 1974. U.S. military assistance to India was barred for a portion of this period, and Washington also withheld its support for loans by international financial institutions.
The agreement, which the two sides signed in 2007, was highly controversial in Washington. While critics warned it would reward India for its secret pursuit of the bomb and allow it to expand its nuclear weapons work, supporters emphasized that it included language in which India agreed to identify its civilian nuclear sites and open them to inspection by the IAEA.
India also said that it would refrain from conducting new atomic weapons tests. And in return for waiving restrictions on India’s civil nuclear program, the U.S. president was required to determine that India was “working actively with the United States for the early conclusion of a multilateral treaty on the cessation of the production of fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons.” In April 2006, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the deal would not trigger an arms race in the region or “enhance [India’s] military capacity or add to its military stockpile.” Rice added: “Moreover, the nuclear balance in the region is a function of the political and military situation in the region. We are far more likely to be able to influence those regional dynamics from a position of strong relations with India and indeed with Pakistan.”
Opponents of the deal complained, however, that it did not compel India to allow inspections of nine reactor sites known to be associated with the country’s military, including several producing plutonium for nuclear arms. The deal also allowed 10 other reactor sites subject to IAEA inspection to use imported uranium fuel, freeing up an indigenously mined supply of uranium that was not tracked by the international community — and could now be redirected to the country’s bomb program.
By May 2009, seven months after Congress ratified the U.S.-India nuclear cooperation deal, the Karnataka state government had secretly leased 4,290 acres adjacent to the villages of Varavu Kaval and Khudapura in the district of Chitradurga to the DRDO and another 1,500 acres to the Indian Institute of Science, a research center that has frequently worked with the DRDO and India’s nuclear industry, documents obtained by lawyers showed.
In December 2010, the state government leased a further 573 acres to the Indian Space Research Organisation and the BARC bought 1,810 acres. Councilor Karianna said the villagers were not told at the time about any of these transactions and that the documents, which the advocacy group obtained two years later in 2012, “were stunning. We were being fenced in behind our backs.”
Srikumar Banerjee, then-chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, first offered an official glimpse of the project’s ambitions in 2011, when he told CNN’s India channel that the enrichment plant could be used to produce nuclear fuel, or slightly enriched uranium, to power India’s heavy- and light-water reactors. However, Banerjee added that the site would also have a strategic use, a designation that would keep international inspectors away. (India’s nuclear agreement with Washington and others provides no access to military-related facilities.)
High security, zero accountability
The sensitivity of the Challakere project became clearer after the Environment Support Group legal team filed a lawsuit in 2012 at the High Court of Karnataka, demanding a complete accounting of pastureland being seized by the authorities — only to learn from the state land registry that local authorities had granted the Indian army 10,000 acres too, as the future home for a brigade of 2,500 soldiers. The State Reserve Police, an armed force, would receive 350 acres, and 500 acres more had been set aside for a commando training center.
The nuclear city would, in short, be ringed by a securityperimeter of thousands of military and paramilitary guards.
The nuclear city would, in short, be ringed by a security perimeter of thousands of military and paramilitary guards.
In July 2013, six years after New Delhi greenlit the plans, an Indian environmental agency, the National Green Tribunal, finally took up the villager’s complaints. It dispatched investigators to the scene and demanded that each government agency disclose its ambitions in detail. The DRDO responded that national security trumped the tribunal and provided no more information; the other government entities simply continued construction.
While the IAEA would be kept out, villagers were being hemmed in. By 2013, a public notice was plastered onto an important local shrine warning worshippers it would soon be inaccessible. A popular altar for a local animist ceremony was already out of bounds.
“Then the groundwater began to vanish,” Karianna said. The district is semiarid, and local records, still written in ink, show that between 2003 and 2007, droughts had caused the suicides of 101 farmers whose crops failed. By 2013, construction had fenced off a critical man-made reservoir adjacent to Ullarthi. Bore wells dug by the nuclear and military contractors as the construction accelerated siphoned off other water supplies from surrounding villages.
Seventeen miles of 15-foot-high walls began to snake around the villagers’ meadows, blocking grazing routes and preventing them from gathering firewood or herbs for medicine. Hundreds rallied to knock holes into the new ramparts. “They were rebuilt in days,” Karianna said, “so we tried again, but this time teams of private security guards had been hired by someone, and they viciously beat my neighbors and friends.”
BARC and the DRDO still provided no detailed explanations to anyone on the ground about the scope and purpose of their work, Karianna added. “Our repeated requests, pleadings, representations to all elected members at every level have yielded no hard facts. It feels as if India has rejected us.” Highlighting local discontent, almost all of the villagers ringing the kavals boycotted the impending general election, a rare action since India’s birth as a democracy in 1947. The growing local discontent, and the absence of public comment by the United States or European governments about the massive project, eventually drew the attention of independent nuclear analysts.
From centrifuges to submarines
Serena Kelleher-Vergantini, an analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nonprofit, scoured all the available satellite imagery in the summer of 2014. Eventually, she zeroed in on the construction site in the kavals. The journal IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review was separately doing the same in London, commissioning Kelley, formerly of the IAEA, to analyze images from the Mysore plant.
What struck both of them was the enormous scale and ambition of the projects, as well as the secrecy surrounding them. The military-nuclear park in the kavals, at nearly 20 square miles, has a footprint comparable in size to the New York state capital, Albany. After analyzing the images and conducting interviews with atomic officials in India, Kelleher-Vergantini concluded that the footprint for enrichment facilities planned in the new complex would enable scientists to produce industrial quantities of uranium (though the institute would only know how much when construction had progressed further). As Kelley examined photos of the second site, he was astonished by the presence of two recently expanded buildings that had been made lofty enough to accommodate a new generation of tall, carbon-fiber centrifuges, capable of working far faster to enrich uranium than any existing versions.
Nuclear experts express the productiveness of the enrichment machines in Separative Work Units (SWUs). Kelley concluded that at the second site, the government could install up to 1,050 of these new hyper-efficient machines, which, together with about 700 older centrifuges, could complete 42,000 SWUs a year — enough, he said, to make roughly 403 pounds of weapons-grade uranium. A new hydrogen bomb, with an explosive force exceeding 100,000 tons of TNT, requires only between roughly 9 and 15 pounds of enriched uranium, according to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group of nuclear experts from 16 countries that seek to reduce and secure uranium stocks.
Retired Indian nuclear scientists and military officers said in interviews that India’s growing nuclear submarine fleet would be the first beneficiary of the newly produced enriched uranium.
India presently has just one indigenous vessel, the INS Arihant, constructed in a program supervised by the prime minister’s office. Powered by an 80-megawatt uranium reactor developed by BARC that began operating in August 2013, it will formally enter military service in 2016, having undergone sea trials in 2014. A second, INS Aridhaman, is already under construction, with at least two more slated to be built, a senior military officer said in an interview. Each would be loaded with up to 12 nuclear-tipped missiles. The officer, who was not authorized to be named, said the fleet’s expansion gained a new sense of urgency after Chinese submarines sailed across the Bay of Bengal to Sri Lanka in September and October 2014, docking in a port facility in Colombo that had been built by Chinese engineers.
Asked what else the additional uranium would be used for, a senior scientist at the DRDO, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it would mostly be used to fuel civilian nuclear power reactors and contribute to what he called “benign medical and scientific programs.” The government has not made such a promise publicly, however, or provided details. India does not have to report what it does with its indigenous uranium, “especially if it is not in the civilian domain,” said Sunil Chirayath, a research assistant professor at Texas A&M University who is an expert on India’s civilian nuclear program.
A senior Obama administration official in Washington, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, expressed skepticism about the government scientist’s private claim. The official said that India’s civilian nuclear programs, including power stations and research establishments, were actually benefiting from new access to imported nuclear fuel after the embargo’s removal in 2007 and now require almost “no homemade enriched uranium.”
India has already received roughly 4,914 tons of uranium from France, Russia, and Kazakhstan, for example, and it has agreements with Canada, Mongolia, Argentina, and Namibia for additional shipments. In September 2014, then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott signed an agreement to make Australia a “long-term, reliable supplier of uranium to India” — a deal that has sparked considerable controversy at home.
The International Panel on Fissile Materials estimates that the Arihant-class submarine core requires only about 143 pounds of uranium, enriched to 30 percent — a measure of how many of its isotopes can be readily used in weaponry. Using this figure and the estimated capacity of the centrifuges India is installing in Mysore alone — not even including Challakere — Kelley concluded that even after fueling its entire submarine fleet there would be 352 pounds of weapons-grade uranium left over every year, or enough to fuel at least 22 H-bombs. (His calculation presumes that the plant is run efficiently and that its excess capacity is purposeful and not driven by bureaucratic inertia — two large uncertainties in India, a senior U.S. official noted. But having a “rainy day” stockpile to deter the Chinese might be the aim, the official added.)
Thermonuclear doctrine and the China threat
A retired official who served inside the nuclear cell at the Indian prime minister’s office, the apex organization that supervises the military nuclear program, conceded that other uses besides submarines had been anticipated “for many years.” He pointed to a “thermonuclear bomb program” as “a beneficiary” and suggested India had had no choice but to “develop a new generation of more powerful megaton weapons” if it was to maintain “credible minimum deterrence.”
Previously, this meant the bare minimum required to prevent an attack on India, but a new Indian doctrine in 2003 — in response to Pakistan’s increasingly aggressive nuclear posture — altered this notion: “Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” China, the retired official said, “has long had a thermonuclear capability, and if India is to have a strategic defense worth its salt, and become a credible power in the region, we need to develop a similar weapon and in deployable numbers.” U.S. and British officials affirmed that they have been aware of this discussion among Indian scientists and soldiers for years.
In an interview, Gen. Balraj Singh Nagal, who from 2008 to 2010 ran India’s Strategic Forces Command within its Nuclear Command Authority, the group that manages India’s nuclear forces, declined to discuss specific aspects of the nuclear city in Challakere or the transformation of the Rare Materials Plant close to Mysore. But keeping pace with China and developing a meaningful counter to its arsenal was “the most pressing issue” facing India, he said.
“It’s not Pakistan we are looking at most of the time, like most in the West presume,” Nagal said. “Beijing has long managed a thermonuclear program, and so this is one of many options India should push forward with, as well as reconsidering our nuclear defense posture, which is outdated and ineffective. We have to follow the technological curve. And where China took it, several decades before us, with the hydrogen bomb, India has to follow.”
The impact of the U.S.-India nuclear deal and India’s fissile production surge on the country’s neighbors can already be seen. “Pakistan recently stepped up a gear,” the former senior British official said. He pointed to an increase in Pakistan’s plutonium production at four new military reactors in the city of Khushab; a reprocessing plant known as Pinstech, near Islamabad; a refurbished civilian plutonium reprocessing plant converted to military use in an area known as Chashma; and “the ramping up of uranium production at a site in Dera Ghazi Khan.”
The retired British official added: “India needs to constantly rethink what deterrence means, as it is not a static notion, and everyone understands that. But the balance of power in the region is so easily upset.” The official said that in choosing to remain publicly silent, the United States was taking a risk, evidently to try and reap financial and strategic rewards.
Does Washington know?
Officials at the Pentagon argued privately before Washington reached its 2008 nuclear deal with India that lifting sanctions would lead to billions of dollars’ worth of sales in conventional weapons, according to a U.S. official privy to the discussions. That prediction was accurate, with U.S. exports of major weapons to India reaching $5 billion from 2011 to 2014 and edging out Russian sales to India for the first time.
“But the U.S. is also looking for something intangible: to create a new strategic partner capable of facing down China,” and so India has taken advantage of the situation to overhaul its military nuclear capability, the British official noted. Pushing back China, said the official, who has worked for 30 years in counterterrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and nonproliferation, especially in Southern Asia, is regarded as being “in everyone’s interest.”
White House officials declined to comment on this claim on the record. But Robert Einhorn, the State Department’s former top nonproliferation official, told the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in March that some officials in the Bush administration had the ambition, in making a nuclear deal with India, to “work together to counter China, to be a counterweight to an emerging China.” He added that, in his view, that ambition has not been realized, due to India’s historic insistence on pursuing an independent foreign policy. He also said the nuclear deal had unfortunate repercussions, because other nations concluded that Washington was playing favorites with India.
In Challakere, construction continues despite a ruling by the National Green Tribunal in August 2014 calling for a stay on all “excavation, construction and operation of projects” until environmental clearances had been secured. Justice M. Chockalingam and R. Nagendran of the tribunal ordered blocked roads reopened with access given to all religious sites. But when villagers attempted to pass over or through the fences and walls in the winter of 2014, they were met by police officers who hand out photocopied notes in English: “Environmental clearances has [sic] been awarded [to BARC] dated 24 July 2014, which is a secret document and cannot be disclosed.”
Councilor Karianna said: “Still, to this day, no one has come to talk to me, to explain to us, what they are doing to our land.”
“Is this what ‘national interest’ means?” he asked, looking out over the rolling pasture, enveloped in the red dust kicked up by diggers. “We sit beneath our ancient trees and watch them tear up the land, wondering what’s in store.”
This story was written by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C., and was originally published on its website.
The Center for Public Integrity’s national security managing editor R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this article from Washington, D.C.


Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Walking in fear as a Muslim


By Mubeen Shakir
A 12-year-old girl is beaten at school in New York, is called “ISIS” and nearly has her hijab torn off by her classmates. A 16-year-old Somali American dies in a fall from a six-story building in Seattle that his family and the Muslim community in the city suspect was the result of foul play. Rocks are thrown through the windows of a Muslim family’s home in Plano, Tex. A shop owner in Queens, N.Y., is attacked at his business by a man shouting, “I’ll kill Muslims.” This is only a small sampling of the recent violence and hate crimes against Muslims, which have reached record highs.
These days, sermons at mosques in the United States, rather than focusing on community and religion, conclude with advice about how Muslims can protect themselves from attack. The fear that any non-Muslim American feels about his or her safety in the face of terrorism is felt tenfold by Muslim Americans. I am 6-foot-1 and 175 pounds, a Rhodes scholar and student at Harvard Medical School. I am not used to feeling so afraid for my body.
I am afraid that on the train home from the hospital, someone will think my backpack contains a bomb. When I walk through a crowd, I fear being accosted by young men calling me “Arab” or “terrorist.” I am afraid that all the talk of Muslim registries, rabid dogs and closing mosques will lead to someone shooting at the mosque that my mother attends every day. If I feel this way walking down the streets of Boston, with the privileges of a well-educated, English-speaking male, I can only imagine the fear of the many people who share my religion without such privileges.
In his book “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of the centuries of violence committed against the black body in the United States. As a Muslim at this moment in the United States, I sympathize. I have never been so aware of my body — the feeling of its not belonging, the knowledge of the violence perpetrated every day against those who share my body.
Republican presidential front- runner Donald Trump has been widely criticized for proposing that Muslims be banned from entering the United States. But Trump is not alone. The rhetoric of the Republican field has lifted to new heights the level of bigotry that’s acceptable in the public sphere. Despite his professed love of the Constitution, which explicitly states that “no religious test shall ever be required” as a qualification for public office, Ben Carson has suggested that I, a natural-born American, should never consider running for president. Ted Cruz has stated that the kindness and generosity of our nation should be shared with innocent Christian Syrian refugees — but not innocent Muslims.
The Nov. 13 Paris attacks hold special importance for me, as the following week was the anniversary of my father’s passing. The founder of the first mosque in Oklahoma City, he aspired to be a part of a United States in which that building would belong as much as any church or synagogue. I am pained to imagine his sorrow, if he were alive, at the realization that the American Muslim condition today is worse than it was in conservative Oklahoma in the 1980s.
Muslim leaders should indeed answer the calls to work to improve our communities. But to suggest that the solution lies solely with Muslims is deeply unfair. There are no calls to reform white Christian communities after mass shootings such as the one allegedly carried out by Robert Dear at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. Of course we must ensure our youth are not attracted to radicalization and that all members of our community have sufficient mental-health resources. The same should be said of all religious groups, of any community.
What we, as Americans, need now is solidarity. The physical and political violence perpetrated against Muslims in this country will only worsen unless we stand together against this fear-mongering. No one should be a bystander on a train or at a school as Muslims are assaulted and our rights questioned. We need others to speak out and stand with us.
I am given hope by my friend from Alabama, the son of a pastor, who called me to say he was there for me and was scared for me. I am inspired by my classmate from Compton, Calif., who texted me to ask how we can combat Islamophobia. We need more of these gestures. We need alliances at the community level, within our government and in the media. If we truly believe in liberty and freedom, the time has come to defy hateful rhetoric and immediately begin to make America great again on our own terms.
I don’t know how this story ends. Each night I pray that there will be no more attacks in the name of Islam. I pray that all Americans can come to realize that Muslims are not, by definition, terrorists. I pray for the day I don’t need to pray for these things.
The article was originally published in The Washington Post on 13 December 2015.


After Iran, Is it Pakistan?



Sarah Khan
After years of tough diplomacy and series of negotiations between Iran and P5+1, the US and Iran were able to conclude a nuclear deal in July 2015. The deal was also approved by US congress in November and very soon it will be in the implementation phase. By signing a deal with Iran, US has successfully resolved the issue of nuclear Iran as it has stalled progress on all those activities which were raising suspicion in the West that Iran might develop a nuclear weapon. Before neutralizing Iran, US had successfully destroyed Osirak reactor in Iraq and Al-kibar nuclear reactor in Syria.

After successfully neutralizing Iran, the statements and media writings in US suggests that Pakistan is next on US denuclearization agenda. It is evident from a renowned US newspaper The New York Times editorial published on 06 April 2015 titled “Nuclear Fears in South Asia” which argued that Pakistani Army has become increasingly dependent on the nuclear arsenal because Pakistan cannot match the size and sophistication of India’s conventional forces. Pakistan has left open the possibility that it could be the first to use nuclear weapons in a confrontation, even one that began with conventional arm. Building upon this argument the editorial urged major powers that this is not a situation that can be ignored, however preoccupied they may be by the long negotiations with Iran.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme has always remained an issue of main concern for US and West. US has always tried to target Pakistan’s nuclear programme whenever its dependence on Pakistan has declined. On 17 December during House Foreign Affairs Committee Ambassador Olson stated that US is engaged with Pakistan to discuss development of its tactical nuclear weapons. He also made it clear that US is not discussing any 123 (nuclear cooperation) agreement with Pakistan. During PM Sharif’s visit to US in October 2015, there was much hue and cry about Pakistan-US civil nuclear cooperation.

In August this year a study titled ‘Normal Nuclear Pakistan’ was released by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace authored by Toby Dalton and Michael Krepon. The report proposed five initiatives to include Pakistan in global nuclear order:
(1)       Pakistan should shift from ‘full spectrum’ to ‘strategic deterrence’.
(2) Pakistan should limit the production of its short-range delivery vehicles, tactical nuclear weapons and commit to a ‘recessed’ deterrence posture.
(3)       Pakistan should lift its long held veto in the Conference of Disarmament and let the negotiations on the Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty (FMCT) begin and both reduce and stop its fissile material production.
(4)       Pakistan should separate its civilian and military facilities.
(5)    Pakistan should sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) without waiting for India to sign.
All five proposals/ initiatives suggested by writers have remained priority agenda for US officials since overt nuclearization of South Asia. By recommending ways to denuclearization, writers have suggested that if Pakistan take these measures it will be included in global nuclear order. Pakistani officials have always rejected all such measures on the pretext that nuclear weapons capability is a deterrent against arch rival conventionally superior India. By taking any of the five above mentioned initiatives Pakistan will not be able to ensure credible minimum deterrence against India to ensure its survival. On the other hand, US/ West are not only ignorant of nuclear development in India but they are helping India to enhance its nuclear capability by signing deals of strategic cooperation.  
As narrated in NY Times editorial US and major World powers are now looking for strategies to neutralize nuclear Pakistan, the only Muslim state left with the nuclear capability. US and major powers will likely adopt non-military means (tough sanctions, economic strangulation or economic baits) to achieve their goal in Pakistan.  In order to ensure its national security, Pakistan must reiterate its stated stance on nuclear capability and there should be no compromise on strategic assets of Pakistan.