Mohan:
Nuclear weapons program to cost $16-160 Billion
This is a heavy burden on the Indian budget. And it will bankrupt pakistan, if the pakis decide to follow the Indians. Then the pakis have to eat grass (-may be smoke it) (according to dear departed Bhutto - seriously he should not have been hung) to foot this Nuclear bill.
deccanchronicleonline.com
Nuclear weapons programme to cost India Rs 70,000 crore New Delhi: India's deployment of nuclear weapons, as envisaged by its recent “nuclear doctrine,” will cost at least Rs 70,000 crore ($16 billion) over the next three decades, a senior official said Sunday.
Bharat Karnad, member of the National Security Advisory Board who was involved in preparing the draft nuclear blueprint, said the cost “is eminently reasonable and affordable.”“According to a study published soon after the May 1998 nuclear tests, the cost of having between 350 to 400 nuclear weapons distributed over a triad (air, sea and land) would be about Rs 70,000 crore over 30 years,”
Karnad told the Times of India daily.
"In a worst-case scenario — of trade embargoes, international credit cut-offs and other punitive measures — economists believe it will work out to ten times that amount,” he said.Karnad said the cost
might appear “unaffordably large,” but is “less than 6.7 per cent of the India's 1996-97 Gross Net Product.”
“If the economy grows at seven per cent every year then in 2030 the total cost will be just 0.7 per cent of the Gross Net Product,” he said. “You will have to put the figure for nuclear weapons programme in this perspective and it appears eminently reasonable and affordable,” Karnad said.
India's draft “nuclear doctrine” envisaged a weapons programme that would produce a land, air and sea-based nuclear deterrent. The document would have to be approved by the government that emerges
from next month's general elections. |
