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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (478)	5/13/1998 2:25:00 PM
From: LoLoLoLita	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12475

Mohan, Congratulations! India has joined the ranks of the world's nuclear superpowers. I've just started my day now, and haven't yet seen any details about the two new sub-kiloton tests. Let me explain what I find is so significant, and why Washington is so upset. It is NOT the fact that the CIA didn't know there were going to be the tests this week. The tests are just the tip of the iceberg. The CIA apparently did not know about the iceberg. The development programs were going on for years. The tests took a few days. If the U.S. had known India was developing H bombs, they would have tried to put a stop to it. The major linchpins of the current non-proliferation regime are based on two things: IAEA inspections of nuclear facilities and the CTBT. The purpose of the regime is to maintain the status quo regarding the nuclear weapons haves and have-nots. If a nation were to decide to have "the bomb" the logical starting point is a plutonium-implosion device such as we used at Trinity Site and Nagasaki. North Korea had such a program. The barriers to entry are small and there is a wealth of public information to assist the designers. India's 1974 test was such a device, with a 12 kT yield. However, in order to build a coherent nuclear weapons capability into military forces it is desirable that other weapons, bigger and smaller, also be incorporated. Any nation who wanted to cheat on the NPT and the IAEA inspection regime (and avoid CIA/NSA notice) could probably scrape together enough fissionable materials (plutonium that is) to make a few Nagasaki-type bombs and hide them away as a hedge. The technology is so straightforward and so much information is publicly available, that there would probably be no need to do an actual test explosion. An H bomb is a different matter. H bombs use a Nagasaki-type device as a trigger to get it started, but the rest of the affair is complicated. If someone were to build one, the only way to know if it would work would be to test it. This was the major reason for the CTBT. Without testing, there would be no new nuclear superpowers w. H bombs. India and Pakistan knew this, and didn't sign. The U.S. was unable to bully them into signing. By attaining H bombs, India can make more efficient use of its fissionable material (that is, get more kilotons of TNT-equivalent out of the same mass of plutonium). It can also develop weapons tailored for different military purposes with different explosive yields. Once a nation has learned the trick, they would never want to go back to the simple Nagasaki type device. Also, it's just as important to look at the smaller device as it is to look at the bigger device. If a nation's military only has very large weapons, it is much more difficult to reach a decision to start using them. That is why the one-kiloton battlefield weapon is just as important as the thermonuclear device. Because they are so much easier to start using than the big ones, an adversary would want to steer clear of even smaller provocations. Unfortunately, Pakistan will not readily sit still and be outdone. They will seek to match the accomplishment and there could be an arms race, causing great expense for two countries with many people living in poverty. This I find sad.