Express News Service By

NEW DELHI: India is building a secret nuclear facility which will significantly increase its ability to produce enriched uranium for both civil and military purposes, including thermonuclear weapons, says a report published in international magazine Foreign Policy.

The report said the construction at a top-secret site in Challakere in southern Karnataka’s Chitradurga district began in 2012 by two secretive agencies. The project 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. The exhaustive report, which was originally published by the US-based non-profit Center for Public Integrity (CPI), claimed that Karnataka’s secret project was aimed at expanding “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,” the report said. The magazine quoting unnamed experts claimed that this secretive development may force India’s neighbours China and Pakistan to ratchet up their own nuclear firepower.

The report said New Delhi has never published a detailed account of its nuclear arsenal, which it first developed in 1974.

The magazine, quoting an estimate by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said that India already possesses between 90 and 110 nuclear weapons, as compared to Pakistan’s estimated stockpile of up to 120. China has approximately 260 warheads.

Foreign Policy said that the US based non-profit organisation had carried out an investigation including interviews with locals, senior and retired scientists and military officers connected to the programme, and foreign experts and analysts. The CPI is funded by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, and the Omidyar Network.

IS IT REALLY A SECRET SITE?

The Foreign Policy report said the Institute for Science and International Security has been monitoring the secret site for a long time. It has also published satellite maps of the proposed plant. Like the CPI, this non-profit too is funded by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation.