New Delhi: It was an Indian Army officer’s inadvertent and innocuous change of address that alerted two Harvard University researchers to stumble upon the secret location of India’s nuclear-capable Agni-2 and Agni-3 missile bases to Assam.
In India, as in most other countries, locations of the strategic missile bases are kept secret.
In a recent 2020 paper “The Strategic Postures of China and India”, two Harvard Kennedy School researchers—Frank O’Donnell and Alex Bollfrass—wrote on the striking method they employed to determine the Agni-2 and Agni-3 missile base location which included media reports, using Bangladeshi and Pakistani military data and most importantly when an Indian army officer assigned to a missile unit changed his address to Nagaon in central Assam in 2011 and stayed there till 2017.
The paper says: “Our estimate of the northeastern missile base location hosting Agni-2 and Agni-3 in Assam is derived from a combination of sources.”
After Bangladesh and Pakistani military data identified Indian Army’s 3341 Missile Group as operating Agni-2, the researchers identified an Indian 3341 Missile Group officer using online open source data. And what next caught their attention was the change of address of the officer.
“Utilizing meaningful records available online, an Indian 3341 Missile Group officer changed his address to a location in Assam in the period 2010-11, where it has remained until at least end of 2017. He was still assigned to the 3341 Missile Group on these updated address details,” the paper said.
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Besides the officer changing his address in 2011, the year was crucial because it coincided with news media reports in August 2010 which said that the government was considering stationing Agni-2 in Northeast India and that the defence ministry was acquiring land to build bases to deploy Agni-2 with the targeting “probably focused on western, central, and southern China.”
As for the Agni-3, two defence ministry reports caught the researchers’ attention.
In one, an Indian Army spokesperson had remarked that with Agni-3, India can even strike Shanghai in China but “this would require launching the Agni-3 from the very northeastern corner of India.”
The other was a defence ministry statement in 2014 that Agni-3 is “in the arsenal of the armed forces”.
These facts, combined with the Indian military tendency to cluster different missile types at the same location “as at Kamptee and Secunderabad; and the fact that Assam forms the optimal placement for the Agni-3 hold all mainland targets in China and Pakistan at risk,” they got around to the fact that the Agni-2 and Agni-3 had their bases in Assam’s Nagaon.
Planned to be the mainstay weapon of India’s strategic deterrence policy, while the Agni-2 has an approximate range of up to 2,000 km, Agni-3 has a maximum operational range of 3,500 km. The former is a medium-range ballistic missile while the latter is of intermediate-range.
In what may be of significance in the backdrop of a tense and ongoing military face-off between the two Asian giants in eastern Ladakh, the paper says the commonly-held notion that China holds the conventional and nuclear edge over India is a mistaken one.
“We conclude that this assessment of the balance of forces may be mistaken… We assess that India has key under-appreciated conventional advantages that reduce its vulnerability to Chinese threats and attacks. India appears to have cause for greater confidence in its military position against China than is typically acknowledged.”
