Hyderabad: India successfully tested the 3500 km range K4 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) on January 19 from a submerged pontoon off the Andhra coast and it has been reported that all the technical parameters were satisfactorily met. While there has been no official press release, government sources confirmed this K4 success and added that the CEP (circular error probability) is 'much more sophisticated than Chinese missiles'.
While the DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organization) and other agencies associated with the development of the K4 SLBM are to be commended for this accomplishment, it would be imprudent to make exaggerated claims about the efficacy of the K4 and by extension, the Indian underwater nuclear deterrent.
India is a recent entrant to the global nuclear weapon club and some historical benchmarking may be useful to place the K4 in a techno-strategic context. As far as SLBM-s go, the USA and Russia (inheritor of the former Soviet legacy and strategic assets) are in a league of their own.
At the height of the Cold War, in the mid-1980s, these two nations fielded SLBM-s aboard the stealthy and invulnerable SSBN (nuclear powered ballistic missile-carrying submarines) and the maximum range of these missiles was 12,000 km with a CEP of under 100 metres.
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The UK and France are deemed to be medium nuclear weapon powers and are part of the US-led strategic configuration as far as the underwater deterrent is concerned. China announced its nuclear weapon capability in October 1964 and carried out its first SLBM test in October 1982. The JL-1 as the missile was called had a modest range of 1700 km at the time.
In the intervening decades, China has invested considerably in its submarine capability and the underwater deterrent. In November 2018, China tested the JL-3 with a range of almost 9,000 km and it is understood that the earliest the missile can be mated with the boat (the SSBN) and deemed fully ops will be 2025.
It is in this larger regional and global context that the Indian effort at enhancing its nascent underwater nuclear deterrent must be placed. It may be recalled that India’s arrival in the underwater strategic domain was announced in November 2018 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who tweeted: “India’s pride, nuclear submarine INS Arihant successfully completed its first deterrence patrol!.”
This tweet marked the first official acknowledgement by India that the country had now acquired a modest but credible underwater deterrent.
The word modest is not misplaced, for the Arihant is equipped with a missile that has a range of 750 km and it was evident that the next boat in the SSBN series would need a missile with a longer range. This is the gap that the K4 seeks to redress.
As Admiral Arun Prakash, former naval chief and Chairman of the COSC (Chiefs of Staff Committee) had pointed out when the Arihant completed its first patrol: “As the third leg of a nuclear-triad, an SSBN threatens an adversary with assured retaliation by nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, while remaining hidden underwater and hence invulnerable. This lends huge credibility to the country’s nuclear deterrent. However Indian SSBNs will need missiles of intercontinental range so that they can credibly threaten adversary forces and population centres from their safe ‘havens’ in the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal.”
With a range of 3500 km, the K4 test of January 19 is a small but significant step in that direction. It merits notice that the firing of a ballistic missile from a submarine underwater is perhaps the MOST challenging operational task for any military in the world. Unlike a ballistic missile launched from a ground silo, which has a two-domain trajectory (earth’s atmosphere and outer space ), the SLBM has to deal with three domains with vastly different characteristics.
When launched from underwater, the SLBM has to traverse the medium of water first; then traverse the earth’s atmosphere in a parabolic path and enter outer-space; streak across thousands of km and again re-enter the earth’s atmosphere in the final target acquisition phase.
This is a very complex technological feat and a number of other parameters have to be harmonized including the impact that firing a heavy missile will have on the stability of the submarine.
The January 19 test of the K4 was conducted from a submerged pontoon and it is expected that the next phase will be to test the missile from the second boat in the Arihant class. Going by the experience of other nations, acquiring this operational status of the SLBM with the appropriate range may take a few more years to realize.
Till then it would be more accurate to note that the Indian underwater deterrent is a work in progress and the requisite degree of national will and financial resources would have to be provided so that the desired degree of ‘credibility’ is attained.
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