India Nuclear Weapons Program

[dronie]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2041319399714644331

 

[Gessler]

What are your thoughts on final test for say a 100 - 300kt device at some geopolitically practical/opportune point?...or whatever is the economy of scale point picked for the MIRV warhead size deployed/upgraded in this ramp in the 200 ----> 1000 warhead realm (and all commensurate CnC and delivery upgrades that are also expensive, RnD intensive and thus potentially larger chokepoints to handle first in assured delivery based deterrence for rest of this century etc).

90%+ of yield is after all provided by fusion (scaled lithium-6 deuteride i.e solid tritium) in teller ullam.

Gaseous tritium production from the PHWRs provides supply assurance for gas boosted (deu-trit) only AFAIK.

It boils down to is the current design teller-ullam type or gas-boosted type (the latter even though fission dominant, can be scaled up to 1 MT), which in Indian case is classified regd what is meant by "2nd stage":

https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=52814&reg=3&lang=2

There are of course arguments against proving this capacity and keeping it opaque w.r.t signalling deterrence to adversaries.

I've posted about testing resumption in a different thread:

Trump says US will restart nuclear weapons tests

Since 2025, Trump has never hidden his ambition to resume nuclear testing. The last U.S. critical nuclear weapons test took place on Sept. 23, 1992 Moscow last conducted a critical nuclear device test on Oct. 24, 1990. China’s last test was on July 29, 1996. At this time, there is no...

defencehub.live

But I'm pretty certain that we won't be the one to initiate the new round of testing. Most likely it'll be US or Russia, and then everyone else will catch on. Even Pakistan seems to be preparing for that eventuality:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2036025284479356983

I'm not much informed regarding weapon design itself so can't say anything on that, other that opining that we may need to test further miniaturized devices to be really confident on the design. I'm sure a lot of work has already gone into it over the last ~25 years. A new round of testing will be great regardless. Some sources seem to be convinced that India managed to obtain access to France's Laser Megajoule facility to help in validating newer designs, make of it what you will.

Laser Mégajoule - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

What I can say regarding the deployment configuration is that while earlier information regarding MIRVing (of both land & submarine-based BMs) indicated a modest 4-RV config for missiles like the Agni-6 and K-5, newer prototypes/demo models shown at some expos (so obviously intended to signal intent) seem to be hinting at a more sizeable 8-RV config:

So I'm guessing we can assume that 8-RV will be sought as the ultimate goal at least for K-6 and a notional Agni-6 Mk.II. That's assuming the base A6 itself doesn't show up with 8 RVs from the start as we already tested the 4-RV config on Agni-5 Mk.II.