India is reportedly building top secret nuclear facility in Karnataka: Foreign Policy
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NEW DELHI: India is building a top-secret facility in southern Karnataka to augment its nuclear power for civilian use as well as increase and upgrade its weapons that could “deeply unsettle” its neighbours, says a exhaustive report in international magazine Foreign Policy. It says work on the project began early in 2012 when tribal pastureland was blocked off with a barbed-wire fence at Challakere for “a project that experts say 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”. Foreign Policy listed the project’s primary aims: to expand the government’s nuclear research, to produce fuel for India’s nuclear reactors, and to help power the country’s fleet of new submarines. The magazine points out that New Delhi has never published a detailed account of its nuclear arsenal, which it first developed in 1974. “However, Western knowledge about how India’s weapons are stored, transported, and protected, and how the radiological and fissile material that fuels them is guarded and warehoused the chain of custody remains rudimentary,” the report says. (Hindustan Times)
