On August 29, India’s second Arihant-class submarine, the INS Arighaat, was commissioned into the Indian Navy in the presence of India’s Defence Minister Shri. Rajnath Singh. At the ceremony, Singh declared that the new submarine would strengthen India’s nuclear triad, enhance nuclear deterrence, establish a balance of power, and secure India’s security. The INS Arighaat is generally regarded as an advanced variant of its predecessor, INS Arihant, India’s first indigenously designed and developed nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN). Both submarines are expected to play a central role in India’s naval force projection.
INS Arighaat and Regional Geopolitics
The INS Arighaat is powered by an 83 MW pressurized light water nuclear reactor. It has a displacement of 6000 tonnes with a length of 112 meters. The submarine can also reach top speeds of 28 kmph on the surface and 44 kmph when submerged. It is reported to carry four nuclear-capable long-range K-4 (3500 kms) submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) or at least 12 Sagarika/K-15 SLBMs, with a 750 km range. Moreover, the INS Arighaat is said to employ stealth technologies via its sonar systems and quiet propulsion.
As with any new advent in military technology, the INS Arighaat will ripple through regional geopolitics. Pakistan has yet to comment on the commissioning, unlike the previous completion of the INS Arihant, when a Foreign Office spokesperson responded negatively, remarking that “the bellicose language employed by the top Indian leadership highlights the threats to strategic stability in South Asia and raises questions about responsible nuclear stewardship in India.” For its part, China has reacted with caution. A report carried by the Global Times, a CCP mouthpiece, cites an unknown Beijing-based expert who advises India to wield this power responsibly and avoid ‘flexing muscles’ or indulging in nuclear blackmail. The expert also acknowledges that the advent of the INS Arighaat bolsters India’s nuclear deterrence posture.
Technical Challenges of INS Arighaat
The arrival of the INS Arighaat represents a step toward achieving deterrence, but not a minimum ‘credible deterrence.’ Given that the INS Arighaat dimensions and missile launch tubes are similar to INS Arihant, military experts remain puzzled over how this SSBN could carry more than 12 K-15 SLBMs. The K-15 missile’s operational range is still modest and thus it could still be considered a tactical missile rather than a strategic missile, which diminishes the effectiveness of India’s second-strike capability. If launched from a safe distance, these missiles can reach the entire Sindh, Karachi, Balochistan, and major cities of Punjab like Lahore, Faisalabad and Multan. To strike the political and military center of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the SSBN would need to launch from a closer distance along the Pakistani coast, raising the risk of being detected. In the case of China, if the SLBMs were launched from the northern tip of the Bay of Bengal, the K-15 could only target Yunnan and Tibet Autonomous region.
To overcome these challenges, the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) is developing the K5 (5,000 kms) and K6 (6,000 kms) SLBMs for employment in the upcoming new class of SSBNs. The K-8 is a larger, 8,000 km range missile and has been in the research and development stage for a while.
In addition to limitations in its missile ranges, the INS Arighaat also has to overcome significant technological issues concerning its underwater vertical launch weapon systems, which require stability, speed, and accuracy traversing both air and water.
The next challenge the INS Arighaat faces is maintaining effective official communication with the authorities, which in India’s case is the Strategic Forces Command (SFC). Nuclear command and control on SSBNs is facilitated through a system of controls which involve de-mated missile systems and permissive action links – devices that prevent unauthorized arming and launching of nuclear weapons without proper codes from the official command authority. As SSBNs generally relay communications with low frequency systems, it prohibits them from receiving the messages on time, thereby increasing the chances of missing a code from the command authority to arm a missile and carrying out a sanctioned attack.
One also has to take into account that SSBNs are only used in the event of a retaliatory second strike and are themselves vulnerable to being attacked by adversaries in the case of being detected during patrol missions. They are not designed for war fighting. This is where the role of nuclear attack submarines or SSNs becomes vital. Because of their offensive capabilities and global reach, the SSNs are used to provide cover and escort SSBNs to distant patrol areas. Yet India currently hasn’t developed the expertise required to design SSNs indigenously and doesn’t have a large number of SSNs apart from INS Chakra, which was leased from Russia. Hence, how far INS Arighaat will be deployed for deterrence patrols will be a constrained by the limiting SSN factor.
SSBNs: A Dated Platform
One must also critically examine whether India’s nuclear deterrence is credible or not. From the undersea strike perspective, experts are concerned due to the lack of progress in testing and operationalizing longer-range SLBMs. Earlier missile tests involving the INS Arihant have been of the K-15 missile, and the longer-range K-4 missile hasn’t been tested enough in operational conditions. This is the platform that could provide a credible deterrence against China; and it needs further testing.
It should also be noted that any SLBM developed operationally on the INS Arighaat is still a ballistic missile and would as such be vulnerable to exo-atmospheric interception by advanced ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems.
SSBNs are widely regarded as platforms of mass destruction, but their utility and stealth capabilities are often debated. For example, China’s second-strike capability is also said to be shaky: The PLA Navy’s Type-094 submarine is range-limited by JL-2 SLBMs, and vulnerable to detection by US anti-submarine operations while navigating choke points. Secondly there has been a marked improvement in US anti-ballistic missile defenses which undercut China’s SSBN deterrence capacity. The effectiveness of US missile defense systems tracking and discrimination capabilities is expected to further improve with the eventual fielding of a space-based sensor layer. This has caused Beijing to rethink its nuclear-triad strategy, eventually leading them to test their indigenous Fractional-Orbital Bombardment platform – a space-based nuclear delivery system.
Is the INS Arighaat a Credible Deterrent?
Although the arrival of the INS Arighaat is a positive development for India, one must remember that the SSBNs are a technology from the Cold War era, and that the concept of second-strike has evolved. Second-strike capability should not be understood narrowly as just a one-time launch of SLBMs after a first nuclear attack. There is no guarantee that the enemy won’t resort to multiple strikes even after a successful second-strike. The number of second-strike targets will always be a variable factor and thus one can’t accurately predict the minimum number of strikes and ranges required to achieve a ‘credible deterrence.’ The limited strike range of INS Arighaat implies that India’s minimum credible deterrence is still a work in progress. The quest for achieving ‘nuclear-triad’ should continue further and India should look to develop and acquire space-based nuclear deterrence, thereby creating a ‘nuclear quad.’
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