India's ICBM Will Carry Multiple Nuclear Warheads 351
An anonymous reader writes "India is equipping its longest range nuclear-capable missile, the Agni-V, with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs), The Diplomat reports. A MIRVed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) carries multiple nuclear warheads on a single missile, which it dispenses towards numerous or a single target after the final stage of the ICBM boosts off. MIRVed missiles destabilized the Cold War nuclear balance and are likely to do so again: 'Because they give nations greater confidence in being able to destroy an adversary's hardened missile silo sites in a first strike by launching multiple, lower yield warheads at the sites.'"
Just another way to destroy ourselves (Score:2)
Geee, I'm in awe...not.
Re:Just another way to destroy ourselves (Score:5, Insightful)
80% of the Indians don't have a toilet to shit in, but the government is more worried about expensive war toys with no purpose at all.
Way to go, India. There's nothing like getting your priorities straight.
Re:Just another way to destroy ourselves (Score:5, Insightful)
So its ok if Indians are ruled by a Chinese-Pak-American invader force as long as they have a toilet to shit in?
The foremost priority of any government is to protect the nations borders, otherwise whats the point of nationalism anyway?
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The foremost priority of any government is to protect the nations citizens, otherwise whats the point of nationalism anyway?
FTFY, though it doesn't change your argument ;)
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What logic says that India should stop worrying about its defence till all Indians are shitting in toilets?
Yours is just another predictable response that shows up whenever anything like this is reported on /.
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What logic says that India should stop worrying about its defence till all Indians are shitting in toilets?
They should consider defence, maybe not that much.
Yours is just another predictable response that shows up whenever anything like this is reported on /.
I'm glad not to disappoint.
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And who decides what "that much" is? Like I've noted elsewhere, different areas that a government spends on get their share of yearly budget and then the decision makes in those areas decide how the money is spent. Nobody is taking away money allocated to providing clean drinking water to make missiles. Indian defence spending is decreasing every year and projects like guaranteed employment and food-at-lower-than-market-cost to poor are getting a larger share of spending. So looks like they have their prior
Re:Just another way to destroy ourselves (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody is taking away money allocated to providing clean drinking water to make missiles
As if the money didn't all come from the same bag? The Indian government is taking in money, allocating it to "defense" and building first strike weapons to bomb an imaginary enemy; all while ignoring that a large part of their population is living in poverty. The fact that there are reasonably well educated people here that are OK with this shit speaks volumes.
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India does not have "imaginary" enemies. Pakistan is a really shitty enemy to have, and they also have nuclear weapons.
As for poverty India has seen a huge increase in wealth over the last few decades as they've become more Western friendly (instead of allied with the Soviets, vs. Pakistan and America) and more capitalist. I'm sure top-down programs like space programs and defense are good for their economy. It's better to have everybody get richer, yet maintain a rich-poor divide (like America's economy) t
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India does not have "imaginary" enemies. Pakistan is a really shitty enemy to have, and they also have nuclear weapons.
A hungry tiger in a confined space is a very real enemy, a pakistani not so much. The slights are imagined, the dispute is over some backwater mountain region none of the countries actually want, except because their neighbor does. No indian and no pakistani is born hating their neighbor, that hate is taught.
As for poverty India has seen a huge increase in wealth over the last few decades as they've become more Western friendly (instead of allied with the Soviets, vs. Pakistan and America) and more capitalist.
This block vs. block world view really has got to fucking go. It is a political diversion meant to take your mind of the very real problems at home. Stop buying into the hyperbole and start voting accor
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And who decides what "that much" is?
India is a democracy, so the answer is "the Indian people".
Way to go USA! USA!, USA!, USA! (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, so maybe the subject is flame bait, but self righteous ass clowns like you really grind my gears.
You have the balls to talk about India spending money on weapons when the 21% of US children live in poverty?
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/ [census.gov]
When there an estimated 500k homeless people living in US cities?
America spends 4.5% on GDP on the military, NOT including the illegal wars being waged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures [wikipedia.org]
You sir, are a jackass.
Re:Way to go USA! USA!, USA!, USA! (Score:4, Insightful)
You really need to examine the definition of "poverty".
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Exactly. I'd rather live in American "poverty" than Indian poverty.
Re:Way to go USA! USA!, USA!, USA! (Score:4, Insightful)
This.
Poverty in US: You're on food-stamps, living in low-income housing, and making less than $12k/year (not including previously mentioned programs).
Poverty in India: You're on less than $12/month. [wikipedia.org] (and probably without programs like welfare/foodstamps, etc).
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So, what'chersayin is that all evidence you don't agree with is fabricated?
Where have I heard that before? [wikipedia.org]
He's just another anti-American Slashtard (Score:3, Insightful)
There's plenty on Slashdot, most who live in America. any time there's a discussion of a foreign country, they feel the need to steer it back to America and do so by hating on America. Near as I can tell it is a combination of two things:
1) Trendiness in hating the US. For some reason, they feel that "cool" thing to do (so to speak) is to hate on the US. If anything is bad anywhere, they need to find a way it is worse in the US.
2) Arrogance/self centeredness. They can't deal with a discussion that isn't abo
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I largely agree, I'm fairly anti-American because I think it's a nation of hypocrisy because there's something distinctly wrong about pretending to be a nation of freedom, liberty, and justice, whilst having things like Guantanamo bay. There are also a number of people who believe in American exceptionalism to the extreme - someone here the other day when talking about H1-B's suggested that it's supposed to be the case, yes, supposed to, as if there is some grand set of rules in the universe, that America s
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"Why would the average US citizen give two shits about what you think is right?"
Well judging by the amount of Americans complaining about how everyone hates them it seems they do care, otherwise they wouldn't be complaining about it.
"The indiscriminate hate mongering will result in the US becoming even more set on basically telling the world to fuck off."
And that's okay if that's what the American people want. It just means the US position in the world will continue to follow a decline from empire to irrele
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Or maybe it's just because the US does, in actual fact, act like a complete dick.
I'm sure there are many nice individuals in America, but as a collective... It has nothing to do with being cool or arrogance (hah! from America!), it has to do with things like your lack of universal healthcare and minimal benefits, use of the death penalty, Guantanamo, various foreign wars, the CIA meddling in everyone else's business, electing one of the dumbest leaders in history twice, insisting on using Imperial units, yo
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Or maybe it's just because the US does, in actual fact, act like a complete dick.
I'm sure there are many nice individuals in America, but as a collective... It has nothing to do with being cool or arrogance (hah! from America!), it has to do with things like your lack of universal healthcare and minimal benefits, use of the death penalty, Guantanamo, various foreign wars, the CIA meddling in everyone else's business, electing one of the dumbest leaders in history twice, insisting on using Imperial units, your world-leading obesity epidemic, saying one thing and doing another etc.
Of course no country is perfect, but America does actually act like a total dick. Not evil, not the great Satan or anything like that, just a "jerk" as you guys would say.
So, basically you're saying that you dislike US foreign policy post 9/11 (I don't care for it either) but the biggest thing that seems to get on your tits is that the US isn't Europe.
Fair sure the US is quite happy not being Europe.
From my perspective the US has elected Presidents somewhere between very bad to worse four times now. Not sure what to make of that really.
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Feed the homeless to the hungry
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Wasn't there a movie about that same idea 40 years ago?
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80% of the Indians don't have a toilet to shit in, but the government is more worried about expensive war toys with no purpose at all.
Way to go, India. There's nothing like getting your priorities straight.
Plenty of homeless people in the US too, including Veterans of many wars.
Don't make it sound like any other country anywhere is justified in even stockpiling these damn things, let alone developing them to make them more "effective" at total annihilation.
Re:Just another way to destroy ourselves (Score:5, Informative)
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I fail to understand your point.
Who said I oppose to anything soda-related? What is "16 ounce"?
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Besides, as rightly pointed out by a comment below, what logic says that India should stop worrying about its defence till all Indians are shitting in toilets?
The common sense kind of logic? Anyways, the MIRV missiles here are decidedly not for defense, as the (very short) article also states. MIRV is a first strike weapon, meant to more thoroughly vaporize an area containing another nations nuclear armaments - there would be no reason to do this unless you're striking first. First strike == aggression != defense
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Except that, doing so gets the ire of the entire world, and potentially brings in retaliation strikes if you don't vaporize them before they see it coming. The reality is these are political bargaining chips. So they are actually not missles at all, they are just bullshit. A potentially very dangerous and caustic form of bullshit, but, bullshit none the less.
Mississippi (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, you've never read an anti-abortion bill.
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LOL, Rambo Indian, I'd like to see one!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfvLcozLwtE [youtube.com]
Re:Just another way to destroy ourselves (Score:5, Informative)
The purpose is to deter the US.
How, pray tell, does an ICBM with a range of 5,500km deter a country that's 12,500km away?
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It's a stage in the development of very long range missiles. You know they have an active space programme and rockets that are more than capable of launching such warheads, right?
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Weeeell, ok.
Next question: tell me again WHY India wants to nuke the US when so many Indians live here, and so many there are off-shored workers for US companies?
Re:Just another way to destroy ourselves (Score:4, Insightful)
India's nukes is and have always been built to deter Pakistan foremost and China secondmost.
The ICBM cannot even reach the US, by a long shot.
Same reason very few Chinese nuclear weapons can reach the US. All of them can reach Russia just fine.
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India's nukes is and have always been built to deter Pakistan foremost and China secondmost.
The ICBM cannot even reach the US, by a long shot.
Same reason very few Chinese nuclear weapons can reach the US. All of them can reach Russia just fine.
A) India can put stuff in orbit, so why couldn't they hit someone on the other side of the globe?
B) Pakistan is not that far away, and that is the only country India would want to nuke.
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Hence why they want to man-up with some MIRV-tipped long range ICBMs.
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India is not building more nukes to deter Pakistan; they already have enough for that, and Pakistan being in its present shape is unlikely to make much further progress on its own nukes (it'll be an Islamic Sharia state pretty soon, anyway, and those tend to be not friendly to scientific progress).
What India is worried about - and rightly so - is China.
Re:Just another way to destroy ourselves (Score:4, Insightful)
>Any country that is cowed by Pakistan is nothing to worry about.
That is United States of America.
$hit Cowed. E.g. Pakistanis had Osama as their honoured Guest and US can't even call that bluff.
Well, except for when they found him and killed him without even asking Pakistan if it was ok to conduct a military operation on their soil.
Try that on a real country like Russia or China anyone in Europe... well my guess is they wouldn't be so brazen.
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Poor Resource Allocation (Score:2, Funny)
India could launch unarmed missiles at a desert island and still destroy everything of value in Pakistan.
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Pakistan Small? 6th biggest population on the planet and you call that small?
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When you have China and India to compare to, yeah.
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This is the path to madness (Score:3, Interesting)
We need to stop this madness. Even if we assume that fall-out outside of India/Pakistan's borders is not severe if they were to ever have a war that turned nuclear, the entire world will suffer the climatological consequences. See the following link (warning, PDF)
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockToonSAD.pdf [rutgers.edu]
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There won't ever be a nuclear war with Pakistan. The real focus is China. And slowly but surely India is beginning to equalize the equation though it's still pretty far from doing so; at the moment it's advantage China. So these developments have to be read in context of China, not Pakistan.
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It's irrelevant who they have the nuclear war is, my point is we *all* will suffer the consequences due to the abrupt disruption of the climate. The developing world especially which will likely be pushed into famine.
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India is more like Greece than China ...
Re:This is the path to madness (Score:4, Informative)
Undeniably so, but isn't it too late for that already, looking at this animated timeline of nuclear tests between 1945 and 1998 [ctbto.org]. One wonders how the planet is still alive.
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Since the planet is most assuredly still alive, maybe you should reassess your abject terror of the occasional nuclear detonation out in the middle of nowhere.
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Perhaps I didn't explain my point clearly enough.
No nuclear tests don't count, because none of those tests were exploded over cities. None of those tests were injecting tens of millions of tonnes of soot into the stratosphere, where it could linger for years. It's the byproduct of the stuff the nukes set on fire that's the problem in terms of climate, not the actual bombs themselves. Densely populated cities (which are often in places where they would be ignited even with attacks against purely military tar
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Still receiving aid (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't India have other priorities? http://www.wateraid.org/uk/where-we-work/page/india [wateraid.org]
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Re:Still receiving aid (Score:5, Insightful)
Like any country, or rather any unit that has multiple areas they need to work on, everything gets its fair share of resources. One doesn't "prioritise" one thing in neglect of other things. Defence gets its share. Social upliftment gets its share. Remember, Indian defence spending in GDP terms is pretty low given the kind of neighbours it has and the amount of terrorism and insurgent violence it bears generally.
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they could use it for actual defense.
you know, for getting rid of corrupt police for one. then building a toilet builder. but admittedly fixing those things is much harder than building a mirv.
This is about choices (Score:2)
Like any country, or rather any unit that has multiple areas they need to work on, everything gets its fair share of resources. One doesn't "prioritise" one thing in neglect of other things. Defence gets its share.
There is no such thing as a 'fair share'. This is all about making (political) choices.
By choosing to spend money on nukes that could have been spent elsewhere, Indian politicians do prioritize. The Indian defence spending may be relatively low, but one may still have the point of view that a part of it should have been spent differently. Assuming there is a 'fair share' for defence is assuming that whatever the outcome of a political debate is, is inherently the right outcome.
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Why the IC in ICBM? (Score:5, Insightful)
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umm... because China is fairly big and the larger cities are pretty far away from where these ICBMs will be launched?
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Actually the reason for developing long range missiles is, as usual, the US. Remember that people were talking about a limited nuclear retaliation for 9/11 against parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan?
The message is clear. If you can see any potential future where you might be at odds with the US you can't just rely on there being a Democrat in the White House at the time, you need Mutually Assured Destruction. Geography dictates that for most countries that means they need ICBMs to strike back.
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Yeah, that worked out real will for Gaddafi, hell the democrat in the White House didn't even get authorization for the use of force from Congress. So you may need to update your antiquated believe that only Repu
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I guess that would be one way to move those off-shore jobs from India back to the US. We'd have a sudden increase in call-center jobs here and when speaking to "Jim" or "Tammy" on the phone trying to fix a problem, they'd have no hint of a foreign accent.. ;-)
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India is keeping its ennemies close. The nukes are foremost to keep Pakistan and China under control. Why the heck are they devellooping ICBM capability? Thy really just need to be able to lob them far enough over the border...
How do you know the "I" doesn't stand for "intra"?
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Maybe one day they'd like to get revenge on Britain for the whole empire thing too?
They need to leapfrog the tech (Score:5, Funny)
This is certainly bad (Score:4, Funny)
Having played a lot of Scorched Earth and ATanks in my time, I can assure you that MIRV nukes are REALLY bad and can easily end up killing your own tank if launched in haste.
bad idea? (Score:2)
Priorities? (Score:2)
There are 600 million Indians without access to toilets, but they are building ICBMs. At least they've got their priorities straight.
Where this is coming from (Score:3)
Looking through the article and its links, it seems like this is a response to China, which is deploying MIRVs to counter US-deployed anti-ballistic missile systems. With the Agni-V's extended range, India will be able to strike every city in China. Both sides are also developing submarine-launched missiles, which should hopefully reduce the incentive for a first strike.
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I thought it was the Holiday Special, but chronologically, it apparently just made them angry.
Star Wars Holiday Special [wikipedia.org]
Cold War (1979-1985) [wikipedia.org]
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Because it's not a stable democracy. Stable democracies "are allowed" (whatever that means) to have nukes, unstable democracies and non-democracies are not. Ideally this eventually allows us to slowly inch back to a non-nuclear world, but that could take hundreds of years.
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So, by that logic... (Score:3, Interesting)
You are really saying that the world community must band together in order to take all of America's nuclear weapons? After all, America is the ONLY country in all of history to have ever used a nuclear device against another, not once, but twice.
You can make all the distinctions you wish about right or wrong, but one cannot argue it is untrue.
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No we're saying that America using them to end the second World War is the thing that taught us how devastating they could be. Pretending what happened then has any relevance whatsoever to modern nuclear weapons control now that we know a lot more about the devastation they can cause is something only a weak minded individual with a weak argument would resort to. It's a kind of pathetic one dimensional thinking where you ignore how geopolitics change over time as if you can't cope with factoring something a
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Given that Israel has a strong track record of attacking its neighbors without provocation by claiming self-defense and has threatened to continue to do so. . .
If it is acceptable for one country to attack its neighbors while claiming self-defense, it is acceptable for one, or all, of those countries to develop technology to limit or halt such attacks.
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I am fully aware of everything you said but the issue remains. Israel has repeatedly attacked its neighbors justifying said attacks as self-defense. Nowhere did I mention anything about Iran or Israel's nuclear programs.
Re:So, by that logic... (Score:5, Insightful)
"America is the ONLY country in all of history to have ever used a nuclear device against another"
Let's keep it that way. Or would you prefer that everybody get their turn?
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see graph [wikipedia.org]
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Yes. What you said is true -- true and irrelevant. That's why we "make distinctions", because the distinctions matter, making the rest of what you said irrelevant.
Re:So, by that logic... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not what anybody "really" said.
Restraint doesn't mean you never do something, it means "under control or within limits."
The wisdom of using the first ever nukes in the biggest war in history before all the consequences were well understood is debatable (personally I think it was fine), but America's history since then does not show a lack of restraint. Quite the opposite -- we are so restrained with our nukes that nobody is scared of them.
Re:So, by that logic... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So, by that logic... (Score:4, Informative)
No, they don't realize that. That is a big part of the problem.
The 'mystique' of nuclear warfare has overshadowed the truth of the Japan bombings. We wiped most of Japan's cities off the map before August 1945, with conventional bombings, using the high explosive and incendiary varieties of bombs. While their factories were modern steel and cement, the 'bamboo-n-rice-paper' style of their houses meant they burnt very well.
So, while the two bombs produced the largest numbers of victims from single weapons, they didn't kill as many people as many other bombing runs before them.
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II#Conventional_bombing [wikipedia.org]
http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html [ditext.com]
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Like China was in the 1960's? Unstable whackjobs with their finger on the button?
The Soviet Union were close to launching a preemptive nuclear attack on China's nuclear infrastructure? Sounds familiar?
The only reason they did not was because China and the USA had their rapproachment, mostly because China felt very threatened by the Soviets. Who attacked China because they felt threatened by the Chinese.
Re:So why can't Iran have Nukes? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So why can't Iran have Nukes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe that's because India is the largest democracy in the world and has been mostly at peace since its independence in 1947 (minus border conflicts with China and Pakistan and some peacekeeping operations abroad). It's last conflict was in 1999 against Pakistan and the total death toll after 3 months of operations was less than 5000 victims. It's not a bad track record for such a large and populated country given the size of the societal issues it's dealing with.
The iranian democracy on the other side is today nothing more than an empty shell and while its population is highly educated, young and probably wouldn't mind a change in government, its government and associates have proven time and time again since the 70s to have a rather proactive agressive stance.
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The iranian democracy on the other side is today nothing more than an empty shell and while its population is highly educated, young and probably wouldn't mind a change in government, its government and associates have proven time and time again since the 70s to have a rather proactive agressive stance.
As opposed to so many way more brutal dicatorships US government supports (far too many to list them all here) and sometimes even gives them technology to build nuclear weapons (Pakistan).
Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention [wikipedia.org]. Regarding threat of Irans's nuclear capabilities, all we see and hear in western corporate media is crap and propaganda. Should they acquire some, they wouldn't be able to use them in other fo
Re:So why can't Iran have Nukes? (Score:4, Informative)
The US certainly did not give Pakistan nukes. The Chinese did help there.
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Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention [wikipedia.org].
Iran's current state is an indirect result of the 1953 coup. It's a direct result of the 1979 revolution and the idiocy of leftists teaming up with Muslim groups. They used the Muslim groups as the muscle and assumed they would step aside and let the leftist intellectuals rule when the dirty work was done. Quite a tragic miscalculation, though obvious in hindsight.
The only reason western powers fear so much of iranian nukes is that since Iran acquires some nukes, US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
That's a common theory but it doesn't make sense.. if anybody wanted to invade Iran, why wouldn't they do so RIGHT NOW before Iran has nukes? And
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Posting to undo moderation.
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The iranian democracy on the other side is today nothing more than an empty shell and while its population is highly educated, young and probably wouldn't mind a change in government, its government and associates have proven time and time again since the 70s to have a rather proactive agressive stance.
Since the 70s? The Iranian revolution was in 1979, with the new constitution coming into force in December. And in 1980 Iraq (under our then-ally Saddam Hussein) invaded Iran, leading to 8 years of war with somewhere between 500000 and 1 million Iranian victims (that's around 250 9/11s if you need a comparison). That looks more like a reactive and defensive stand to me...
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Thats becuase we like idia, while Iran is filled with a bunch of hate filled nutters!
And you think there is no reason for that hate (if any)? I was talking to an Iranian friend a few days ago who was saying US and western countries have stopped selling medicine (cancer, MS, AIDS, ...) and create problems for them even if they want to buy from other countries.
The irrational financial sanctions (Swift network) is harming ordinary people in Iran. Do you expect love from them?
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Oh God, let them. It seems today that a lot of governments seem to be suffering from Highlander Syndrome ("There can only be one"), so let them nuke each other back to the Stone Age. At the very least, it will weaken them, and hey, if one of them manages to dominate the others, it will be so f*cked up from being bludgeoned half the dead with a brick from its neighbor (since it will have exhausted its conventional weapon supply by then), that it won't pose much trouble.
Then people can go back to doing what t
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That's if anyone's left afterwards.
http://www.dorringtoninstruments.com/columbia/Robock_nuclear_winter.pdf [dorrington...uments.com]
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