DOES INDIA NEED THE H-BOMB?

The Hindu, Wednesday, December 23, 1998

 

M.V. Ramana and Frank von Hippel*

 

Ever since the Indian nuclear tests of May 11, 1998, there has been considerable scepticism in the U.S. about the claim that one of them was a successful test of a hydrogen bomb.  This was not due to any doubt about India’s ability to design and produce a hydrogen bomb.  Rather the questioning was because the explosive power of 55,000 tons of chemical explosive equivalent (55 kilotons) claimed by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) when it announced the test was about four times larger than estimates by U.S. academic seismologists.  About 10-20 kilotons of explosive power is what one might expect if the first-stage fission explosive detonated successfully but did not ignite the more powerful “secondary” thermonuclear explosive.

Recently there have been reports in the press that India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has admitted internally that this is in fact what happened and is pressing the Indian government for permission to carry out another test.  Perhaps this time the device tested would be designed to have a much larger explosive power so as to settle all doubts about the DAE's capability to design hydrogen bombs.  However, permitting such a test would be a tragic error.

The 15-kiloton bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima killed most people within a circle with a radius of about one kilometre. The chief physical effects that caused these deaths were the blast wave that blew down houses and threw people around; the searing heat from the fireball, which burned the skin, blinded the eyes of those directly exposed and caused innumerable "secondary" fires; and radiation illness caused by the neutrons and gamma rays coming from the explosion before it turned into a fireball.  If the same weapon were exploded over the centre of Mumbai (Bombay) today, it would, under the most conservative assumptions, kill about 150,000 people.

As the explosive power of a nuclear weapon increases, fire becomes the dominant cause of casualties.  The area that burned in Hiroshima was small enough so that most people who were not trapped in collapsed homes could escape before the individual fires created by the explosion combined after 20 minutes into a “firestorm.”  This would not be the case when a hydrogen bomb is exploded. In a firestorm the conflagration acts as a huge air pump.  The heat of the fire creates a column of rising hot air above it.  Replacement air from surrounding areas is sucked in, generating high-speed winds. The temperature in the fire zone reaches several hundred degrees, making survival virtually impossible.  The combination of hurricane-force winds, thick smoke and streets clogged with debris also rules out effective fire fighting. 

A hydrogen bomb with an explosive power of about 1500 kilotons, exploded at an altitude of 2,300 metres would engulf in a firestorm a region with a diameter of 30 kilometres and an area of 700 square kilometres.  That could consume the entire metropolis of Bombay and its 13 million inhabitants. If the explosion occurred at an altitude of less than 600 metres, the fireball would suck up huge quantities of earth and deposit it downwind as radioactive fallout, which would kill people over a much larger area by radiation illness whose victims sicken by stages over a period of weeks.  Over the following decades, some of the survivors would die of radiation-induced cancers.  Thus the destruction from such a bomb would extend across space and time.

Does India really want to join the “club” of nations that have built such weapons?

Nearly fifty years ago, in late 1949, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee, chaired by Robert Oppenheimer and including other key scientists, advised the U.S. Government against developing and testing the more destructive hydrogen bomb.  In part this advice was based on the absence of a convincing design at that time.  In part also, however, it was based on moral concerns.  Unlike the fission or “atomic” bomb, the destructive power of a thermonuclear explosive could be increased to virtually unlimited levels by simply adding in more fuel.

The General Advisory Committee explained its moral concern simply:

 “The use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations."

President Truman did not heed the advice of the scientists.   After the first Russian nuclear test, political hysteria in the U.S. was too great.   The President ordered a crash program which three years later resulted in the test of an explosive with an explosive power of 10,000 kilotons. 

Ever since, the unholy combination of nuclear weapons and military doctrine has resulted in the United States and Soviet Union remaining ready to execute within minutes nuclear war plans that would result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Even today, a decade after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia have not been able to stand down their missiles from their hair-trigger alert.  A mistaken warning of incoming attack or an unauthorized action could still start a full-scale nuclear war.  Does India really envy the way in which the nuclear “superpowers” have entrapped themselves in this situation? 

For the moment, India has demonstrated the ability to inflict at least tens of Hiroshimas and Nagasakis.  No sane leader would want to risk such a catastrophe in his or her country.  Even those that believe in nuclear “deterrence” – a doctrine that several Indian leaders have eloquently condemned as reprehensible and abhorrent– would have to grant that the threat of such instant destruction should lend pause to any adversary planning a military attack. And, if the threat of destroying a capital and tens of lakhs of people is not sufficient to stop a mad leader, why should the threat of killing hundreds of lakhs?  The development of thermonuclear weapons was, and continues to be, totally irrational.

The qualitative and quantitative nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet was also enormously costly and ended only with the economic collapse of one of the contenders.  The "winner", the U.S., wasted at least $6 trillions (Rs. 24,000,000 crores) on its nuclear arms race with the USSR. Does India really wish to embark on such a wasteful venture?

And then there are the human and environmental costs, even if nuclear weapons are never used in war.  Thousands of U.S. uranium miners have died of cancer because “national-security considerations” made the carrying out of their tasks too urgent to allow for the installation of well-known occupational-health protections.  Radioactive pollution from one of Russia’s plutonium-extraction facilities sickened villagers living up to hundreds of kilometers down river. The task of cleaning up radioactive contamination at U.S. and Russian plutonium-production sites – if possible at all – will cost at least hundreds of billions of dollars.  The cleanup of the huge nuclear test sites, each with hundreds of underground deposits of intense radioactivity slowly contaminating the ground water, is not even being discussed.

 For some, Pakistan testing a fission bomb is a decisive argument for India developing a bigger bomb to regain strategic superiority.  This is the argument that proved persuasive to the U.S. government 49 years ago.  Presumably, Pakistan’s nuclear establishment would feel compelled to follow suit.  Leaders of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program have stated repeatedly that they have been working on a hydrogen bomb design and are waiting only for their government’s go-ahead to develop it.  It is a familiar story.  It is a miracle that the U.S.-Soviet Doomsday Machine did not go off.  Can, or should, anyone be sure of repeating such a miracle?

The reportedly failed test of May 11 has provided India with a second chance of taking a moral stance – at least against thermonuclear weapons.   Such an act of restraint could give India some credibility in global nuclear disarmament – rather than being a “me-too” member in a mad club of nations flaunting genocidal weapons.

Recently, at the United Nations, India tabled a new resolution calling for the de-alerting of nuclear missiles.  Though India’s motivations were impugned by some, 108 countries supported the resolution because it is a good idea.  As one of us (FvH) has argued extensively elsewhere, this would be a good first step towards global disarmament that should be followed by deep cuts in the United States and Russian nuclear arsenals, which in turn should be followed by multilateral cuts involving the other nuclear countries, including eventually Israel, India and Pakistan. 

Nuclear disarmament is the only way out.  Another H-bomb test would certainly not hasten the world down this path.  India needs to show that it can think for itself rather than blindly following the insane and discredited model created by the United States and Soviet Union during their Cold War.