vnomad
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How U.S. Exports Helped Fuel the South Asian Arms Race
India and Pakistan, fresh from testing nuclear devices, are poised to build missiles that could deliver the bomb deep into each other's territory. The United States deplores these developments, but along with other countries, stands guilty of supplying much of the necessary technology.
In fact, India's next generation of nuclear missiles will probably be designed with the help of American-made equipment.
U.S. officials say that in 1996, Digital Equipment Corp. shipped a supercomputer to the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, a key missile research site. Supercomputers are the most powerful tools known for designing nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. They can model the thrust of a rocket, calculate the heat and pressure on a warhead entering the Earth's atmosphere and simulate virtually every other force affecting a missile from launch to impact. Because of the billions of computations needed to solve these problems, a supercomputer's speed is invaluable for efficiently finding design solutions.
The DEC computer will come in handy at the Indian Institute of Science. The institute is on the British government's official list of organizations that procure goods and technology for India's missile programs. It develops India's most advanced rocket propellants, guidance systems and nose cones. Its wind tunnels and other equipment analyze rocket fuel combustion and flight performance. It has even been linked in published reports to India's new nuclear-capable missile called the "Sagarika," intended to be launched from submarines.
This is a typical global disarmament/non-proliferation/do-gooder think-tank's article. Though its not very professionally written up. The supercomputer argument is hilarious.
Ask anyone familiar with the Indian Institute of Science and he'll laugh at the implication of this clock and dagger style proliferation happening there. The IISc is to sciences what the IITs are to engineering. Its not as simple as supercomputer = missile technology. There are a hundred other applications for it.
And for the record supercomputers were not a novelty even back then. India developed its first supercomputer in 1991 and several more thereafter.
International Business Machines Corp. supplied the institute with an even more powerful supercomputer. According to IBM spokesman Fred McNeese, IBM installed the supercomputer at the institute's Supercomputing Education and Research Center, which specializes in computer-aided design. The machine operated at 1.4 billion operations per second when installed in 1994, and IBM upgraded it in March 1997 to perform 3.2 billion operations per second and again in June 1997 to 5.8 billion, making it one of the most powerful computers in India.
The PARAM-8000 could do 1 Gigaflop i.e. 1 billion floating point operations per second in 1991. Its successors in the PARAM-series were iteratively more powerful.
The PARAM Padma completed in 2003 could do 1 trillion operations per second.
And IIRC the current PARAM Yuva has a theoretical capacity to perform 54 trillion floating point operations per second.
The pro-export Commerce Department granted a license for the DEC sale, despite the notoriety of the institute as a missile site. Commerce also licensed the original installation by IBM, but IBM performed the upgrades without a license, in apparent violation of the law.
This week, the U.S. Customs Service opened an investigation into the IBM upgrades. It is already investigating IBM for selling a supercomputer to Russia's leading nuclear weapons lab under similar circumstances.
Ahh... so IBM is guilty of proliferation. Shouldn't the investigation in that case have been carried out by the FBI in that case?
The U.S. government requires an American company to obtain an export license if it wants to sell to a bomb-prone nation like India a computer that performs more than 2 billion operations per second. IBM claimed an exception, that allows such computers to be shipped as long as the buyer is not connected to nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, missile or military work. The seller must ensure that the exception applies, which IBM failed to do. McNeese of IBM says only that the company "has no indication that the machine has been used for anything other than university research."
Okay, so we have IBM on record saying that the sold equipment has been used only for university research. I just heard of the Wisconsin project for the first time today, so I confess I'm biased in favour of granting IBM greater credibility.
And there is the case of Viewlogic Systems Inc. of Marlborough, Mass. According to the Journal of Commerce, Viewlogic shipped computer software for designing printed circuit boards to an Indian missile manufacturer on the very day that President Clinton announced sanctions against India for its five nuclear weapon tests.
The Commerce Department approved the sale, despite the fact that the buyer was Bharat Dynamics Ltd. (BDL), a leading entry on the British government's list of Indian missile makers. BDL manufactures and assembles India's single-stage Prithvi missile, which can deliver a nuclear payload about 150 miles, and the two-stage Agni, which can deliver one about 1,500 miles. Both threaten Pakistan's major cities.
Printed circuit boards!!
This is bordering on the absurd. If they'd sold bottled water, that could be construed as proliferation as well since they would have kept Indian scientists refreshed while they were developing these missiles.
Well since BDL wasn't on any restricted list except for the British (why British?) government's list of missile makers, the sale was completely legal.
With better electronic circuits, BDL's nuclear missiles will be more accurate and reliable. The same is true of the antitank and other guided missiles that BDL makes, and advertises in a public catalogue.
How the Commerce Department could approve a sale to India's main missile assembly site remains a mystery. Both Viewlogic and the Commerce Department decline to comment on the sale.
Here's a possibility. The supplied items were not a critical requirement and/or were otherwise available from other sources on the open market. Maybe from Japan or South Korea or Taiwan or even China... making any export restriction meaningless.
This misguided policy of helping India develop missiles is not new. In 1963, the United States began India's missile program by launching a U.S. rocket from India's new Thumba Range, which the United States helped design. Despite his recent claim to being "indigenous," A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the "father" of the Indian bomb, spent four months in training in the United States. After visiting NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast, where he saw the U.S. Scout space rocket in action, he returned to India to build a copy.
Veni Vidi Copi.
The U.S. government obligingly supplied data on the Scout's design after a request from the Indian Atomic Energy Commission.The Scout's first-stage rocket is identical to the first stage of India's longest-range missile, the Agni.
Virtually every element of India's nuclear and missile programs has been imported directly or copied from imported designs. The Agni's second-stage rocket motor is derived from a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile and the Agni's guidance system was developed with help from Germany's space agency.
And this is in the opinion of the missile experts at Wisconsin Project? They've either managed to get access to highly classified details about the IGMDP or they've seen pictures of it and are making connections from their armchairs.
Well lets assume for the sake of argument that the Agni was derived from the SLV which was derived from the ... Scout was it? Does that imply that every element of the Agni-3 IRBM is imported or copied? Or that every element of the under development Agni-5 ICBM will be imported or copied as well.
If one were to subscribe to this brand of hyperbolic, one could claim that every element of the US missile program was stolen or copied since the basis of development was Nazi Germany's V-2 guided rocket.
Sanctions will stop at least some of the exports from the United States. Because of the recent nuclear tests, U.S. law now bars the sale to India or Pakistan of any "goods and technology" controlled by the Commerce Department. Although the White House was quick to apply financial sanctions, it is still deciding how to interpret this export prohibition. It could cost big exporting companies real money. The companies are already lining up to limit the sanctions as much as they can.
The administration is now considering three options. The first is to forbid any item controlled for export to be sold to anyone in India or Pakistan -- no one could buy a military-related item or any item that could help make nuclear weapons, chemical/biological weapons or missiles. Only 1 percent of U.S. sales to India are now controlled for export, so this option would be effective and painless.
The second option is to deny the nuclear and missile items to everybody, but allow private companies in India and Pakistan to buy only conventional military and chemical/biological items. The third option would allow the two governments to buy such items as well. These latter two options would undermine the integrity of the legislation passed by Congress.
What will the president decide? The pro-trade and pro-India forces are leaning on him, and he is bending. He has already hinted that he would be satisfied if India merely promised to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and to cap its production of nuclear weapon material.
The US has very recently taken both ISRO and DRDO off the restricted list. I bet that cause some teeth gnashing at the Wisconsin Projectworks.