The government’s Apex Committee-1, headed by career diplomat D.P. The event did not go unnoticed by Indian planners, nervous at the prospect of nuclear weapons wielded by its unpredictable northern neighbour with whom it had already fought a border war in 1962. It was noisy and leached radioactivity but propelled China as the last entrant into an elite club. The first Chinese SSN entered service in 1974 and was named ‘Long March-1’ after the definitive event in the chairman’s life. Mao Zedong, who had once operated out of mountain caves as a guerrilla, said in 1959 that China would produce nuclear submarines even if it took “10,000 years”. Even those with a perceived landward bias.
Unsurprisingly, their game-changing utility has been grasped by politicians with great power dreams. "Their lethality and near-invulnerability has even inspired a popular meme - ‘There are only two types of vessels at sea, submarines and targets'." The technological complexity of fitting in a compact high-performance reactor inside a submarine hull has restricted this capability to only the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. "They are the only platform that can operate independently and discreetly in enemy waters, thus posing an asymmetrical threat," says Vice Admiral KN Sushil, former C-in-C Southern Naval Command. Swiftly moving under the ocean, it can stalk and strike at enemy warships and shore targets with its arsenal of deadly heavyweight torpedoes and long-range cruise missiles. An SSN moves at speeds of over 30 nautical miles per hour underwater (55 kmph), the top speed of the navy’s most powerful surface combatant, a Delhi-class destroyer. This vulnerability is best exploited by nuclear-powered attack submarines, what nuclear strategist Rear Admiral Raja Menon (retired) calls “the ultimate arbiter of sea power”. The PLA navy was growing fast, but so was its Achilles’ heel, the lack of anti-submarine warfare capabilities. Perhaps Parrikar knew what the American intelligence assessments had repeatedly flagged. The late defence minister frequently argued that the only way India could counter a growing Chinese surface fleet was by fielding submarines that could hunt them. The committee, which submitted its report to defence minister Manohar Parrikar in December 2016, explicitly struck down the proposal for a third aircraft carrier and pitched for more submarines. The Modi government’s thinking for submarines over aircraft carriers was shaped to a large extent by the committee of experts headed by Lt Gen. Two more units, the S4 and the S4*, will be inducted by 2025. The INS Arihant was commissioned in 2016 and the second unit, the S3, will be commissioned this year. The SSN project has remained in the shadows of India’s Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV), a top secret effort to build four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). It is believed that an ambitious naval project to build a second indigenous aircraft carrier, the 65,000-tonne IAC-2, has now been shelved in favour of the SSN project. It will take over a decade for the first 6,000-tonne submarine to enter the waters. The project involves a final design clearance in Gurugram, nuclear reactor construction in Kalpakkam, hull fabrication in Hazira and assembly and sea trials at the ship-building centre (SBC) in Visakhapatnam.
The CCS nod will release government funds so that the geographically scattered, technologically challenging project can finally get under way. The CCS is now set to fire the starter’s pistol on a project that has been on the blocks for two decades. Admiral Singh’s pitch seems to have worked.
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