Hyderabad: Thousands of acres of farm land of tribals in Challakere near Mysore in Karnataka have been barricaded and a flurry of activity is underway clandestinely on a “a project of strategic importance” that would cost nearly $100 million to develop India’s top secret nuclear city to produce thermonuclear weapons, according to a report of the Centre for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organisation in Washington, D.C.
The enlargement of India’s thermonuclear programme would position the country alongside the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, Israel, France and China, which already have significant stockpiles of such weapons. India’s move is likely to provoke China and Pakistan and trigger an arms race. India is one of just three countries that continue to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons — the others are Pakistan and North Korea.
The ministry of environment, forest and climate change approved the Mysore site’s construction in October 2012, according to a letter marked “secret”, from the ministry to atomic energy officials that month.
The letter lists the objective to feed new centrifuges with fuel derived from yellowcake — milled uranium ore named after its colour — shipped from mines in the village of Jadugoda in India’s north, 1,932 km away from the Rare Materials Plant, and to draw water from the nearby Krishna Raja Sagar dam.
Experts believe that the project will be subcontinent’s largest military-run complex of nuclear centrifuges, atomic — research laboratories, and weapons — and aircraft-testing facilities on completion most likely in 2017.
