�India building secret nuclear facility�
India is building a top-secret facility in southern Karnataka to augment its nuclear power for civilian use as well as increase and upgrade its weapons that could deeply unsettle its neighbours, reports The Hindustan Times citing an exhaustive report in international magazine Foreign Policy.
The international magazine says work on the project began early in 2012 when tribal pastureland was blocked off with a barbed-wire fence at Challakere for a project that experts say will be the subcontinents largest military-run complex of nuclear centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories, and weapons - and aircraft-testing facilities when its completed, probably sometime in 2017.
Foreign Policy listed the projects primary aims: to expand the governments nuclear research, to produce fuel for Indias nuclear reactors, and to help power the countrys fleet of new submarines.
But another, more controversial ambition, according to retired Indian government officials and independent experts in London and Washington, is to give India an extra stockpile of enriched uranium fuel that could be used in new hydrogen bombs, also known as thermonuclear weapons, substantially increasing the explosive force of those in its existing nuclear arsenal, the report says.
The magazine points out that New Delhi has never published a detailed account of its nuclear arsenal, which it first developed in 1974.
