India Test Fires Long-Range, Nuke-Capable Missile

An anonymous reader writes "India has successfully test fired a long-range, nuke-capable missile. Named after Hindu God of fire 'Agni', the ICBM is capable of hitting targets in China, East Africa and parts of Europe. With a successful launch of the missile, India joins an elite group of nations with long-range weapons. 'The BBC's Andrew North in Delhi says Indian officials deny it, but everyone believes the missile is mainly aimed at deterring China. A spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, Liu Weimin, said his country was not threatened by the test. ... It was only launched once officials were sure they had the best weather conditions — so this was as much a demonstration as a real test, to show India's rivals that it has this kind of capability.'"

Comments

Re:Wait, hang on

[Digicaf]

Replying instead of moderating

You make great points except for "used nukes in anger". There were a lot of considerations that went into the decision to use nukes, but anger definitely wasn't one of them. The debate over the US' decision to use them has been going on for quite some time, but a few things are pretty clear:

1. The casualty estimates for an invasion without the use of nukes ranged between half a million to 1.5 million.
2. The Japanese had a standing order to execute allied POW's in the event of such an invasion, of which there were about 100 thousand.
3. The conventional wisdom at the time (which was probably true) indicated that Japanese leaders would be unlikely to surrender until well into the invasion of the Japanese homeland.

Agni vs Agni

[bayankaran]

AGNI means fire in many Indian languages. The word also refers to the god of fire "Agni". Slashdot description "Named after Hindu God of fire Agni" - is misleading and insinuates some type of religious weaponry. It is like saying Saree is a Hindu dress...Saree is an Indian dress.
Hinduism is more of a way of life than a religion. And India has the largest number of Muslims after Indonesia. The 2% of Christians will be more than 20 million - much more than many European nations. This plurality one should not forget.
In fact the chief scientist of AGNI mission - Tessy Thomas - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessy_Thomas - is from my state Kerala. She is a Christian and she named her son Tejas - a Hindu name. I am a Christian, but my name is Hindu.
Try to understand the complexity...generalizing a complex country is the basic mistake Western journalists make about India.