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

Wait, hang on

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's just get this straight.

So North Korea, a despot nation with no natural resources and maybe, perhaps, who the hell actually knows, may just have a nuclear weapon but we're not totally sure if they actually work, fire a "missile" and everyone is pissed.

India, a populous and relatively rich nation with a known nuclear capability, which has been to war with it's neighbour who also has a known nuclear capability, fires it's missile and we don't bat an eyelid?

What the fuck?

Re:Wait, hang on

[dkleinsc]

India is the closest thing that region has to a western democracy.

It of course depends a bit on how you define the region, but Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Nepal, and more recently Cambodia are all democracies largely modelled after the British government. Pakistan is at least in theory a democracy as well, although political violence is relatively common.

Re:Wait, hang on

[Luckyo]

South Korea is not a model democracy today. It's a fascist (or corporatist if you want to white wash it through name change) state where large corporations like Samsung and Daewoo essentially own the government regardless of who is actually voted in and get to decide on essentially all relevant policy.

It is also very financially successful state, due to smart moves by said corporations in essentially "dronifying" the population to the point where wealthiest families move out of the country to avoid that happening to their children.

Re:Wait, hang on

[Anonymous Coward]

The range on the new missile (the Agni-V) is 5,000 km. For an ICBM, that is short. It didn't have to be that short. They could, fairly easily, have given it a few thousand more kilometers. The Indians chose not to. The reasons for the short range are political, not technical. 5000 km gives them range on Beijing but conveniently leaves Tokyo and all of Western Europe out of range, to say nothing of the United States.

The North Korean new 'satellite' launching rocket, if it worked, could easily drop something on Japan as well as the United States.

Put bluntly, the North Koreans are building a weapon that threatens the US, Japan and Europe. The Indians are building a weapon that intentionally does not threaten the US, Japan and Europe.

Re:Wait, hang on

[doston]

The whole "used nukes in anger" remark is nonsense.

We were in the middle of a war. We had been leveling cities for strategic purposes for a long while before we decided to do it with a single device.

People that like to fixate on the nukes tend to ignore all of the other cities that got bombed and all of the other people that got killed. They also tend to trivialize the Japanese.

I often wonder if there isn't a bit of racism mixed in there, trivializing the Japanese.

There's some racism; but mostly it's just ignoring one's own crimes. The US is entirely guilty of both, especiallly the latter and *very* consistently. Take Pol Pot. While our enemies were causing genocide in Cambodia, of course it was getting *heavy* press here in the US. What did not get press was East Timor and was happening at *exactly* the same time, was just as severe, but the US was funding the aggressors (indonesia), so no reporting. History rarely makes a controlled experiment, but in that case it did and you can see how lock-step the press and government was in the US at prosecuting one and ignoring the other. Or take the Nazi Holocaust. It was awful, you hear about it all the time...6 million Jewish people killed. Do you hear about the Native American Holocaust? Not much. Even though probably 2-10 times (estimates vary) as many dark skinned natives were slaughtered. The difference was that we weren't responsible for the former, but entirely responsible for the latter. That generalizes....and it's real consistent. It's not just the US; all power systems ignore their own crimes. And their intellecutal class helps by writing history in their favor. If you want to read bad things about the US regarding Hiroshima, you'll probably have to read some subversive book, or simply visit a library in a country that isn't real fond of the US.

Re:Wait, hang on

[doston]

Maybe not that unprecedented. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_U.S._involvement_in_the_Vietnam_War By that war's end, 72% of the country were opposed. Plus then there was the draft; there has been no draft in decades. You could argue these polls were taken at the end, not the beginning of the war, but one could also argue that the "Iraq War" was not a new war at all; technically, the US was still at war with Iraq over Desert Storm; the terms of the cease fire were repeatedly violated by Hussein, the sanctions undermined by the UN; and our sustained military bases in Saudi Arabia fueling recruitment for Al Qaeda. Not that any of that makes it a good idea after all.

There was actually very little domestic dissent or press coverage about Vietnam. All the footage you see on the History Channel, the protests etc, that began like five years into Vietnam. The war in Iraq was strongly opposed before it even began. That's the unprecedented part.

Re:Wait, hang on

[MightyMartian]

The Japanese were the aggressors in WWII. Ask the Koreans, the Chinese, and all the other people of region. At any rate, they had no hope of winning. Yes, they could have cost a lot of Allied lives, but sooner or later they were done. They had no way of propping up their industrial capacity, and even with two A-bombs gone, a conventional bombing campaign would have wiped out what was left of its industrial capacity, not to mention killing hundreds of thousands in the process.

The Emperor saw the writing on the wall. He knew that if they refused the unconditional surrender, Japan would be knocked back to the Stone Age, and everything the country had struggled to do from the Meiji Period on would be destroyed. He took the only sane approach, it was his government that had lost its wits and believed it still had any meaningful capacity to negotiate.

Can't feed nor provide clean water for population

[blahbooboo]

It's a huge poverty stricken country. It can't even provide food and clean water adequately (and don't get me started on the filth of their healthcare system). Yet they have enough funds to pay for this stuff. Great work and good priorities India!

Re:India invents the "V2"?

[Anonymous Coward]

USA and North Korea are not in a state of war. North Korea is ONLY in a state of war with South Korea. In addition, North Korea is constantly trying to invade the South. They constantly harass. They have been spreading nuke development around the world (North Korea and China are helping Iran, Burma, and Venezuela build nuclear bombs).

Finally, NK has many treaties and agreements prohibiting them from developing nukes or missiles. They honor none of them. India has no such agreement. That is the real difference.

Re:Can't feed nor provide clean water for populati

[cplusplus]

They can thank about a hundred years of British rule for driving them in to poverty. India was among the wealthiest countries on earth until the British showed up and proceeded to siphon trillions of dollars (in today's terms) of raw wealth like gold, precious metals, and gems, from them. Want to see a small example of India's former wealth? Look no further than the crown that sat upon the late Queen Elizabeth's head. The world would look totally different today if Britain wasn't able to steal from India to help get them through two world wars.

India's continued investment to prove that they can keep up with powerful western nations will only help prop up their nation as a whole, and help lift all out of poverty over time. Count the poor on the streets of Bangalore (a major IT hub), and compare it with other Indian cities that haven't see the same level of investment, like Calcutta, and you'll see what first hand what it can do.

Re:Can't feed nor provide clean water for populati

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever been to Baltimore?

Re:We broke the NPT with India

[MightyMartian]

There were and remain solid reasons to remain in good stead with India. It's the country that's going to keep the schizophrenic state, Pakistan, in line and is also the only substantial military and economic competitor to China in the region. As well, there is over a half a century of reasonablly good relations between the two countries.

Why no Indians (or Chinese?) in Star Trek?

[wisebabo]

You know, I've always wondered why (in the original series at least) there seemed to be few, if any Indians or Chinese for that matter.

Then I remembered a line that Spock once said that went something like "the 15 million dead from WWI, the 60 million in WWII or the 600 million in WWIII". (He was talking about the stupidity of mankind after Kirk's boasting).

Then the movie "Star Trek: First Contact" came out which was supposedly set in North America after a big war(?) had impoverished the populace but hadn't reduced the country to radioactive cinders.

I never read any of the "official" (or unofficial) histories but I was wondering; was a nuclear war supposed to have taken place, not between the U.S. and USSR but in Asia? Between India and China perhaps?

(I'm glad to have gone to see the Taj Mahal last year; I've always thought that if Pakistan and India went to all out war, it would be the first to go.)

Ok, ok I realize that probably the real reason for the dearth of these nationalities was probably due to the script choices of Gene Roddenberry or some casting decisions but I was wondering if there was any justification after the fact. Anyway, if so I hope life DOESN'T follow art!