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India's ICBM Will Carry Multiple Nuclear Warheads
An anonymous reader writes "India is equipping its longest range nuclear-capable missile, the Agni-V, with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs), The Diplomat reports. A MIRVed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) carries multiple nuclear warheads on a single missile, which it dispenses towards numerous or a single target after the final stage of the ICBM boosts off. MIRVed missiles destabilized the Cold War nuclear balance and are likely to do so again: 'Because they give nations greater confidence in being able to destroy an adversary's hardened missile silo sites in a first strike by launching multiple, lower yield warheads at the sites.'"
I thought it was the Holiday Special, but chronologically, it apparently just made them angry.
Star Wars Holiday Special
Cold War (1979-1985)
80% of the Indians don't have a toilet to shit in, but the government is more worried about expensive war toys with no purpose at all.
Way to go, India. There's nothing like getting your priorities straight.
No. It's because India already has them and has [barely] demonstrated restraint from using them.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
We need to stop this madness. Even if we assume that fall-out outside of India/Pakistan's borders is not severe if they were to ever have a war that turned nuclear, the entire world will suffer the climatological consequences. See the following link (warning, PDF)
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockToonSAD.pdf
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Doesn't India have other priorities? http://www.wateraid.org/uk/where-we-work/page/india
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Pakistan Small? 6th biggest population on the planet and you call that small?
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
So its ok if Indians are ruled by a Chinese-Pak-American invader force as long as they have a toilet to shit in?
The foremost priority of any government is to protect the nations borders, otherwise whats the point of nationalism anyway?
What logic says that India should stop worrying about its defence till all Indians are shitting in toilets?
Yours is just another predictable response that shows up whenever anything like this is reported on /.
India is keeping its ennemies close. The nukes are foremost to keep Pakistan and China under control. Why the heck are they devellooping ICBM capability? Thy really just need to be able to lob them far enough over the border...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I fail to understand your point.
Who said I oppose to anything soda-related? What is "16 ounce"?
When you have China and India to compare to, yeah.
And who decides what "that much" is? Like I've noted elsewhere, different areas that a government spends on get their share of yearly budget and then the decision makes in those areas decide how the money is spent. Nobody is taking away money allocated to providing clean drinking water to make missiles. Indian defence spending is decreasing every year and projects like guaranteed employment and food-at-lower-than-market-cost to poor are getting a larger share of spending. So looks like they have their priorities in order.
India should be working on improved stick technology so they can win WWIV.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
You are really saying that the world community must band together in order to take all of America's nuclear weapons? After all, America is the ONLY country in all of history to have ever used a nuclear device against another, not once, but twice.
You can make all the distinctions you wish about right or wrong, but one cannot argue it is untrue.
Yeah, so maybe the subject is flame bait, but self righteous ass clowns like you really grind my gears.
You have the balls to talk about India spending money on weapons when the 21% of US children live in poverty?
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/
When there an estimated 500k homeless people living in US cities?
America spends 4.5% on GDP on the military, NOT including the illegal wars being waged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
You sir, are a jackass.
Indians got into this shit by not spending enough on defence anyway. So as an Indian I don't mind spending on defence. Had Indian rulers cared for defence, they would have not been invaded by Muslims first and then the British, turning them into a third world craphole.
Or maybe that's because India is the largest democracy in the world and has been mostly at peace since its independence in 1947 (minus border conflicts with China and Pakistan and some peacekeeping operations abroad). It's last conflict was in 1999 against Pakistan and the total death toll after 3 months of operations was less than 5000 victims. It's not a bad track record for such a large and populated country given the size of the societal issues it's dealing with.
The iranian democracy on the other side is today nothing more than an empty shell and while its population is highly educated, young and probably wouldn't mind a change in government, its government and associates have proven time and time again since the 70s to have a rather proactive agressive stance.
Nobody is taking away money allocated to providing clean drinking water to make missiles
As if the money didn't all come from the same bag? The Indian government is taking in money, allocating it to "defense" and building first strike weapons to bomb an imaginary enemy; all while ignoring that a large part of their population is living in poverty. The fact that there are reasonably well educated people here that are OK with this shit speaks volumes.
... whatever
There's plenty on Slashdot, most who live in America. any time there's a discussion of a foreign country, they feel the need to steer it back to America and do so by hating on America. Near as I can tell it is a combination of two things:
1) Trendiness in hating the US. For some reason, they feel that "cool" thing to do (so to speak) is to hate on the US. If anything is bad anywhere, they need to find a way it is worse in the US.
2) Arrogance/self centeredness. They can't deal with a discussion that isn't about them or their experiences, so they have to steer any discussion back to the US so it is. They mentally justify it to themselves as pointing out the US's flaws, but it is really about making the discussion about them and their world.
There's sadly a lot of it on Slashdot, it often gets moderated up, and it can make it difficult to have a real discussion about problems in the rest of the world.
Except that, doing so gets the ire of the entire world, and potentially brings in retaliation strikes if you don't vaporize them before they see it coming. The reality is these are political bargaining chips. So they are actually not missles at all, they are just bullshit. A potentially very dangerous and caustic form of bullshit, but, bullshit none the less.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The purpose is to deter the US.
How, pray tell, does an ICBM with a range of 5,500km deter a country that's 12,500km away?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
80% of the Indians don't have a toilet to shit in, but the government is more worried about expensive war toys with no purpose at all.
Way to go, India. There's nothing like getting your priorities straight.
Plenty of homeless people in the US too, including Veterans of many wars.
Don't make it sound like any other country anywhere is justified in even stockpiling these damn things, let alone developing them to make them more "effective" at total annihilation.
The iranian democracy on the other side is today nothing more than an empty shell and while its population is highly educated, young and probably wouldn't mind a change in government, its government and associates have proven time and time again since the 70s to have a rather proactive agressive stance.
As opposed to so many way more brutal dicatorships US government supports (far too many to list them all here) and sometimes even gives them technology to build nuclear weapons (Pakistan).
Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention. Regarding threat of Irans's nuclear capabilities, all we see and hear in western corporate media is crap and propaganda. Should they acquire some, they wouldn't be able to use them in other form than a deterrent. Their army contains of (mostly) defensive forces. Their defence strategy is to block Hormuz Strait and then look for diplomatic solution ("you stop invading us, we ublock your oil"). There was a publicly available Pentagon document describing it, yet I don't remember where I downloaded it. Use your favorite search engine to find it if you want.
Almost everything you see of hear about Iran in western media (maybe except of them being quite brutal theocracy) is a crap. The only reason western powers fear so much of iranian nukes is that since Iran acquires some nukes, US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
The iranian democracy on the other side is today nothing more than an empty shell and while its population is highly educated, young and probably wouldn't mind a change in government, its government and associates have proven time and time again since the 70s to have a rather proactive agressive stance.
Since the 70s? The Iranian revolution was in 1979, with the new constitution coming into force in December. And in 1980 Iraq (under our then-ally Saddam Hussein) invaded Iran, leading to 8 years of war with somewhere between 500000 and 1 million Iranian victims (that's around 250 9/11s if you need a comparison). That looks more like a reactive and defensive stand to me...
Stephan
Obviously, you've never read an anti-abortion bill.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The US certainly did not give Pakistan nukes. The Chinese did help there.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
India's nukes is and have always been built to deter Pakistan foremost and China secondmost.
The ICBM cannot even reach the US, by a long shot.
Same reason very few Chinese nuclear weapons can reach the US. All of them can reach Russia just fine.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Having played a lot of Scorched Earth and ATanks in my time, I can assure you that MIRV nukes are REALLY bad and can easily end up killing your own tank if launched in haste.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
>Any country that is cowed by Pakistan is nothing to worry about.
That is United States of America.
$hit Cowed. E.g. Pakistanis had Osama as their honoured Guest and US can't even call that bluff.
Well, except for when they found him and killed him without even asking Pakistan if it was ok to conduct a military operation on their soil.
Try that on a real country like Russia or China anyone in Europe... well my guess is they wouldn't be so brazen.
Weeeell, ok.
Next question: tell me again WHY India wants to nuke the US when so many Indians live here, and so many there are off-shored workers for US companies?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
No purpose at all? China attacked India in 1962. There have been border incursions, by Chinese forces, as recently as May of this year. They have fought several wars over disputed borders with Pakistan. Both China and Pakistan are nuclear powers. Before any government can do anything else, such as providing the plumbing mentioned in your post, they have to maintain the territorial integrity of the nation and assure the survival of the state. Frankly of all the recent nations that have gone for nuclear weapons India has the best argument for why they need them.
Looking through the article and its links, it seems like this is a response to China, which is deploying MIRVs to counter US-deployed anti-ballistic missile systems. With the Agni-V's extended range, India will be able to strike every city in China. Both sides are also developing submarine-launched missiles, which should hopefully reduce the incentive for a first strike.
Visit the
Therefore, India isn't as was considered earlier a nation with a failed thermonuclear test but one with a compact dial-able thermonuclear warhead capable country with places them in a block of just three countries or four countries(if you include the likes of piggybacker UK) with such advanced warheads.
I wish people in the UK who claim that Trident is "too expensive" would realise this. if we keep Trident we've got a system that would have cost us far far more to develop from scratch than to co-develop with the US.
If the UK scrapped Trident the sharing would stop and we'd probably sack all the scientists. Then if we needed nukes in the future we'd have to develop from scratch with a new set of scientists and no help - indeed active attempts to stop "proliferation" - from the US.
The few billion the UK will spend per year to stay part of the club is a lot less than it would have to pay on a crash program to rebuild a scrapped program with no help from anyone else.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Exactly. The British weren't as obviously vicious as Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany or the earlier European empires but still there were regular famines during British rule that stopped after they left. So British rule killed millions of people.
And Islamic rule of India was no joke either. The Hindu Kush is so named because Hindu slaves died in vast numbers on their way to slave markets in Islamic lands.
The world is not a very nice place and countries need to be able to defend themselves. Otherwise their inhabitants will be enslaved or slaughtered.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You may find the following information useful: Chavez is dead. Has been so, as I write this, for several weeks.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
list India-Pakistan as the most likely place for nuclear war to erupt?
Anyway, MIRVs were my favorite weapon in Scorched Earth, so I wonder if Angry Birds has anything similar. Maybe in the next version.
Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention [wikipedia.org].
Iran's current state is an indirect result of the 1953 coup. It's a direct result of the 1979 revolution and the idiocy of leftists teaming up with Muslim groups. They used the Muslim groups as the muscle and assumed they would step aside and let the leftist intellectuals rule when the dirty work was done. Quite a tragic miscalculation, though obvious in hindsight.
The only reason western powers fear so much of iranian nukes is that since Iran acquires some nukes, US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
That's a common theory but it doesn't make sense.. if anybody wanted to invade Iran, why wouldn't they do so RIGHT NOW before Iran has nukes? And yet it doesn't happen...
India does not have "imaginary" enemies. Pakistan is a really shitty enemy to have, and they also have nuclear weapons.
As for poverty India has seen a huge increase in wealth over the last few decades as they've become more Western friendly (instead of allied with the Soviets, vs. Pakistan and America) and more capitalist. I'm sure top-down programs like space programs and defense are good for their economy. It's better to have everybody get richer, yet maintain a rich-poor divide (like America's economy) than to try to bring up the low end and ignore the high end (like America's public education system, e.g. No Child Left Behind). We are the richest and most powerful country in the world due to the former, and have one of the worst public education systems of the developed world thanks to the latter.
Thats becuase we like idia, while Iran is filled with a bunch of hate filled nutters!
And you think there is no reason for that hate (if any)? I was talking to an Iranian friend a few days ago who was saying US and western countries have stopped selling medicine (cancer, MS, AIDS, ...) and create problems for them even if they want to buy from other countries.
The irrational financial sanctions (Swift network) is harming ordinary people in Iran. Do you expect love from them?
Just goes to prove what I've been saying for years, the absolute best way to move humanity forward towards peace and brotherhood....would be to take every religious text on the planet and throw them in a massive bonfire that blots out the sun.
What does the whole India/Pakistan hatred boil down to? "My God is better than your God Aie ie ie ie yee!" bullshit. Hutus and Tutsi, pretty much ALL of the middle east bullshit, now that the East/West ideology wars we can see how truly harmful religion is just by looking at all the wars and terrorism being fought in the name of this or that skybully. And please don't say "Its not the religion, its the practitioners" because I'm sorry but we have more than enough evidence that shows that for every one person that can handle it you get a dozen that either completely turn off their brains and become mindless followers that don't question jack shit their religious leaders say (who always end up corrupted) or who completely have the cheese slip off their cracker to become foaming zealots.
So really those of us that would like to see the "Star Trek" future of everyone treated as equals should want nothing less than the compete and total destruction of all religion because it is, like the WMDs talked about in TFA, just too damned dangerous. I'm sure I'll get hatred from the true believers, but if you could actually look at anything without the infection of religion? You'd see I'm right, I can show horror after horror, from suicide bombers to those blowing up abortion clinics to outright genocide and at the end of the day it ALL comes down to religion. We simply cannot handle religion, its like a drug that too few are able to take, its just got too many risks and too many side effects for it to be any good.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
India is not building more nukes to deter Pakistan; they already have enough for that, and Pakistan being in its present shape is unlikely to make much further progress on its own nukes (it'll be an Islamic Sharia state pretty soon, anyway, and those tend to be not friendly to scientific progress).
What India is worried about - and rightly so - is China.
India does not have "imaginary" enemies. Pakistan is a really shitty enemy to have, and they also have nuclear weapons.
A hungry tiger in a confined space is a very real enemy, a pakistani not so much. The slights are imagined, the dispute is over some backwater mountain region none of the countries actually want, except because their neighbor does. No indian and no pakistani is born hating their neighbor, that hate is taught.
As for poverty India has seen a huge increase in wealth over the last few decades as they've become more Western friendly (instead of allied with the Soviets, vs. Pakistan and America) and more capitalist.
This block vs. block world view really has got to fucking go. It is a political diversion meant to take your mind of the very real problems at home. Stop buying into the hyperbole and start voting according the problems you want solved, not some fat millionaire who can't seem to land that last oil lease contract. Whenever a politician tells you that [some ethinic group | country | region] is a danger to you, you need to do some serious Source criticism
PS: It is not the amount of dollars available that makes for a stable country, it is the (lack of) divide between rich and poor. The greater the gap, the larger risk of violent upheaval - you know the kind where they roll out the guillotines.
... whatever