Letters: Nuclear interest

This refers to Jyoti Malhotra's column "How India's pride INS Arihant was built" (Elsewhere, August 12). The Indian Navy's interest in nuclear propulsion actually predates 1974. It started in 1967, then reinforced by events during the 1971 war (when a Russian nuclear submarine surfaced somewhere in the Indian Ocean to stave off the USS Enterprise entering the Bay of Bengal), and reconfirmed formally in 1976 by the Committee of Secretaries. The actual ATV programme began in 1984 and not 1985, with the first Director General ATV (with the ex officio rank of secretary to government) being appointed on March 31, 1984, and a budget provision for 1984-85 of Rs 20 crore was approved by the Cabinet Committee of Political Affairs on April 28, 1984.

The original plan (in 1980) was to build a land-based prototype with enriched uranium. Project S was sanctioned in 1982, but delegations from Russia and India had been visiting each other since 1981 to explore training, leasing and design & manufacture of nuclear submarines, leading up to the leasing of the INS Chakra. It would be pertinent to note that China took 16 years to build its second generation SSN despite having a massive conventional submarine-building programme with help from the USSR.

Probir Roy Gurgaon

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