India's Nuclear Gambles: Are We Supposed to Just Look Away?

Look, when a country joins the nuclear club, there’s an unspoken agreement: you handle this terrifying power with extreme, almost obsessive, care. But then you look at India, and you have to ask – did they miss that memo? Frankly, the pattern of screw-ups, lost materials, and baffling leadership decisions coming out of their nuclear program isn’t just concerning; it’s starting to look like outright recklessness.

Let’s start with the basics: keeping your house in order. India’s Nuclear Command Authority, the supposed adults in the room, often seems to be wrestling with its own red tape. The INS Arihant incident in 2018 is a case in point – a nuclear submarine, their pride and joy, knocked out for nearly a year because someone, incredibly, left a hatch open. You couldn’t make it up. If they can’t get that right on such a critical piece of hardware, what else is going wrong that we don’t hear about?

Then there’s the head-scratching stuff from the top. Respected experts like Bharat Karnad have practically been shouting from the rooftops that Indian political leaders frequently get fundamental nuclear jargon disastrously wrong. Mistaking “minimum credible deterrent” for “credible minimum deterrent” might sound like dry academic wordplay to some. But in the high-stakes poker game of nuclear strategy, that kind of confusion isn’t just embarrassing; it’s the sort of blunder that could lead a nation to stumble into an unimaginable crisis. Are they genuinely sure they know what buttons they’re even threatening to push?

And then there’s the jaw-dropping issue of nuclear material simply vanishing. We’re talking over 200 kilograms either stolen or lost between 1994 and 2021. Think about that: 18 documented cases, including uranium snatched from places like the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station and, just this year, the Bhabha Atomic Energy Centre. This isn’t someone misplacing their car keys; this is material that could fuel a dirty bomb or worse. It’s a monumental failure of basic security.

It’s not just the big facilities, either. In 2023, a gang in Bihar was caught trying to flog 50 grams of Californium – nasty stuff. Another crew in Dehradun managed to walk off with a radioactive black box from a facility in Mumbai. The supposed watchdog, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), seems perpetually unable to secure even research labs. It’s as if the foxes aren’t just guarding the henhouse; they’ve been given the keys and a map.

Let’s not forget the innocent people who get caught in the crossfire of this incompetence. The Mayapuri incident in 2010 saw five people seriously injured when a Cobalt-60 source, discarded from a university, ended up in a Delhi scrapyard. A similar scary episode occurred at the Madras Atomic Power Station back in 2002. These aren’t abstract risks; they’re real people suffering because of appalling negligence.

And to top it all off, India still plays fast and loose with the critical separation of its civilian and military nuclear sites. The 2008 U.S.-India deal was built on that clear division. But India’s compliance? Patchy and almost entirely unverified. It’s this kind of deliberate murkiness that makes it incredibly hard for anyone to trust what’s really going on.

Pull all this together – the shoddy procedures, the confused leadership, the stolen materials, the public endangerment, the refusal to be transparent – and it paints a truly alarming picture. This isn’t responsible stewardship of the deadliest weapons on Earth. This is a country whose nuclear safety net appears riddled with gaping holes. For a nation with India’s ambitions, this is an appalling record. Someone needs to demand far stricter oversight and real accountability before something truly terrible happens. Because right now, India’s nuclear program looks less like a deterrent and more like an accident waiting to happen.

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