Five nuclear submarine and possibly at least one carrier.
India's fission weapons are all entirely based on Plutonium. They are lighter and we could produce a lot of it. Refer OP.
This is TN only capability. This is the first ever estimate anywhere of Indian TN capability.
This has always been true from the beginning. Two bombs dropped one on hiroshima and one
LF, it was the other way around. Nagasaki got Fatman, the plutonium warhead and Hiroshima got Little Boy, which was the untested Uranium warhead.
True TW the point I was trying to make was plutonium based nukes do not need HEU.
I was under the impression that all SSBN's would be under the SFC and not the Navy.
Actually I misread, I thought you meant uranium was on nagasaki. I just rearead your post and noticed you were not assigning either.
I have acknowledged this capability in one of my earlier posts in this forum. I wrote about the assumption that India needs enriched Uranium and rebutted that with the FBF warhead example of why our economics dictated otherwise. I had suggested we have single stage Fusion boosted fission variable yield warhead. As of 2006 this is our preferred warhead. Admiral Arun Prakash confirmed this recently. So until the true TN devices take over we are using 300KT FBF with variable yield. There is as yet no confirmation on the variable yield part except some obscure defense publications from 2009. Our Pakistan only arsenal is likely to stay plutonium based.
We will not have too many excesses if we consider 20kg 90% HEU blankets with 5kg trigger. In ten years we will produce 280 warheads with 300000 SWU/yr.
We will have more than enough for 3 SSBN's and 6 SSN's even assuming we produce one vessel a year. There will also be enough for aircraft carriers if they are of higher displacement and Indian Navy decides we need them to be propelled by Nuclear reactors. IN has denied reports of fielding a nuclear aircraft carrier. My estimates have included fuel for 1 submarine a year at american utilization factors. The other estimates floated around are 90Kg of HEU for Arihant. I have used 300kg of HEU per submarine. There will more than suffice for Aircraft carriers as well. There is enough excess HEU to account for more. I have also calculated the HEU in the maximal case ignoring 30,000 SWU/yr for processing losses and other such contingencies. So there is plenty of room to play around with. I have given an extremely conservative estimate. The idea was to get a minimum and a maximum. I am quiet confident about the minimum even from western intel source based calculations. With the new advances the number is much much higher. It's like day and night. If you notice the values quoted for the 30,000 SWU/yr figure even those numbers are respectable. 30 TN devices of W-88 with U-235 90% HEU blanket in 10 years. Or a large number of U-235 devices with 5kg HEU trigger. Please also note I have only indicated HEU values. A teller-ullam two stage implosion design will also include other material. This is easier to come by for India. So even in the worst case we will have plenty of HEU devices by 2020.
We still have a little further to go on Centrifuge designs. TC11 is two generations behind Urenco centrifuges. TC12 produces 40SWU/yr. TC21 is 50 x initial designs which is 100 to 150SWU/yr. All of my calculations were based on TC11 which is 30SWU/yr in the Indian reactors. I have made this reduction given our surface speed is 600m/sec as opposed to 620m/sec for TC12. I have also kept it lower to account for our older generation units which may still be working until we move them to chittradurga. So lots of bandwidth to account for uncertainty.
