Indian nuclear submarines

Neil

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Indian SSBN Arihant Achieves Milestone, Govt Messes Up By Releasing Photo Of US Navy Submarine

The Indian Information & Broadcast Ministry has just released this Youtube clip which contains a single still photograph of what it wants you to believe is the Arihant SSBN, which reached a milestone today with its pressure water reactor finally going criticial. Well, guess what. Even on a day like this, the government didn't mind filching a photograph of a US Navy Ohio-class submarine in an officially released video. My thanks to Shubhankar for pointing this out. Stay classy, government. No day like today to get it embarrassingly wrong. Sigh.


http://www.livefistdefence.com/2013/08/indian-ssbn-arihant-achieves-milestone.html
 
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Decklander

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God save this nation, if the PMO of the nation can do such blunders, what will happen to the nation.
 

Bheeshma

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PLA Navy's Tang Class nuclear submarines will be a major threat to INS Arihant.
PLA navy does not have nuke submarine capable of going 100 miles from there shore without every one in SEA knowing about it. There diesel electric subs don't have the range to go after Arihant.
 

SamwiseTheBrave

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its a big week for the Indian Navy - kudos to everyone involved in these major milestone accomplishments !
 

drkrn

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PLA navy does not have nuke submarine capable of going 100 miles from there shore without every one in SEA knowing about it. There diesel electric subs don't have the range to go after Arihant.
yes .i remember few months back a report came that chinese subs are spotted in bay of bengal more than 20 times
 

Bheeshma

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yes .i remember few months back a report came that chinese subs are spotted in bay of bengal more than 20 times
Not one has been spotted they claimed 20 contacts which means all were detected. Not a single one nuke sub.
 

Vishwarupa

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Not one has been spotted they claimed 20 contacts which means all were detected. Not a single one nuke sub.
If not a single nuke sub then how can chinese navy travel 3000 KM on diesel electric submarine till India. Are they taking logistic support from other countries? Need to know who are they.
 

Bheeshma

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Why do you think srilanka or Combodia or thailand would refuse them logistic help. Its peacetime and they can travel freely.
 

Neil

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How India's pride INS Arihant was built

India's first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, which went "critical" over the weekend, has enabled India to join a select club of nations like the US, Russia, China, the UK and France, which possess nuclear-powered submarines.

The story of the Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) project, of which the INS Arihant is a part, is really the story of the incredible hard work, long-term strategy and clear thinking employed by generations of India's political leaders cutting across party lines, defence experts, foreign policy mandarins and scientists, to build indigenous capability that could give India the chance of becoming a serious power.


The 'Arihant' was launched on July 26, 2009, exactly ten years after the end of the Kargil conflict, which means it has taken four years for its nuclear reactor to achieve criticality. Its design is based on the Russian Akula-1 class submarines, of which the best-known example is the INS Chakra, a nuclear submarine leased for ten years by India from Russia in 2011 and formally commissioned into the Indian navy in 2012. (In January 1988, when India first leased a Charlie class nuclear submarine from the Soviet Union for three years, it called it by the same name, INS Chakra.) The 100-member Indian crew for the 'Arihant', besides training at the School for Advanced Underwater Warfare at Vishakapatnam, is also training on the new INS Chakra.

The Arihant's 83Mw pressurised water reactor (PWR) has also been built with considerable assistance from the Russians, who are said to have helped scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in miniaturising the reactor to fit into the 10m diameter hull of the nuclear submarine.

But it is equally true that the Arihant is more than a sum of its imported parts, transfer of technology and consultancy given by the Russians. The Rare Materials Project of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) in Ratnahalli, Mysore, supplied the highly enriched uranium, while the submarine itself was built in a completely enclosed dry dock at the Shipbuilding Centre in Vishakapatnam.

India's private sector helped out the $2.9-billion project in significant ways. The hull for the vessel was built by L&T's Hazira shipbuilding facility, Tata Power built the control systems for the submarine, while the systems for the steam turbine integrated with the reactor are supplied by Walchandnagar Industries, reported DNA newspaper in 2009.

"We have used the Russians as consultants. As far as efforts in designing, developing and maintaining the reactor are concerned, they are entirely ours," BARC director Srikumar Banerjee said at the time.

The INS Arihant may not launch a thousand ships or nuclear-powered submarines in its wake-five more are being built in Vadodara and Vishakapatnam-and in fact has been called a "technology demonstrator" by former navy chief Admiral Nirmal Verma, but it is a classic example of collaborations sought with friendly countries abroad at various inflection points of India's post-independent trajectory.

The ATV project was launched as long ago as 1974 in the wake of the India-Pakistan war when the US aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, was deployed in the Indian Ocean as a warning to India, in response to which the Soviets despatched ships armed with nuclear missiles as well as a nuclear submarine to ward off the threat posed by the Americans. Then prime minister Indira Gandhi was said to have been considerably impressed by the power of the Soviet Union's nuclear-armed flotilla to change the course of the war and ordered the launch of the ATV project in 1974.

But it was only in 1985, after Indira Gandhi's death, that the Rajiv Gandhi government ordered the upgrade of the ATV project and the Mazagaon docks in Mumbai began the construction of two German HDW 209 1500 submarines--the INS Shalki and the INS Shankul. He also asked the Soviet Union to lease the INS Chakra, a hush-hush project for the time because India, a non-nuclear power, had no business with a nuclear-powered submarine. (Simultaneously, the Rajiv Gandhi government was also giving a big push to the nuclear programme at Pokhran.)

With the Rajiv Gandhi government ousted in the 1989 polls, the V P Singh government kept the INS Chakra in India, even though he caved into public pressure to withdraw the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) from Sri Lanka in early 1990.

By 1998, Atal Behari Vajpayee's government had taken power, gone nuclear and announced its no-first-use nuclear policy. After the Kargil conflict in 1999, this was further refined when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced its intention to build the nuclear triad to its logical conclusion. The ATV project got a big boost at this time, when in November 2003, the miniaturised nuclear reactor went critical inside a simulated submarine hull (seeking to replicate Arihant conditions) on land at Kalpakkam.

In 2006, under the Congress-led first Manmohan Singh government, this land-based prototype nuclear reactor at Kalpakkam was declared operational, and in January 2008, it was integrated into the Arihant. By this time, the political controversy over the Indo-US nuclear agreement was its apogee. As the politics over the nuclear deal with America fermented, the Left parties withdrew from the United Progressive Alliance, allowing the Congress-led government to piggy-back on the shoulders of the Americans to enter the exclusive club of de facto nuclear powers.

The Indo-US deal would allow India to open negotiations with the outside world, like France, Russia and the US, to build pressurised water reactors (which use natural uranium, from places like Jadugoda in Jharkhand, as fuel and heavy water as coolant and moderator) for the production of clean electricity.

BARC officials have confirmed that for large-scale commercial nuclear power stations (that will be built by outside powers like France, Russia and the US), which require much larger quantities of enriched uranium, the special material enrichment facility in Chitradurga district in Karnataka will be used.

Soon after the elections in 2009, on July 26, Manmohan Singh's wife Gursharan Kaur broke a coconut and launched the INS Arihant for the world to see. The presence of then Russian ambassador Vyacheslav Trubnikov and other diplomats at the submarine's launch at the Eastern Naval Command in Vishakapatnam confirmed the behind-the-scenes role played by the Russians in developing this part of India's nuclear triad.

Meanwhile, the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier or the INS Vikramaditya is completing its sea trials in Russia and will soon move into the White Sea for aviation trials for fighter jets landing and taking-off. The Russians have told India that it will hand the warship over in end-2013.

India is now said to be constructing a nuclear submarine base on its eastern coast that will be named INS Varsha, for which Rs 160 crore is sanctioned in the 2011-12 budget (Rs 58 crore for civil works and the remaining for setting up a VLF communication system.) These will berth the INS Arihant, the INS Chakra as well as the new nuclear submarines under construction.

Notwithstanding these incredible markers on the road to self-defence, it is likely to be decades before the Navy can send an Arihant-class submarine into waters close to Pakistan or China. This is because the Arihant is still very noisy and at an underwater speed of 24 knots cannot run away easily. (With a 500 kg Sagarika missile on board, whose range is about 700 km, it can at best threaten Pakistan.)



How India's pride INS Arihant was built | Business Standard
 

Decklander

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If not a single nuke sub then how can chinese navy travel 3000 KM on diesel electric submarine till India. Are they taking logistic support from other countries? Need to know who are they.
Chinese subs had been operating in BOB even during 1971 war with Pak.
 

Vishwarupa

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Chinese subs had been operating in BOB even during 1971 war with Pak.
Sir, my question is how can they travel so far without any logistic support from near by countries( to India). If Chinese sub can travel to BOB, AS & IOR then its a threat to our AC. How is our Anti SUB warfare ? Can you shed some light on this please.
 

Vishwarupa

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Why do you think srilanka or Combodia or thailand would refuse them logistic help. Its peacetime and they can travel freely.
i doubt about Srilanka supporting china militarily. If they are supporting china then its our major diplomatic failure
 

SajeevJino

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i doubt about Srilanka supporting china militarily. If they are supporting china then its our major diplomatic failure
Sure they will ...This month They opened a Mega Port with Chinese assist...so they would allow Chinese sub to refuel on that Port
 

Decklander

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Sir, my question is how can they travel so far without any logistic support from near by countries( to India). If Chinese sub can travel to BOB, AS & IOR then its a threat to our AC. How is our Anti SUB warfare ? Can you shed some light on this please.
Chinese conventional subs have that kind of range to get into BOB for a few days only. Searching a sub in open oceans is like searching for a needle in hay stack. However they all have some choke points from which they have to enter or exit a particuler area. For Russian subs to get into Atlantic they had to cross a network of underwater sensors called SOSUS which wud tell them whenever a sub came that way.
IN too maintains round the clock sub patrols in Malacca st, Persian Gulf & Horn of Africa area to keep track of subs entering and exiting IOR. It is on these choke points that we can start tracking them and chasing them quietly. They too can do the same or may already be doing on the eastern side of Malacca st to track IN subs. We normally send our subs to these areas alongwith our surface fleet. They stay right below the ships and can't be detected by passive means unless you go active as the ships use methods like Turn count Masking to not only change theie own prop signature but also to mask the signature of the sub under them.

SOSUS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/acoustics/images/iuss-nrl.gif

One very big advantage which IN acquired for detecting subs at sea was thru the use IRSS. They have been found to detect subs while they are at snorkel height at sea. Every deisel-electric sub needs to come to snorkel ht to charge its batteries. Even the AIP subs will need to come to surface to charge its batteries as the AIP endurance is normally the patrol endurance @3-4kts speed and not for attack or dash.
As a thumb rule, A sub needs to have minimum 80% charge on its batteries to be able to attack a warship group and make a safe get away.
 

Payeng

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Folks it is usually not a submarine Vs submarine battle we see but submarine Vs anti submarine warfare. ASW counter measures are the biggest threat for a submarine such as P-8I

Even though China has more nuclear submarines than us, how long can it remain in water without any major logistic base in this region? Also, we are getting the P8I aircraft, which is an excellent anti-submarine warfare aircraft, from the Americans.
INS Vikrant to put China at sea | idrw.org
 

drkrn

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Sure they will ...This month They opened a Mega Port with Chinese assist...so they would allow Chinese sub to refuel on that Port
if they do it ltte will be born again with another name.they know it very well so they may not
 

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