India Starts Up New Reactor That Can Make Arms-Grade Plutonium

Amid mounting pressure in Parliament for India to resume its nuclear weapons program to counter developments in neighboring Pakistan, the government announced Thursday that a new research reactor near Bombay has gone critical, enabling it to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

The Indian Atomic Energy Department announced that the 100-megawatt Dhruva reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center began a sustained chain reaction Thursday morning.

“This is a landmark in the country’s atomic energy program,” said Chairman Raja Ramanna of India’s Atomic Energy Commission.

Ramanna said that the new reactor is the largest research reactor in the world and will have medical and industrial applications for India’s large and advanced nuclear industry.

In Washington, the State Department had no immediate comment on the announcement. But an expert on nuclear proliferation said the disclosure signals to Pakistan that India no longer need rely on other nations for enriched uranium and other materials needed for nuclear explosives.

Those suppliers, including the United States and Canada, have barred India from using their nuclear materials in weapons, according to Leonard S. Spector, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Spector, author of an annual report on the spread of atomic weapons, said that Ramanna’s announcement warns both Pakistan and the United States, Pakistan’s ally, of India’s readiness to match Pakistan’s own nuclear weapons goals.

“It’s definitely a signal, and not a very benign one,” Spector said. “They’re saying that if Pakistan continues its pursuit of the bomb, we now can respond without any legal restrictions, . . . and we don’t have to use any imported technology.

“There’s an arms race here, and the yachts are circling before crossing the starting line. They’re getting ready.”

The announcement here comes as the government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi faces mounting pressure to reactivate a nuclear weapons program dormant since India tested a nuclear device in the Rajasthan desert in 1974.

Plutonium, which the new reactor is said to be capable of producing, is a radioactive element used as a reactor fuel and as a fissionable component of nuclear weapons.

On Wednesday in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, leaders of opposition parties and many members of Gandhi’s Congress-I party pressed Khurshed Alam Khan, a minister of state for external affairs, about reports on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

Echoing recent statements made by Gandhi, which apparently marked a shift in India’s expressed policy against proliferation of nuclear weapons, Khan said, “We have kept our options open.”

As to developments in Pakistan, he said: “We will reply stone by stone.”

Neither India nor Pakistan has signed the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and both have charged recently that the other is engaged in developing nuclear weapons.

India’s so-called bomb lobby, made up of defense experts, military officers and intellectuals, stepped up its activity after a recent broadcast by ABC, the U.S. television network, reporting that Pakistan had successfully tested a nuclear triggering device, using non-nuclear explosives.

This followed reports that Pakistan, at its secret nuclear research facility near Islamabad, is capable of producing weapons-grade enriched uranium.

India proved to the world in 1974 that it was a potential nuclear power. The device it tested at that time used plutonium produced at another reactor at the Bhabha complex. Because the reactors at the Bhabha center were designed and built by Indian nuclear engineers, they are not subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The 1974 explosion employed plutonium made with U.S. and Canadian materials, but India sidestepped the two nations’ bans on weapons-related use of the materials by saying that the explosion was for peaceful purposes.

The much larger reactor that went into operation Thursday gives India the potential to produce a much greater volume of plutonium, Indian officials said.

Although the development disclosed Thursday had long been expected, it allowed the Gandhi government to show Parliament that progress is being made without openly committing the government to a weapons program.

Khan, speaking out Thursday in Parliament, referred to Pakistan’s claims of more advanced nuclear prowess and dismissed them as an illusion.