US report says India was in a position to develop nuclear weapons even in 1964

The US intelligence community had concluded in 1964 itself that India was in a position to develop nuclear weapons, says a declassified State Department report said. The reason, it said, was the frequent change of the fuel core of the Canada-supplied reactor at Trombay.

"The Indians are now in a position to begin nuclear weapons development if they chose to do so. We have no evidence, however, of a weapon research and development programme and would expect to see some if the programme existed," the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) had said in a report on May 14, 1964.

This report, along with several other reports, was published yesterday by the National Security Archive and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.

Back then, the US intelligence report had raised questions about India's nuclear objectives because the fuel core of the Canadian-Indian Reactor (CIR) at Trombay was being changed every six months. The report said that a six-month period was quite short for "normal research reactor operations;" however, it added that it was the optimum time for using the CIR's spent fuel for producing weapons grade plutonium.

The report also said the Canadians had not established specific safeguards while giving the reactor to India, and therefore Indians had a free hand in using the newly-built Phoenix plutonium separation plant to produce the fissile material.

"India's leadership might have had nationalistic motives for building the Phoenix plant but if it wanted a nuclear weapons capability it would seek such a capability," said The State Department report.

The INR report said that it had no "direct evidence" of an Indian weapons programme, thus believing that it was "unlikely" that India had made a decision to build a bomb.

Nevertheless, it was "probably no accident" that "everything the Indians (had) done so far would be compatible with a weapons programme if at some future date it appeared desirable to start one."

According to INR, India had taken the "first deliberate decision in the series leading to a nuclear weapon," which was to have "available, on demand, unsafeguarded weapons-grade plutonium or, at the least, the capacity to produce it."

The report said that a scholar characterised this as India's "proliferation drift, the slow but sure moves towards the development of nuclear weapons."

Image source