We’ve all read how India recently fired a prototype of it’s advanced undersea launched missile, aka the K-15 from a submerged pontoon. Everyone also knows that India has a growing submarine fleet. However, it seems that only India has put 1 and 1 together to reach an advanced conclusion – that they are now members of a select club of submariners with sub launched missile capability. I say this based on recent publications such as:
Strike power
In missile technology, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has arrived. In the past few months, it has had a phenomenal run of success with its various missiles, and it proved on February 26 that it had acquired the capability to launch ballistic missiles from under the sea. {z – but not actually from a sub} On that day, a ballistic missile named Sagarika, or K-15, blasted off flawlessly from a pontoon submerged to a depth of 50 metres in the Bay of Bengal. The pontoon simulated the conditions of a submarine. {z- submariners everywhere must rejoice in knowing that their dangerous, complicated missions are akin to life on a stationary pontoon with no one searching for you and no undersea obstacles}
India thus joins the select club of countries {z – oh really}, which includes Russia, the United States, France, China and the United Kingdom, with submarine launch capabilities. What affirmed India’s entry into this league was that this was the fifth launch of the Sagarika missile from a submerged pontoon and, according to DRDO missile technologists, all the five were “consistently successful”. A top DRDO official called it an “excellent mission and a copybook flight”. Another missile technologist called it “a thumping success”.
The successful launch takes India closer to its plan of completing the triad, that is, the launching of missiles with nuclear warheads from sea, land and air, as part of establishing a credible, minimum nuclear deterrence. “It is a great day for the country’s missile technology and national defence capability,” said a missile technologist. “We are getting into the possibility of completing the triad. This successful launch will give us the sea capability.”
If things go as planned, in about two years {z -the famous – if all goes as planned – how often does that actually happen?} India will launch the Sagarika missile from a submarine reconfigured for the purpose and later from the nuclear-powered submarine that is being built at Visakhapatnam. The indigenous nuclear-powered submarine project is called Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV), and the partners in that programme are the DRDO, the Navy and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE).
Sagarika is a versatile missile that can be launched from different platforms: from submarines, from the ground and from mobile launchers. It is about 6.5 m long or 10 m long and weighs about 7 tonnes. It can carry nuclear warheads weighing up to 600 kg. It is a single-stage missile powered by solid propellants. DRDO officials describe it as “light and short”. It has advanced avionics, propulsion, control and guidance, and inertial navigation systems. While its underwater booster propels it out of the water, its powerful air booster fires and can take it over a distance of more than 700 km.
On the launch day, there was no one aboard the pontoon when the missile was fired. A naval ship was positioned several kilometres away, and the missile’s fire-control systems were in place on this ship, which was linked to the pontoon by an underwater cable and through wireless communication. So the test-firing was a remote operation.
