Abstract
GENERAL ASHFAQ P. KAYANI, THE CHIEF OF ARMY STAFF, PAKISTAN Around noon on 26 July 2009,Gurushuran Kaur, the wife of the Indian prime minister, broke a single coconut on the hull of a submarine in the fifteenmeter- deepMatsya dry dock at Visakhapatnam (also known as Vizag).1 The occasion marked the formal launch of India’s first indigenously built submarine, a six-thousand-ton nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN) known as S-2-also as the Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) and,more commonly, by its future name, INS Arihant (destroyer of the enemy).2 The launch ended for India a journey stretching over three decades since the inauguration of the ATV program and including an eleven-year construction period.3 The submarine is intended to form a crucial pillar of India’s strategic deterrence. Special anechoic rubber tiles (to reduce the risk of detection by sonar) coat the steel hull.7 A similar technology was previously used in the Russian Kilo-class submarines. 8 (Russian help in designing the ATV has long been an open secret; there are also reports of Israeli, French, and German imprints on the project.)9 Butmore than design or fabrication of hull, it was the downsizing andmating of the ninety-megawatt (120,000 horsepower) low-enriched-uranium-fueled, pressurized light-water reactor that kept the submarine in the dry dock formore than a decade.10 The reactor and its containment vessel account for one-tenth (nearly six hundred tons) of the boat’s total displacement.
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