Illusion Of Missile Defence

The Defense Research and Development Organization DRDO has chosen Delhi and Mumbai, the two vital cities of India, for the ballistic missile sheet. This BMD system will be able to soot down the enemy’s missiles in both within the Earth’s atmosphere and outside it. This decision will be materialized after getting the final approval from the Defense Committee of the Cabinet (DCC), the highest decision making body regarding the defense and security in India . The introduction of BMD to the South Asian security environment will result into the deterrence instability, crisis instability arm race instabilities and will jeopardize the prospects of arms control and disarmament in the region.

India has been embarked aggressively upon the development of BMD system since 2006,however, origin of India’s plan for missile defense, dates back to the early 1980s, when it started its Integrated Missile Development Program (IGDMP).IGDMP consisted of panoply of offensive and defensive missile plate forms such as Pritvi, Agni and Akash. As it is conceived from media the Indian BMD system revolves around the variants of Pritvi and Akash missiles. According to the Indian official sources DRDO used the Pritvi missile as simulated targets. The finally ready version, as per the Indian sources, has the capability to destroy an incoming missile with the range of almost 2000 km.

Technically, BMD system as a concept embodies two distinct but inter-related facets: Theatre Missile Defense (TMD) and National Missile Defense (NMD). The former envisions deploying of a defensive system to protect the military forces at battle field. Such system is usually precise, mobile and quickly deployable across the diverse geographic environments. While the later, in contrast to the former, envisions protecting the population, command centers and vital industrial complexes against the sea and ground based ballistic missiles of enemy.

As the DRDO has signaled out that the ballistic missile defense shield will be deployed around the Mumbai and Delhi in the first phase, which will be extended to the other major cities of India in the next phases, we can easily adjust the Indian BMD system in the NMD category.

Intercepting an incoming missile is like to hit an incoming bullet with a bullet. According to the experts of missile defense the missile interception is an extremely difficult feat even under the perfect testing conditions. But the task would have to be accomplished in an environment for which there has been no actual experience. Since there has not been any real nuclear war between nuclear weapon states, so predicting about the environmental effects on the reliability and efficiency of interceptors in a nuclear exchange would be a futile practice. More