CIA: India could have gone nuclear in 1964

As early as 1964, the US intelligence community had concluded that India was in a position to develop nuclear weapons, a declassified state department report said, citing 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) said in a report on May 14, 1964.

The report along with several others was published on Wednesday by the National Security Archive and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project. Noting that the fuel core of the Canadian-Indian Reactor at Trombay was being changed every six months, the US intelligence report had raised questions about India’s nuclear objectives.

The bureau said a six-month period was quite short for “normal research reactor operations,” but it was the optimum time for using the reactor’s spent fuel for producing weapons grade plutonium. The report also said the Canadians had not established specific safeguards when they made the reactor available to India, thus giving the Indians a free hand in using the newly-built Phoenix plutonium separation plant to produce the fissile material.

According to the state department report, “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”. The bureau report said it had no “direct evidence” of an Indian weapons programme and believed 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.”

The report also said that by late 70s, the CIA knew that China had aided Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme by providing it with weapons design information wondered whether China would help Pakistan, among other countries, acquire a nuclear capability. The US experts believed China had limited resources and seemed “cautious and indecisive” on the question of nuclear assistance. A year later, intelligence reports concerning visits to China by Pakistani defence and science advisers sparked the question, “will Communist China give nuclear aid to Pakistan ”