Asia goes ballistic: North Korea's Unha-3 fizzle and India's Agni-5 launch

The Agni-5 certainly has ignited the sub-continent.

The Agni-5 was unmistakably a ballistic missile test, the muted reaction to which demonstrated the extent to which India's nuclear weapons programme has been legitimised. The Agni-5 is a 3 stage 5,000km range all solid fuelled missile. The Indian missile has a weight of about 50 tonnes and has a throw-weight of approximately 1.1 tonnes. The Agni-5 gives India the ability to strike all the major population centres of China. Furthermore, the Indians argue that it augments the military's ability to assure a comprehensive second strike against Beijing because the Agni-5 is road mobile. China, however, argues that the Agni-5 is too heavy to be a road mobile missile.

Many Indian reports state that the Agni-5 is an ICBM. This is quite false. The Agni-5 places India on the cusp of having a true ICBM capability. Furthermore, it has been widely reported, in India, that the Agni-5 gives India the ability to deliver long-range multiple nuclear warheads or MIRVs (that is Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles) from a single missile.

The latter claim is pure hype. It is true that India has mastered many of the technologies required to develop MIRV, for example the Indian space programme has mastered multiple satellite launching technology. However, there is more to developing MIRVs than possessing a multiple satellite launching capability and missiles with adequate throw-weight to accommodate MIRVs.

The Indian scientific community would also need to develop highly specialised nuclear weapons with an adequate yield-to-weight ratio for the Agni-5. That means India needs to miniaturise its nuclear weapon designs to make them compact and light (for example through the use of two-point implosion which relies upon fissile cores of innovative geometry). China can deliver multiple thermonuclear warheads. India does not have the ability to develop multiple thermonuclear warheads without further testing, given that the most widely cited yield of India's 1998 thermonuclear (or hydrogen bomb) test was consistent with a fizzle yield where the first stage fails to ignite the second.

For India to truly develop a MIRV capability, certainly to match China toe-to-toe, it would most likely need to conduct more nuclear tests. This will have an interesting effect on the various nuclear trade and technology transfer deals that India has signed, including an in principle commitment made by Australia to export uranium to India.

The Agni-5 could well make India more likely to conduct a nuclear test than North Korea, given that Pyongyang does not have much plutonium to spare (we don't know whether Pyongyang has weapons grade uranium).

India will face an interesting choice following the completion of the Agni-5 test programme. Should Delhi go further and develop a true ICBM capability? Or should India concentrate on augmenting its current strategic capability through both the development of MIRV warheads and more compact, lighter and faster intermediate range missiles?

So far as we are aware both options have their supporters within the Indian strategic and scientific communities.

Where Asia goes from here, and the impact that these developments will have on Australia's position in the region, is highly uncertain. It will certainly be interesting to see what the major review of Australia's role in the "Asian century" will make of all this.

It is quite possible that Asia won't see out its century in one piece, which would be quite the irony.