By Adrian Levy And R.
On October 8, 2014, Head Constable Vijay Singh awoke before dawn
in Kalpakkam, India, and scurried across the ocher gravel outside the
constabulary barracks at the Madras Atomic Power Station, “looking like the monsoon was
about to break,” as a grounds sweeper later recalled.
Singh was
one of 620 paramilitary officers in the country’s Central Industrial Security
Force assigned to protect
the facility’s nuclear-related buildings and materials. But he did not have his
usual tasks in mind that morning.
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By 4:40 a.m., the 44-year-old officer reached the armory, where he
signed out a 9 mm submachine gun and 60 rounds of ammunition in two magazines.
Singh loaded one clip into his weapon, pocketed the other and entered the
portico of a cream and red, three-story residential complex.
He climbed up one flight to the room where a senior colleague,
Mohan Singh, dozed and abruptly opened fire at him in a controlled burst, to
conserve rounds, just as he had been trained.
Then he jogged downstairs, where he shot dead two more men and
seriously injured another two. With 10 rounds left in his magazine, and an
unused 30-round clip in his pocket, he prowled unimpeded across the gravel,
with no alert called.
A bystander shouted out to him, and suddenly Singh halted and dropped
to his knees, an eyewitness recalled later. He was finally surrounded and led
away, glassy-eyed, “as docile as anything, a neat guy, his hair still perfectly
parted,” the witness said.
The episode was a fresh example of what officials here and outside
India depict as serious shortcomings in the country’s nuclear guard force,
tasked with defending one of the world’s largest stockpiles of fissile material
and nuclear explosives.
An
estimated 90 to 110 Indian nuclear bombs are stored in six or so government-run
sites patrolled by the same security force, according to the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute, an independent think tank, and Indian officials.
Within the next two decades, as many as 57 reactors could also be
operating under the force’s protection, as well as four plants where spent
nuclear fuel is dissolved in chemicals to separate out plutonium to make new
fuel or be used in nuclear bombs.
The sites are spread out over vast distances: from the stony
foothills of the Himalayas in the north down to the red earth of the tropical
south. Shuttling hundreds of miles in between will be occasional convoys of
lightly protected trucks laden with explosive and fissile
materials—including plutonium and enriched uranium—that could be used in
civilian and military reactors or to spark a nuclear blast.
As a result, the Kalpakkam shooting alarmed Indian and Western
officials who question whether this country, which is surrounded by
unstable neighbors and has a history of civil tumult, has taken adequate
precautions to safeguard its sensitive facilities and keep the building blocks
of a devastating nuclear bomb from being stolen by insiders with grievances,
ill motives or, in the worst case, connections to terrorists.
Although experts say they regard the issue as urgent, Washington
is not pressing India for quick reforms. The Obama administration is instead
trying to avoid any dispute that might interrupt a planned expansion of U.S.
military sales to New Delhi, several senior U.S. officials said in interviews.
The experts’ concerns are based in part on a series of documented
nuclear security lapses in the past two decades, in addition to the shooting:
· Several kilograms of what
authorities described as semiprocessed uranium were stolen by a criminal gang,
allegedly with Pakistani links, from a state mine in Meghalya, in northeastern
India, in 1994. Four years later, a federal politician was arrested near the
West Bengal border with 100 kilograms of uranium from India’s Jadugoda mining
complex that he was allegedly attempting to sell to Pakistani sympathizers
associated with the same gang. A police dossier seen by the Center for Public
Integrity (CPI) states that 10 more people connected with smuggling
were arrested two years after this, in operations that recovered 57 pounds of
stolen uranium.
· Then, in 2003, members of
a jihad group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, were caught in a village on the Bangladesh
border with 225 grams of milled uranium—allegedly purchased illicitly from
a mining employee—that they said they intended to wrap around explosives. The
Indian authorities initially claimed it was from Kazakhstan but later
concluded it was more likely from a uranium mining complex in Jadugoda, in
eastern India.
· In 2008, another criminal
gang was caught attempting to smuggle low-grade uranium, capable of being used
in a primitive radiation-dispersal device, from one of India’s state-owned
mines across the border to Nepal. The same year, another group was caught
moving an illicit stock of uranium over the border to Bangladesh, the gang
having been assisted by the son of an employee at India’s Atomic Minerals
Division, which supervises uranium mining and processing.
· In 2009, a nuclear reactor
employee in southwest India deliberately poisoned dozens of his colleagues with
a radioactive isotope, taking advantage of numerous gaps in plant security,
according to an internal government report seen by the CPI.
· And in 2013, leftist
guerillas in northeast India illegally obtained uranium ore from a
government-run milling complex in northeast India and strapped it to high
explosives to make a crude bomb before being caught by police, according to an
inspector involved in the case.
The
paramilitary Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), which has a
total of 95,000 personnel under civilian rather than military control and a
$785 million budget, is supposed to keep all these nuclear materials from
leaking from India’s plants. But it is short-staffed, ill-equipped and
inadequately trained, according to a confidential draft Home Ministry report about the force’s future, dated
November 2013, seen by the CPI.
“Weapons supply is down by 40 percent, and training equipment by
more than 45 percent,” compared with what officials running the force had
sought, the report stated. Its size should be 20 percent larger, it added.
“Morale is low as security levels remain high.... There is a danger of the
force falling behind in terms of its level of equipment and also competence.”
A former three-star Indian Police Service officer, who ran a large
Indian force under the Home Ministry alongside the CISF, said in an interview
that the force’s training, weapons and technical equipment lagged well behind
comparable security forces elsewhere in the world.
“From passive night goggles that cannot see in low light to
outmoded communications equipment that does not work over long distances,
they’re as good as blind and dumb,” said the ex-officer. “The monies promised
two years ago to overhaul it...mostly failed to materialize,” he claimed.
This critical account roughly matches what the U.S. intelligence
community has stated in its annual classified rankings of global nuclear
security risks, based on detailed assessments of safeguards for materials that
could be used in explosives or “dirty bombs” laced with radiation, according to
three current or former senior Obama administration officials.
They said that India’s security practices have repeatedly ranked
lower in these assessments than those of Pakistan and Russia, two countries
with shortcomings that have provoked better-known Western anxieties.
In all the categories of interest to the U.S. intelligence experts
making the rankings—the vetting and monitoring of key security personnel, the
tracking of explosives’ quantities and whereabouts, and the use of sensitive
detectors at nuclear facilities and their portals—the Indians “have got
issues,” a senior official said. (He spoke on condition that he not
be named, due to the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue.)
Cautioning that Washington probably does not know everything that
India has done to protect its facilities because of its obsessive nuclear
secrecy, the official said that according to “what we can see people
doing...they should be doing a lot more.”
He added that it is “pretty clear [they] are not as far along as
the Pakistanis,” explaining that, as with the Russians,
Indians’ confidence in being able to manage security challenges by
themselves has repeatedly closed them off to foreign advice not only about the
gravity of the threats they face but also about how to deal with them.
When U.S.
officials made their first visit to the restricted Bhabha Atomic Research Center
(BARC) in Mumbai, a complex where India makes plutonium for its nuclear
weapons, their observations about its security practices were not reassuring.
“Security at the site was moderate,” a cable from November 2008, approved by
embassy Chargé d’Affaires Stephen White, told officials in Washington.
Identification checks at the front gate were “quick but not
thorough,” and visitor badges lacked photographs, meaning they were easy to
replicate or pass around. A security unit at the center’s main gate appeared to
be armed with shotguns or semi-automatic Russian-style rifles, the cable noted,
but as the U.S. delegation moved toward the Dhruva reactor, where the
nuclear explosive material is actually produced, there were no “visible
external security systems.”
White’s cable noted that a secondary building where engineering
equipment was stored also had “very little security.” While there was a sentry
post at a nuclear Waste Immobilization Plant that processes radioactive water,
no guards were present, and visitors’ bags were not inspected. No security
cameras were seen inside, White added. The cable was disclosed by WikiLeaks in
2011.
A U.S. nuclear safety official, also on the visit, who still works
in the field and was not authorized to discuss it told the CPI in an
interview that “laborers wandered in and out of the complex, and none of them
wore identification.” He said that “the setup was extraordinarily low-key,
considering the sensitivity,” explaining that guards could not see camera
footage from other locations. There is little evidence that conditions have
changed much since then, officials say.
U.S. and Indian officials also have privately expressed worry
about the security surrounding India’s movement of sensitive nuclear materials
and weaponry.
For example, an industrialist who provides regular private advice
to the current prime minister about domestic and foreign strategic issues said
in an interview that due to India’s poor roads and rail links, “our
nuclear sector is especially vulnerable. How can we safely transport anything,
when we cannot say for certain that it will get to where it should, when it
should.”
The adviser said that as a result, fissile materials in India have
been moved around in unmarked trucks that “look like milk tankers,” without
obvious armed escorts. He called this “urban camouflage,” meant to avoid the
clamor that would ensue if a security convoy attempted to navigate
traffic-choked roads like the one leading from a nuclear fuel fabrication plant
in Hyderabad, in south-central India, to a test center for India’s nuclear
submarines on the coast at Visakhapatnam. An armed convoy, he said, might need
14 hours to traverse that 400-mile distance.
Experts say the movement of the vehicles is tracked by special
devices and communications. But two recently retired scientists from BARC
echoed the adviser’s concern in interviews.
“Using civilian transport is a case of making the best of the
worst. Far better not to be noticed at all, if you cannot control the
environment you’re traveling in,” one said. Western officials have said that
Pakistan uses similar unmarked convoys to move its nuclear materials, without
obvious protections.
Official inquiries into the Mumbai attack in 2008, where
10 Pakistani gunmen laid siege to the city after arriving at night by
boat, showed that nuclear installations close to the city were staked out as
potential targets before the terrorists settled upon a Jewish center, a railway
station and two five-star hotels.
But to date, most of the troubling incidents at nuclear facilities
in India have involved insiders, making the presence of aberrant employees the
most tangible threat and the focus of intensive government efforts, according
to a presentation made by Indian experts at a U.S. National Academy of Sciences
workshop on nuclear security in Bangalore in 2012.
They said that CISF forces assigned to protect India’s nuclear
materials get extra training and are rotated regularly among such sites,
possibly to deter corruption. Ranajit Kumar, the head of the Bhabha center’s
physical protection system section, told the workshop that anyone who takes a
new assignment on any classified project is supposed to undergo a new
background check.
But an internal government report about the shooting in Kalpakkam,
drafted by officials in the Home Ministry and dated December 2014, warned
that many warning signs about Vijay Singh, the perpetrator, were ignored.
It said that despite having an explosive temper and telling a
doctor he was suffering from stress and exhaustion—problems that forced
his withdrawal from weapons duties—Singh was promoted to the rank of head
constable due to staff shortages and sent to Kalpakkam from another
nuclear installation without any psychological assessment or records recounting
his problematic behavior.
At his new posting, he was given access to a submachine gun even
though colleagues considered him unwell, as they told investigators later. He
complained of being picked on by another head constable, and as the Diwali
festival approached in October, he asked for leave to visit his family. He was
refused and instead ordered to serve overtime, due to a public call by
Al-Qaeda’s leader to “raise the flag of jihad” across South Asia by targeting
sensitive sites in India.
When the CISF officer’s final bid for leave was turned down, he
told a colleague that “he would burst like a firecracker,” a colleague told
police, in a witness statement seen by the CPI. One day later, he did.
Similar lapses had occurred seven years earlier when an employee
at the Kaiga nuclear reactor deliberately poisoned several others, subjecting
them to a radiation dose 150 times that in a chest X-ray.
A report completed in December 2009 by the plant’s operator, seen
by the CPI, pointed to failures in technical monitoring as well as a “human
reliability program” that was “ineffective if not misconceived” by the plant
operator. Security cameras were not fixed on the key areas of the installation,
and some were immobile and incapable of operating in the dark. It said that the
contamination was “an act of deliberate sabotage,” and that the perpetrator had
eluded detection and capture due to numerous security lapses.
Asked about these matters by the CPI, India’s Atomic Energy
Commission declined to reply, following its usual habit of rebuffing inquiries
about sensitive, nuclear-related matters. The Atomic Energy Regulatory
Board initially pledged to offer responses but then declined, as did the
Home Ministry, which oversees the CISF.
Since November 30, 2001, when the CIA began investigating rumors
that Al-Qaeda was trying to obtain nuclear materials or finished weapons to be
used against the West, the U.S. government has campaigned around the
globe—sometimes unsuccessfully—for heightened vigilance in India and other
countries with substantial stockpiles of explosive materials.
According
to the International Panel on Fissile
Materials, an independent nonprofit, India’s stockpile of about 2.4
metric tons of highly enriched (weapons-usable) uranium puts it at fifth
place among all nations, and its stock of approximately 0.54 metric tons of
separated (weapons-usable) plutonium puts it at ninth place. But its security
practices put it even higher on the list of Western anxieties.
For
example, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit in
Washington, reported last year that India’s nuclear security practices ranked
23rd among 25 countries that possess at least a bomb’s worth of fissile
materials. Only Iran and North Korea fared worse in the analysis, which noted
that India’s stockpiles are growing and said the country’s nuclear regulator
lacked independence from political interference and adequate authority.
It said the risks stemmed in part from India’s culture of
widespread corruption—which helped force the nation’s ruling Congress Party
from power in May 2014—as well as its general political instability.
“Weaknesses are particularly apparent in the areas of transport security,
material control, and accounting and measures to protect against the insider
threat, such as personnel vetting and mandatory reporting of suspicious
behavior,” the group’s report stated.
But India has rebuffed repeated offers of U.S. help. Gary Samore,
President Barack Obama’s coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass
destruction from 2009 to 2013, said that at preparatory meetings for
international summits on nuclear security in 2010 and 2012, “we kept offering
to create a joint security project [with India] consisting of assistance of any
and every kind. And every time they would say, to my face, that this was a
wonderful idea and they should grasp the opportunity. And then, when they
returned to India, we would never hear about it again.”
India
also refused to collaborate with the NTI project by sharing or confirming
information about its practices, unlike 17 of the other 24 countries in the
study. India responded ferociously to its conclusions, according to a
researcher connected to the project, who was not sanctioned to talk about it.
Officials at the Indian Atomic Energy Commission verbally attacked Ted Turner and Sam
Nunn, the NTI’s founders, in conversations with Indian journalists, the
researcher said.
In
countries such as India that are resistant to hearing direct U.S. advice, the
Obama administration has tried what an official referred to as a
“work-around”—the creation of training centers around the globe where Western
experts working in collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency can encourage better safeguards.
Twenty-three such centers, deliberately named Nuclear Security Centers of
Excellence in a bid to get local buy-in, have been created so far.
The Indians “are happy to be in a place to have a conversation
about nuclear security that is not judgmental,” a senior Energy Department official
said, explaining the concept behind placing such a center in India. But
internal U.S. government cables asserted several years ago that while India
initially seemed to embrace the idea, it eventually rejected it, to
Washington’s surprise.
In a February 22, 2010, cable disclosed later by WikiLeaks,
then-U.S. Ambassador Timothy Roemer said that instead of focusing on nuclear
security, India finally decided to set up “a research and development center
dedicated to the world-wide deployment of [nuclear reactor] technologies” that
the country likes but experts in Washington consider dangerous, on the
grounds that they could contribute to the use and spread of nuclear-explosive
materials.
The center “would be an Indian government body, staffed by the
[Department of Atomic Energy], whose primary focus was research and
development” on new reactors, Roemer wrote. This approach “did not fully meet
the U.S. vision,” he added.
India
subsequently renamed the facility its Global Centre for Nuclear Energy Partnership, and it began
limited operations last year with closed workshops on the physical protection
of nuclear materials and facilities scheduled alongside nuclear advocacy
seminars titled “Splitting Atoms for Prosperity” and “Atoms for Progress.”
Despite the celebration of close U.S.-Indian ties during Obama’s
visit to Delhi in January, “there is still no deep technical relationship”
between the two countries on nuclear security issues, a White House official
conceded in a recent interview, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We only
hope that this will slowly change.”
At the
moment, India is seeking three favors from Washington: It wants U.S. help to
gain membership in the Missile Technology Control Regime, an international forum
meant to limit the spread of nuclear-tipped missiles, which would give it
access to certain otherwise restricted foreign space-launch
technologies. And it wants to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group, composed of nations that agree to
respect nonproliferation rules when they trade in nuclear-related technologies.
Both ambitions reflect India’s desire to be accorded the status of a major
world power, U.S. experts say.
It also wants to acquire U.S. defense technologies by co-producing
weapons systems in India with key Pentagon contractors—an issue discussed
between Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Indian Defense Minister Manohar
Parrikar during the minister’s weeklong visit to Washington this past December.
But the Obama administration decided not to use these issues as
leverage to force better security measures for nuclear explosives, the senior
U.S. official said, because of its judgment that doing so would only prompt
India to walk away.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former senior U.S.
nonproliferation official said this was a mistake. Washington, he said, “has
allowed itself to be put into the position of not wanting to displease India
for fear of putting things off-track” in its new, warming relationship, and it
has wrongly “allowed the Indians to wall off things they are not interested in
talking about” while its ties to the United States grow.
An official in Britain’s Foreign Office, who also spoke on
condition of anonymity, expressed a more jaundiced view of this reluctance to
press Delhi harder.
“Nothing can be allowed to get in the way of investment in the
capacious Indian market,” he said, describing the current American mindset.
“India has effectively bought itself breathing space, over a lot of concerning
issues, especially nuclear security, by opening itself up for the first time to
significant trades with the U.S. and Europe.” The financial gains, he said, are
“eye-watering.”
According to the U.S. Commerce Department, trade with India grew
from $19 billion in 2000 to more than $100 billion in 2014. U.S. exports
exceeded $38 billion—including substantial new U.S. arms shipments—supporting
181,000 U.S. jobs. Indian direct investment in the United States totaled $7.8
billion, while U.S. investments reached $28 billion.
Washington, the British official explained, does not wish to
provoke a spat over nuclear security simply because doing so could threaten
this lucrative trade, which benefits many U.S. companies.
R. Jeffrey Smith reported from Washington,
D.C., and California. Adrian Levy is an investigative reporter and filmmaker. His most recent
books are The Meadow, about a 1995 terrorist kidnapping of Westerners in
Kashmir, and The Siege: The Attack on the
Taj, about
the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. He reported from India and the United
Kingdom.
