Late last month, India added a second nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarine to its fleet. The government claims this improves India’s nuclear deterrence as New Delhi looks wary of both China and Pakistan.
But as the People’s Liberation Army expands its navy and its air and ground capabilities amid simmering tensions along their shared border, India is still lagging behind, at least in comparison to China.
During an August 29 commissioning ceremony at Visakhapatnam naval base, the headquarters of India’s Eastern Naval Command on the Bay of Bengal coast, Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh stated that the nuclear-powered sub, INS Arighaat, or “Destroyer of the Enemy” in Sanskrit, will “help in establishing strategic balance” in the region.
That balance currently tilts in favor of China, with the world’s largest navy by numbers, including six operational Jin-class nuclear-powered ballistic submarines that outclass India’s two – Arighaat and its predecessor in the same class, INS Arihant – in firepower.
The Chinese subs can carry a dozen ballistic missiles with ranges of at least 8,000 kilometers (4,970 miles) and have the ability to carry multiple nuclear warheads, according to the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a non-profit organization promoting the development and deployment of missile defense for the United States and its allies. Both 366 feet long with a 6,000-ton displacement, according to an analysis by the open-source intelligence agency Janes, Arighaat and Arihant carry K-15 Sagarika ballistic missiles that can be launched from four vertical launch tubes. But the range of the nuclear-tipped K-15 is thought to be only around 750 kilometers (466 miles), limiting the targets that can be struck from the Indian Ocean.
“The INS Arihant-class can barely reach Chinese targets along the eastern Sino-Indian border from the coastal waters of northern Bay of Bengal, which is dangerously shallow for a submarine,” said analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.
The de facto border between India and China, known as the Line of Actual Control, has been a longtime flashpoint between the two. Troops most recently clashed there in 2022 and in 2020, when hand-to-hand fighting between the two sides resulted in the deaths of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in Aksai Chin. Still, a second ballistic missile sub does do something for India’s naval and military psyche, said Tom Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former US Navy submarine commander.
“It is a marker of being a great power,” Shugart said, pointing out that the five members of the United Nations Security Council – the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France – all have nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs. The smallest of those SSBN fleets, those of Britain and France, have four boats each, a number Shugart sees as the minimum for keeping one at sea at all times.
Nuclear-powered submarines are complex machines. When things break and need repairing, or just when regular maintenance is needed, the work can take a month or more. For instance, the US Navy’s Ohio-class SSBNs spend on average 77 days at sea followed by 35 days in port for maintenance, according to the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet.
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