India pursues a nuclear doctrine of credible minimum deterrence and a no-first-use (NFU) policy. However, this narrative masks the fact that India’s nuclear programme is the fastest growing in South Asia. India has repeatedly leveraged its civilian nuclear cooperation and technology transfers for its nuclear weapons programme. India’s nuclear programme is also replete with incidents of theft and sale of fissile material, as well as safety and security concerns associated with its nuclear facilities.
During the 1960s, New Delhi covertly diverted fissile material and resources from a civilian nuclear reactor into its weapons programme. David Albright, a physicist and the founding president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), explained in his 1998 article The Shots Heard Round the World, carried by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that the plutonium used in the 1974 explosion was produced and diverted from the Canada-India Reactor Utility Services (CIRUS) nuclear reactor provided by Canada under a 1956 bilateral agreement. The heavy water used in the reactor was supplied by the USA for peaceful purposes.
Enabled by the transfer of technology and fuel supplied explicitly for peaceful uses under the ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative, India detonated a nuclear device, code-named Smiling Buddha, in 1974 at its Pokhran test site. At the time, the Indian leaders described the detonation as a Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) for non-military applications such as earth-moving operations, mining and canal digging. However, in 1997, Dr Raja Ramanna, former Director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), admitted that the Pokhran-I test was indeed a nuclear weapons test and was “not all that peaceful.” India’s diversion of its civilian nuclear programme for weapons development nuclearized the South Asian region and undermined the global non-proliferation efforts. India’s nuclear test of 1974 led to the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in 1975.
In 2007, the US signed a Civil Nuclear Agreement with India, also known as 123 Agreement. India was granted a waiver in 2008 by the NSG. Prior to the waiver, India’s draft separation plan was accepted by IAEA, under which 14 of its 22 operational nuclear power plants were placed under IAEA safeguards, while the remaining eight were kept outside of it.
India’s 14 safeguarded reactors are facilitated and kept operational through bilateral agreements that it has signed with various nuclear supplier countries after receiving the NSG waiver. According to the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), the remaining eight unsafeguarded nuclear reactors provide India with the technical flexibility to divert locally processed fissile material for strategic and military purposes. IPFM also notes that India does not accept safeguards on the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) and the Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR), both located at Kalpakkam. The PFBR alone can produce up to 140 kg of weapons-grade plutonium each year, enough for producing 35 nuclear warheads.
According to data shared by Reaching Critical Will, India’s eight unsafeguarded nuclear reactors have the capacity to produce up to 200 kg of weapons-grade plutonium per year. Considering 4 kg of plutonium per weapon as estimated by IPFM, India can add approximately 50 nuclear warheads annually to its existing nuclear arsenal. In 2017, in a discussion paper for Harvard University’s Belfer Center, Dr Mansoor Ahmed concluded that India had the capacity to produce up to 2,686 nuclear weapons from existing fissile material stocks.
As a result, India’s sizable and growing stockpiles of weapon-grade plutonium and HEU underpin its ever-expanding nuclear weapons programme and form the basis of its position on the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) in the Conference on Disarmament (CD). India opposes the Fissile Material Treaty (FMT) that aims to include existing stockpiles of fissile material in addition to the cut-off of future production. India however supports FMCT to freeze the existing asymmetries in its favor.
According to the 2024 assessment by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), India currently possesses an estimated 700 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium and approximately 5.3 tons of weapons-grade Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU). The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Yearbook 2025 estimated that India’s nuclear arsenal increased from 164 in 2023 and 172 warheads in 2024 to 180 in 2025. The report by SIPRI also highlights that India’s stockpile growth remains embedded in a complex and only partially safeguarded infrastructure, which complicates credible international verification. This persistent ambiguity raises questions about the effectiveness of existing safeguards in ensuring that nuclear fuel supplied for civilian purposes does not enable expansion of India’s weapons programme.
The Cold War alignment also contributed to India’s latent nuclear capabilities. India’s nuclear submarine programme benefitted significantly from strategic cooperation with the former USSR. In 1988, India leased a Soviet Charlie-class nuclear-powered submarine (K-43), which operated as INS Chakra until 1991. Subsequently in 2012, India leased an Akula-class nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) from Russia under similar arrangements. Although these transfers were framed as training exercises for the Indian Navy, they arguably contravened the spirit of global non-proliferation norms by enabling India to accelerate its indigenous nuclear naval capability without full transparency or international oversight.
Despite India’s eight nuclear reactors that remain outside IAEA safeguards and its history of diversion of nuclear technology for weapons development, it continues to receive preferential treatment from the West. The NSG waiver of 2008 permitted New Delhi to engage in international nuclear trade despite its non-signatory status to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This arrangement effectively freed up India’s domestic nuclear fuel for accelerating its weapons programme by fulfilling civilian reactor needs through external supply. The Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement of 2007, further institutionalized this dual pathway by not mandating full-scope safeguards on India’s entire nuclear complex.
Serious concerns have also emerged regarding India’s internal nuclear safety and security architecture. According to the NTI Nuclear Security Index 2024, India ranks near the bottom, 20th out of 22 states with regard to safety and security of weapons-usable nuclear material. It gave India a score of 40 out of 100, indicating systemic weaknesses in India’s nuclear security regime.
The NTI Global Incidents and Trafficking Database, maintained in collaboration with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), has recorded over 20 incidents of theft, loss or attempted illicit sale of nuclear and radioactive material in India since 1994. Notably, the August 2024 seizure of californium in Bihar worth an estimated $100 million and multiple uranium theft cases reported between 2016 and 2021, involved stolen material from major research facilities such as the BARC.
The recurrence of such incidents of theft raises questions about India’s compliance with international legal frameworks. As a signatory to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and as a state bound by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540, India is obliged to ensure that non-state actors do not have the possibility to access, transfer or misuse nuclear material. Persistent nuclear theft cases risk enabling the fabrication of radiological dispersal devices or “dirty bombs,” posing threat to regional and international peace and security.
Unchecked growth of India’s nuclear infrastructure, coupled with partial safeguards, recurring theft incidents and preferential treatment, undermine the global non-proliferation regime. A coherent response would require Western governments to revisit the exceptionalism underpinning civil nuclear cooperation with India. A credible non-proliferation approach demands rigorous, full-scope safeguards, independent verification of fissile material use, and accountability for lapses in India’s nuclear safety and security mechanisms.
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