Russia agrees to lease another nuclear attack submarine to India

Russia has quietly agreed to lease out a second nuclear attack submarine of the Akula class to India this month in a deal worth around $2 billion. The lease of the first Akula-class submarine that the Indian Navy calls INS Chakra expires in 2021.

Updated on: Oct 19, 2016, 09:55:52 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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Russia has quietly agreed to lease out a second nuclear attack submarine of the Akula class to India this month in a deal worth around $2 billion. The lease of the first Akula-class submarine that the Indian Navy calls INS Chakra expires in 2021.

Russia has quietly agreed to lease out a second nuclear attack submarine of the Akula class to India this month. (HT File Photo)

The lease deal for the second nuclear submarine was finalised at a summit-level meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The attack submarine will arrive in Indian waters in 2020-21. The decision to acquire a second Russian nuclear submarine on lease was taken after India’s first indigenously built nuclear submarine INS Arihant was quietly commissioned days before the September 18 Uri terrorist attack. The 6,000-tonne indigenous nuclear submarine that can fire nuclear ballistic missiles up to a range of 3,500- km was commissioned in secret even as Pakistan Defence Minister Khwaja Asif was invoking in public the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against India.

The Akula-class submarine is nuclear powered but is armed with conventional land attack missiles. The Arihant, however, is part of India’s nuclear triad with Agni V missiles and aircraft-delivered nukes making up the other two legs. Given the sharp variation of temperatures with depth in Indian waters, the difficulty of detecting the Arihant makes it a potent weapon.

It is understood that Arihant has already been operationally deployed. The second indigenous nuclear submarine of the same class, INS Aridhaman, will slip into the water in 2018. Powered by an 83 MW miniaturized reactor which went critical on August 10, 2013, the Arihant had to undergo extensive diving and missile firing trials.

Pakistan does not have a nuclear submarine, and thus lacks a nuclear triad. China has four nuclear-powered submarines in operation, a number that will go up to six in a couple of years. China’s N-subs carry a version of the Dong Feng nuclear missile that has a range of up to 7,000 km.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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