International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation

The Pakistani Ghauri Missile

Ever since the Pakistani government announced in April its having conducted a test of the "Ghauri" missile, 5th in the Hatf series, the debate is not so much on its lethality as its origins. In India, various theories have been floated in this regard. Pakistan claims it is indigenously developed but there are two schools of thought in India. One, attributing its lineage to China, and the other to North Korea.

According to Jasjit Singh of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, "Ghauri is a CSS-5, a highly accurate weapon, which the Chinese themselves stopped producing some years ago but which has now made its appearance in Pakistan. Nobody had heard of Pakistan developing a missile with a 1500 km range. Its pedigree is not certain. It is not indigenous. That is certain." Singh's argument is strengthened by the fact that China supplied the M-11 (the so called, Hatf- 3) missile variant to Pakistan. It is well known that 50 km west of Islamabad a factory built with Chinese assistance at Fatehjung is said to have manufactured the guidance and control system and solid fuel for the M-11 (Hatf-3) missile variant.

The second school of thought is represented by the analysis conducted by S. Chandrasekhar, a former scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and now a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Chandrasekhar attributes Ghauri's origin to North Korea. He claims that it is a version of the Nodong I missile. Chandrashekhar has gone into the technicalities of the missile and investigated Dawn's report that the missile weighed 16 tonnes, of which 13 tonnes was fuel. Dawn also reported that Ghauri had a one tonne warhead. Chandrasekhar argues that a solid propellant missile with these characteristics would not give Ghauri a 1500 km range. "If Ghauri, like Nodong, had a Scud lineage or four Scud engines clustered together, then it could be using a propellant combination of UDMH (unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine) and nitric acid, which would give around 235 seconds impulse", he adds. Therefore, the missile could not go beyond 950 km. For Chandrashekhar, Ghauri is a single-stage liquid fuel propelled vehicle.[...]

Whether the transfer constitutes an MTCR violation, and whether Ghauri has a 1500 km range with a 700 kg payload, and has been built indigenously, are matters that analysts want answers to. In the meantime, what is important is that India will have to compete with the missile technologies of China and North Korea. Sooner or later, the transfer of missiles to Pakistan would erode India's technological superiority vis-a-vis the former.

Excerpts from: Ghauri Missile : What Variant Is It Anyway? by Ashutosh Misra, Research Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (Source: www.ipcs.org/issues/articles/090-sas-ashtosh.html).