India is building a top secret military complex to produce enough enriched uranium for an ambitious thermonuclear weapons program, according to experts.

The facility occupies a vast swath of land in Challakare, in Karnataka province.  The site is so huge analysts have likened it to a city. 

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In a report re-published exclusively by Foreign Policy Magazine, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) says work on the facility began discreetly in 2012.  The non-stock, non-partisan news organization says the complex will be completed by 2017.

Once operational, the facility will be the largest military-run nuclear research and weapons testing complex in the sub-continent, experts say.  A smaller testing facility for the program near Mysore reportedly cost India some $100 million. 

The Challakare complex is more deeply shrouded in secrecy.  Few authorities in India are willing to talk about the project, partly because they do not know much, but also because of India's tough laws on unauthorized disclosure of military secrets. 

"Even for us, details of the Indian program are always sketchy, and thin on the ground," a senior official in Washington told the CPI.     

The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the international body that regulates the sale of nuclear material and technology, voted to allow India to engage in nuclear trade in 2008.  The New York Times reports the vote was largely the result of pressure from the Bush administration. 

Now the facility is said to have become a source of concern for policymakers in the UK and the US.  "Mysore is being constantly monitored," a former White House official said, "and we are constantly monitoring progress at Challakare."

Much of the concern is premised on the possibility that the facility will precipitate a nuclear arms race in the region. India, Pakistan, and China have competing claims in the Kashmir region, which many believe is a potential flashpoint for a much broader conflict.  

"India and Pakistan is a particularly complex area and I think a very dangerous region of the world right now," Joan Rohlfling of the Nuclear Threat Initiative told the BBC in April. "It is believed both of them have arsenals in the range of 100 weapons."

General Balraj Singh Naval, a former commander under India's Nuclear Command Authority, however argues that the most pressing issue for India right now is not Pakistan, but China's growing technological prowess.    

"We have to follow the technology curve," Naval told the CPI. "And where China took it several decades before us with the hydrogen bomb, India has to follow."

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a professed fan of China, and the two countries share warm relations.

"The momentous progress in China-India relations is by no means coincident," Chinese ambassador to India Le Yucheng wrote in an article published recently by the Beijing government. "Rather, it's a natural outcome of the development in both countries and the global configuration."  

How India's top secret facility will ultimately re-shape the balance of power in that same global configuration remains to be seen.

Back in Challakare, work on the sprawling secret complex continues, despite the protestations of ethnic villagers whose cattle herds have been walled off from their pasturelands because of the construction.

Leo Saldanha, a founder of an advocacy organization called Environment Support Group, took up the cause of the villagers in 2012.   But the group has made little progress, the CPI reports.

Saldanha alleges that government agents had earlier warned the group that the prime minister's office is behind the project.

"There is no fighting this, we were told," Saldanha recalls. "You cannot win." 

TagsPakistan, China-India, China India dispute, kashmir, arms race, weapons of mass destruction, Challakare