Online pictures highlight nuclear race

India's Thar desert test site assesses the country's nuclear potential

The US pressure group Federation of American Scientists (FAS) have put more photographs of nuclear weapons facilties on the internet.

In March, FAS published pictures of Pakistani nuclear installations.

Now it has added pictures of Indian weapons research establishments and more pictures of Pakistani facilities.

FAS director John Pike said that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review Conference currently under way at the UN in New York had failed to come to grips with these countries' nuclear ambitions.

Nuclear potential

The new pictures show the Hyderabad Defence Research Complex at Kanchanbagh in India.

Fas says that the Agni rocket could be equipped with nuclear warheads

FAS says it develops and tests the new Agni-II missile and the short-range Prithvi missiles, both of which could be equipped with nuclear warheads.

Other institutions and factories in the Hyderabad complex provide materials and support for the main research and development centre.

FAS says satellite images reveal that India has recently expanded a storage area that is almost certainly devoted to rocket propellant and fuel assemblies for these missile systems.

The FAS site includes new photographs of the Kahuta uranium enrichment complex in Pakistan, which, the group says, reveal significant additions in the last 10 years.

"Pakistan has laid the groundwork for a force of dozens of nuclear-tipped missiles capable of striking Indian cities and military bases," said Mr Pike.

FAS is also publishing older photographs of Israel's Dimona facility, which it says houses an installation for processing spent fuel to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

Commercial satellites

Pakistan's nuclear-tipped missiles could hit India

The FAS Public Eye Project uses satellite photographs produced by the Space Imaging Ikonos satellite, which can take pictures nearly as close to the ground as spy satellites do.

Costing around $2,000 per photo, the service makes images of strategic objects more widely available.

Previously they were obtainable only by government employees with security clearances.