Strategic nuclear command being put in place: Lt Gen Joshi
Press Trust of India Posted online: Monday, September 30, 2002 at 1614 hours IST
New Delhi, September 30: Declaring that the setting up of the country's Strategic Nuclear Command was on the anvil, the Chief of the newly-set up Integrated Defence Staff, Lt Gen P.C. Joshi said all nuclear and missile assets including Air, Land and Sea launched weapons, would be under its operational control.
"All the country's nuclear weapons and delivery system whether a nuclear bomb carrying Aircraft or land-based as well as sea-based missiles, when developed, would come under the umbrella of the new command", he told newsmen on the completion of the first-year of the Integrated Defence Staff set up.
While saying that a proposal for appointing a Chief of the Defence Staff as an operational head of the three services was beyond his purview, the Chief of the Integrated Defence staff, whose set up was supposed to be a forerunner for the naming of a full time CDS, said he was not aware of the progress on the front.
Disclosing that the country's first ever Tri-service, command set up recently on the Andaman island, was being treated by the Government as "Laboratory experience", Joshi said that the authorities would review the working of the idea by year 2005 and then formulate whether or not to go ahead with replicating the experiment.
Gen Joshi said a high level Tri-Service committee on revamping defence training institutions had submitted its report and this would be considerded by the Chairman Chiefs of Staff Committee, Gen S Padmanabhan.
Asserting that the concept of joint training of officers and personnel was catching on, Joshi said the Chairman of the Chiefs of staff committee would look into how many of the services' training commands and institutions should be merged under the new CIDS set up.
While saying that he wes not aware of the proposals submitted by the Tri-Service committee, he said that he felt that in a large number of training institutions staff could be reduced and some done away entirely.
On repeated queries on when the CDS appointment could come about or whether the proposal had been shelved, Joshi said though the Group of Ministers who had gone into Kargil committee findings had opted for setting up of such a unified command, it was for the Government to take a final decision on this.
As far as his Integrated Defence Staff set up was concerned, he made it clear that the newly raised organisation was more or less set up to be a single-window think tank of the defence policy makers tasked to provide strategic inputs on operations, intelligence, organisational matters, training and strategic vision.
Joshi said the tasks that the integrated Defence staff was occupied with were to form the long term strategic perespective planning for the services, chalk out short five year plans and pursue the acqusition plans of the three services.
"CIDS is tasked to ensure that acquisition plans of the three services follow and integrated plan rather than indiviual strategy and present this report to the Defence acqusition council headed by the Defence Minister", he said.
