The Indian Navy «revealed» the movement of its nuclear weapons through a yoga picture on Instagram

The Indian Navy has been integrating yoga into its training practices for decades, and recently began offering classes on board its warships — simultaneously flaunting the pictures on Instagram and thus revealing the movement of secret nuclear weapons.

Posts in detail studied The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which, among other things, monitors the world’s nuclear capabilities, found that such images, for example, indicate that one of India’s oldest nuclear-capable naval missiles may have been decommissioned.

For 15 years, the Indian Navy has used only two warships that were specially configured to launch Dhanush nuclear missiles.

Dhanush — this is a variant of India’s short-range ballistic missile Prithvi. Its relatively short range and liquid-fueled design means that it must be refueled just before launch, so the Dhanush’s utility as a strategic deterrent was very limited. Ships carrying these missiles would have to sail dangerously close to the coasts of Pakistan or China to target sites, making them highly vulnerable to counterattacks.

For years, India’s Dhanush missiles have been carried by two specially configured Sukanya-class naval patrol vessels known as INS Subhadra (hull number P51) and INS Suvarna (P52), and they were most clearly distinguished from four other Indian patrol vessels of a similar class by the presence of missile stabilizers on their aft decks, which are clearly visible on satellite imagery, including this image from April 2018:

Over the next few years, Dhanush activity was mentioned in several posts on the Indian Navy’s official Facebook account, and the carrier ships could be seen on later satellite images. But the FAS suspected that the missiles might have been eliminated in favor of more modern and powerful weapons.

The scientists’ speculation was reinforced by a series of Instagram posts where a local public broadcaster posted a yoga workout for the military during visits to the Seychelles port in October 2022. The INS Suvarna had new markings indicating that the missile stabilizers had been removed from the ship no later than December 2021, and since then the ship had been unable to launch Dhanush ballistic missiles.

At the same time that the crew of INS Suvarna was practicing yoga in the Seychelles, a satellite image taken by Maxar Technologies showed a second Sukanya-class patrol vessel at the Karwar naval base with an aft deck under construction, and a subsequent satellite image in 2023 showed a new pattern on it, indicating that the deck was being used as a helicopter landing platform.

This same unique deck pattern was fully displayed in another yoga session in the Seychelles during the INS Subhadra’s port visit in February 2024, ultimately confirming researchers’ speculation that the ship had lost its ability to deliver Dhanush nuclear missiles.

For many years, researchers have speculated that the current system would be eliminated as soon as new nuclear deterrents became available. And judging by all these photos, the time for replacement has come: the Indian ballistic missile submarine INS Arighat is likely to be commissioned by the end of 2024. Two more ballistic missile submarines will be launched during this decade, and satellite images show that they will be able to carry twice as many missiles as India’s first two vessels.