India Has Fissile Material To Develop Only 100 Nuclear Warheads

India can build not more than 100 nuclear weapons as it has fissile material only for that many numbers of weapons.

In a research published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), scholar Elizabeth Whitfield denied Pakistani analyst’s claim of India stockpiling 2000 nuclear weapons.

She said, “Publicly available information nowhere takes the math that India can build 2,000 nuclear weapons.

Pakistani news daily Dawn in September 2015 had reported that India possessed "enough fissile material....for more than 2,000 warheads," PTI reported April 22. The report came after a meeting of the Pakistans National Command Authority.

"What is the most plausible estimate of India’s fissile material stockpile and the number of nuclear weapons that it could build? After discounting unseparated plutonium in spent fuel as a source of proliferation in the near future, even (Mansoor) Ahmed’s (Pakistani nuclear analyst) generous estimate from the South Asian Voices blog post is only equivalent to a potential Indian arsenal of 844 nuclear warheads a significant number to be sure, but nowhere near 2,000 weapons," Whitfield said.

"If one discounts reactor-grade plutonium entirely, that estimate drops even further to an arsenal of just 219 weapons," she wrote.

It is also clear that some of Indias weapons-grade plutonium was already used in nuclear tests or is contained in process waste, she added.

"Taking into account those factors, the estimate quickly begins to drop to something much more along the lines of the ISIS estimate of roughly 100 nuclear warheads," Whitfield said.