The DRDO Chairman’s declaration at the ANI National Security Summit that India is “ready whenever the government gives us the go-ahead” was, in diplomatic terms, a public unveiling of ambition. The Agni-VI, if developed as described, would be a four-stage, solid-fuelled ICBM equipped with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs), manoeuvrable warheads designed to evade missile defence systems.
It would have a range that brings not just Beijing and Islamabad within striking distance but also Moscow and, at the far edge of its operational envelope, the continental United States. That this ambition is now technically credible owes considerably to Mission Divyastra, India’s first successful MIRV flight test conducted in March 2024, and reaffirmed just days ago with a further successful test-fire of the Advanced Agni missile under the same programme from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island, Odisha, in which a single platform once again dispensed multiple warheads across distinct targets. Taken together, these successive demonstrations signal not an experimental foray but a maturing capability moving steadily toward operational deployment.
“Ask Indian strategists why they need a missile of 12,000 kilometres range and they will offer a reasonable-sounding answer: China”
The exercises validated the complex warhead separation sequencing and precision guidance architecture that independently targetable re-entry vehicles require, furnishing the essential engineering foundation upon which the Agni-VI’s multi-warhead capability is intended to be constructed. The system is further expected to employ a canisterised launch configuration, already operationalised on the Agni-V, which permits stop-and-go mobility across dispersed road-mobile or rail-mobile platforms and significantly compresses the interval between a deployment order and launch.
Proponents contend that canisterisation is constitutive of, rather than merely complementary to, a credible No-First-Use posture, insofar as it guarantees a survivable retaliatory force capable of absorbing an adversary’s first strike before delivering an assured punitive response. The programme’s strategic ambitions are not confined to land-based delivery alone. Reports indicate that a submarine-launched variant, commonly designated the K-6, is under concurrent consideration, a development that would complete India’s nuclear triad with an intercontinental sea-based deterrent and confer upon its second-strike capability a degree of survivability that no land-based system, however mobile, can fully replicate.
Ask Indian strategists why they need a missile of 12,000 kilometres range and they will offer a reasonable-sounding answer: China. Beijing is expanding its nuclear arsenal at a pace that alarms New Delhi, from roughly 600 warheads today to an estimated 1,500 by 2035. China’s DF-41 ICBMs already reach 12,000 kilometres, and its nuclear silo fields in Xinjiang sit to the north of Indian territory. India, the argument proceeds, requires survivable second-strike reach against China’s eastern coastline even in the event that its own launch sites are struck first. But from a South Asian security perspective, the Agni-VI could be characterized as a “global hazard” on the grounds that a range of this magnitude materially exceeds what regional deterrence against China demands and signals a deliberate shift toward offensive realism rather than the defensive sufficiency that minimum deterrence doctrine ostensibly prescribes. Framed in India’s own terms, the Agni-VI is merely defensive arithmetic. Examined against the full geometry of its range, payload, and naval ambitions, the arithmetic looks considerably more expansive.
But this reasoning, however internally coherent on its own terms, collapses the moment one zooms out from the bilateral regional equation to the broader strategic environment in which it is embedded.
Range is not neutral
A missile with a range of 12,000 kilometres cannot be credibly characterised as a tailored deterrent calibrated against a proximate border rival. By any objective measure of reach and payload, it constitutes a global-class weapon. The Agni series itself traces an instructive developmental trajectory: conceived initially as a response to Pakistan’s nuclear posture, it subsequently expanded its targeting calculus to encompass China. The Agni-VI represents a qualitative departure from this regional logic altogether, positioning India within a category of near-global strike capability that has historically been the exclusive preserve of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. That this convergence is deliberate rather than incidental is difficult to contest on the available evidence.
India’s own strategic community has been candid on this point. Analysts and former senior military officials have argued openly that ICBM development is justified, at least in part, on grounds of great-power status and prestige. Former Chief of Air Staff Marshal Pradeep Naik contended as early as 2011 that India ought to pursue missile ranges of 10,000 kilometres or beyond. Read in this light, the Agni-VI functions less as a deterrent instrument in the classical sense than as a credential, representing India’s formal application for membership in the most restrictive and consequential tier of global military power.
The non-proliferation regime, as currently constituted, offers no adequate institutional response to this trajectory. India declined to accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, conducted its nuclear weapons tests in 1998, absorbed a period of international sanctions, and subsequently received from the United States a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation agreement in 2008 that effectively conferred legitimacy upon India’s nuclear status outside the NPT framework. The normative signal transmitted to other aspiring nuclear states was unambiguous: sufficient economic weight, strategic utility, and geopolitical scale render the established rules negotiable rather than binding.
The triangular trap
But here is where the Agni-VI ceases to be merely India’s business and becomes a regional catastrophe in slow motion.
India insists its missile modernization is aimed at China. Pakistan cannot afford to believe it. No Pakistani strategic planner, watching India deploy MIRVed ICBMs, can responsibly assume those warheads are not also calibrated for Rawalpindi and Karachi. The result is a triangular action-reaction dynamic that has no floor: China expands, India responds, Pakistan escalates, and each step is dressed in the language of minimum deterrence, even as the arsenals grow.
Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine, unlike India’s, carries no No-First-Use commitment. It explicitly reserves the right to first use against overwhelming conventional force. In an environment where India is deploying missiles with ten warheads and maneuverable re-entry vehicles designed to defeat Pakistani countermeasures, the pressure on Islamabad’s nuclear planners to lower their threshold rather than raise it is immense. The Agni-VI does not make South Asia more stable. It makes every crisis more combustible.
This situation could also be linked to the arms control failure between US-Russia. As it will have China less reasons to cap its expansion, which will in turn drive Indian missile advances, which will fuel Pakistani ones. The Agni-VI sits at the end of this chain, yet it also feeds back into it.
The accountability vacuum
What is most striking about the Agni-VI’s development is not the missile itself but the silence surrounding it. There are no formal negotiations. No multilateral forum. No arms control treaty that governs this. India is not a signatory to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, nor bound by any bilateral agreement limiting its missile ranges. The Missile Technology Control Regime, which restricts the spread of delivery systems capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction, has never applied to India’s indigenous programme in any meaningful way.
In other words, a country is preparing to deploy a weapon capable of reaching most of the inhabited world, carrying up to ten nuclear warheads, with manoeuvring capability designed to defeat missile defence systems, and there is no international instrument that even requires India to explain itself.
It is the failure of an arms control order that was designed for a bipolar Cold War world and has never been seriously updated for a multipolar nuclear reality. The Nuclear Suppliers Group gave India preferential treatment. The P5 process has stalled. The NPT review conferences have become rituals of mutual recrimination. And into that vacuum, every emerging nuclear power draws its own conclusions.
What should concern the world?
The Agni-VI’s most dangerous quality is not its range. It is the precedent.
If India can develop a 12,000 km ICBM with MIRV capability outside any accountability framework, deploy it under a nominal “credible minimum deterrence” doctrine that bears increasingly little resemblance to minimum or credible, and face no meaningful international consequence, then the question is not what India will do next. The question is who will follow, and on what timeline.
The global non-proliferation order is not being shattered by rogue states in defiance of the international community. It is being quietly hollowed out by states that operate within the community while systematically expanding capabilities the community’s instruments were designed to prevent. India is not alone in this, but the Agni-VI is a particularly clear illustration of how it works.
A missile that can reach anywhere on earth, built by a country answerable to no nuclear treaty, in a region with three nuclear-armed states and no crisis communication architecture worth the name, should not be discussed primarily as a question of Indian strategic doctrine. It should be discussed as a question of whether the world’s arms control institutions are serious or merely decorative.
The answer, so far, appears to be the latter.
