Science

The physicist David Thouless passed away earlier this month. I confess I didn’t know much about him or his work until he won a part of the Nobel Prize for physics in 2016. After that, I read up about his work and had my mind blown, mostly motivated by a phenomenon in condensed-matter physics called BKT transitions, where the ‘T’ stands for Thouless, as well as his contributions to our understanding of superconductivity. I’ve explained BKT transitions before (here), fairly simple to understand. I admired that Thouless was an imaginative physicist with the confidence to admit uncertainty and the conviction to consider possibilities that others might have thought crazy. His biography on the Nobel Prize website is very informative. Gautam Menon at Asoka University recently shared the following nugget on his Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/gautam.menon.758/posts/2270075846644416

Reading this, I remember thinking that the 2016 Nobel Prizes chemistry were also particularly interesting, enough for me to temporarily set aside my issues with this quasi-institution. The physics prize went to three men who used deceptively simple ideas from geometry to explain quantum phase transitions. The chemistry prize went to three men who built nano-machines by assembling individual molecules in intricate ways. (And the literature prize went to Bob Dylan.) And like Thouless’s experience at his university narrated above, one of the chemistry laureates had a tough time as well.

J. Fraser Stoddart, who won a share of the chemistry prize for synthesising molecules linked like chain-links and for building a ‘molecular shuttle’, wrote an essay in 2005 that I can’t seem to find now, probably because the website it was hosted on was revamped after he won the prize and the URL was changed as a result. However, I’d quoted some portions of it in my article in The Wire, excerpted below:

In an autobiographical essay written in 2005, Stoddart outlines the way his brand of chemistry research evolved – had to evolve – for scientists to get to molecular machines. … [He] writes how one phase of his work began in 1981 at Sheffield University when he wanted to improve the performance of a herbicide and ended with his entry into molecular electronics – on the way synthesising machines called catenanes and rotaxanes.

A short time later, Jean-Pierre Sauvage and his lab at the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, France, were able to show that there existed a simpler way of synthesising catenanes and rotaxanes en masse. As a result, Stoddart’s lab was able to produce the supramolecules they needed in large quantities as well as build on Sauvage’s method to improve them. This led to a breakthrough in 1991, when Stoddart’s team published a more efficient way to synthesise rotaxanes. And only a year later, the group was involved in the design and construction of bistable mechanical switches – molecules that could exist in two states like ‘on’ or ‘off’ depending on some external conditions.

But in order to get as far, the man had to reinvent himself and seek … international collaborations in the face of much resistance from his colleagues. He wrote, “Any successes, however modest, only seemed to engender envy and resentment amongst some of my senior and influential colleagues who would then go to any lengths to undermine my academic activities.” So in the 1980s, Stoddart started to write to the national press about “the wantonness and waste I witnessed all around me. I questioned the extremely high level of bureaucratic state control that accompanied the hierarchically manipulated allocation of financial and other resources to research in science and engineering in Britain”. … Eventually, he was able to persuade some university administrators to send his grant proposals to be reviewed in the United States. Stoddart’s lab then began actively collaborating with the Americans from around 1984.

However, his tribulations weren’t yet at an end. In the 1990s, Stoddart faced yet more resistance from the wider community of supramolecular chemists who refused to believe that nanoscale machines of the kind Stoddart had helped build could exist. … Though Stoddart doesn’t say he was ridiculed, he does say that “it was in response to a ridiculously high level of skepticism and criticism” that he fell back on the use of less exotic techniques to establish what he had accomplished was legitimate. After that, he was able to set up a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continued to work on building molecular machines into the late 1990s.

But despite these troubles, Stoddart also did not give up on working on what he found interesting, when he could just as easily have staved off the criticism and ill-will by shifting to research on more conventional topics. He concluded the same essay with the following words about the molecules he had synthesised to build the things he had wanted to build:

What will they be good for? Something for sure, and we still have the excitement of finding out what that something might be. And so the story goes on…

In a live address to the nation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India had successfully tested an anti-satellite (ASAT) missile against a live satellite in low-Earth orbit.

Though he didn’t explicitly mention a date, he implied in his 15-minute announcement that the test was conducted today, March 27.

Modi also lauded the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for developing various space-related technologies that benefit society. He added that given India had already established itself as a space power, a demonstration of its military prowess in space was necessary for regional peace.

An FAQ released by the Ministry of External Affairs attested to this: “The test was done to verify that India has the capability to safeguard our space assets.”

These words about peace allude to China’s ASAT test in 2007. In that test, a multistage missile successfully intercepted and destroyed a Chinese weather satellite in a polar orbit, at an altitude of 865 km.

The Indian ASAT test is believed to have destroyed either the Microsat-R or the Microsat-TD satellite, likelier the former according to some sources. They were both built by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). ISRO launched the Microsat-R on January 24 this year and the Microsat-TD a year before that.

Prime Minister Modi declared the test, codenamed Mission Shakti, a success and claimed that an ASAT missile had destroyed the satellite in its low-Earth orbit.

The missile in question is described as a kinetic kill vehicle, which means it does not carry any explosives or other devices. Instead, its ‘kill’ capability arises simply from the fact that it smashes into the target satellite and shatters it using its kinetic energy.

At this altitude, about 300 km, experts said that debris from the collision would fall back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere in a matter of weeks instead of posing a threat to other satellites. As a result, Mission Shakti is called a controlled ASAT test.

In contrast, the Chinese test in 2007 provoked international ire because it destroyed a satellite at a little over 800 km, producing over 14,000 pieces of debris that endangered hundreds of other satellites in its vicinity. The act violated the principles of the Outer Space Treaty.

With this test, India has become the fourth nation in the world with ASAT capabilities, after the US, Russia and China. The US conducted its first such test in 1985 and Russia, in 2015.

The Microsat-R weighs 740 kg and is in a 268 km by 289 km orbit. The Microsat-TD weighs 130 kg and is in a 327 km by 368 km orbit. Both of them are classified as Earth-observation satellites. The lower mass of the TD variant renders it an unfavourable target.

India’s ASAT programme, publicly acknowledged in 2012 when an Agni V missile’s parabolic trajectory took it up to 600 km in space, is subsumed under its Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) programme, responsible for intercepting and destroying ballistic objects before they threaten Indian territories or assets. The BMD has two broadly defined target tiers, called endo-atmospheric and exo-atmospheric. Mission Shakti falls in the exo-atmospheric category.

While more details are awaited from the DRDO, it is possible that the organisation used a modified version of the Agni V missile for the task. In 2012, shortly after testing the Agni V, DRDO’s then chief V.K. Saraswat had said that the missile could be modified for use as an ASAT weapon.

However, LiveFist, a defence publication, reported that the vehicle was “an extended range derivative of the Prithvi Defence Vehicle”, and that it had been launched from “the Integrated Test Range in Odisha”.

In its 2007 test, China used a DF-21 ballistic missile equipped with an infrared seeker.

According to defence experts, the DRDO has had ASAT capabilities for almost a decade, developed under its BMD programme. Saraswat has acknowledged before that the DRDO was ready to perform a test in 2012, and then in 2014, if the Centre gave its go ahead. That it was finally conducted now, weeks ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, suggests Modi’s green-light was more political than strategic.

Depending on the situation, the BMD has two kinds of major targets: foreign missiles and satellites. One observer noted that India had successfully tested its anti-missile capabilities first and then proceeded to work on ASAT capabilities, contrary to China, which completed its ASAT tests first before proceeding to the anti-missile systems.

Even though both vehicles showcase extreme abilities to cause damage, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and ASAT missiles don’t work the same way. One engineer told The Wire that the BDM is more comparable to an ASAT system.

For example, intercepting an ICBM requires three kinds of radar: one each to detect, intercept and fire the rebutting weapon. An incoming ICBM also follows an inherently unpredictable trajectory that requires response systems with very low reaction times.

On the other hand, a satellite in low-Earth orbit follows a predictable trajectory. But that said, satellites at that altitude move at about eight times the speed of sound in the atmosphere, outpacing ICBMs by up to 1 km/s. Third, because of their speed and altitude, the object being sent to strike them needs to be very precisely guided. Even an error so small that an ICBM is not affected by it could throw an ASAT missile off course, potentially towards a different satellite.

Modi also noted in his speech that through Mission Shakti, India had not violated any international law. The most overarching agreement in this context is the Outer Space Treaty, and while it stresses on the peaceful use of outer space, it doesn’t ban exo-atmospheric ASAT missiles either.

ASAT weapons have yet to be used in war. In fact, all countries that have tested them have claimed thus far that they were developing ASAT technology to protect against dysfunctional satellites in uncontrollable descent.

However, it is difficult to see an ASAT missile as an entirely peaceful machine because of the tremendous consequences of its use as well as the sophistication of the underlying technology. For example, the Agni V missile that India tested in 2012 can also be used to quickly launch micro-satellites into low-Earth orbits for wartime reconnaissance. In this situation, keeping ASAT systems ready can allow India to knock enemy microsats down as a countermeasure.

If at all such a threat looms on India’s horizon, it is likely to be from China. One expert said that ASAT missiles are one of the most difficult to develop. They often succeed the development of other technologies, such as satellite launch vehicles, so Pakistan is unlikely to have ASAT capabilities.

The Wire
March 27, 2019

In November 2018, T.V. Ramakrishnan reviewed a book called Modern Atomism, edited by J. Pasupathy and published in 2017, for Current Science. To the uninitiated, TVR is a condensed matter physicist of considerable repute and currently works at the Indian Institute of Science. He won the S.S. Bhatnagar Prize in 1982, the Padma Shri in 2001 and the Trieste Science Prize in 2005. In his review, TVR describes Modern Atomism as accessible but in need of stronger editorial control. In the final third, he also evaluates the book based on Indian scientists it included or left out – mostly left out – and concludes:

… this book is not an appropriate representative of modern atomism in the Indian context, and as such does not sit comfortably in the array of volumes detailing science, philosophy and civilisation in the Indian context.

However, shortly before this sobering judgment, there are a few lines that mention two Indian scientists as famous for their scientific work as for missing out on lasting international recognition (you know which I’m prize I’m talking about): G.N. Ramachandran and E.C.G. Sudarshan. And as you move past them, you expect TVR to climb further up the “forgotten Indian giants” ladder – and why not. It’s useful to remind ourselves of these people, albeit with less self-pity, less jingoism and more unadulterated pride. However, the next rung in TVR’s diatribe is unexpected. He writes:

Much farther afield, two proponents of traditional Indian knowhow (Annie Besant and George Leadbetter) used a yogic siddhi called ‘anima’ acquired by them over decades of practice in India, and claimed that the proton consists of three quarks, nearly half a century before the experimental discovery of the quark constitution of the proton (this is not modern science, but could mark an intriguing connection between other ways of knowing, and modern atomism).

I had to pause for a few minutes when I first read this, buried as I was between a few layers of disbelief. The uppermost layer was of course motivated by the discovery that TVR of all people is spouting this nonsense. As one of the most respected physicists in India, he should have thought twice before writing this. TVR is of course entitled to his opinions – just the way I am to mine. As one of the country’s most respected scientists, his words carry greater import than he might care to acknowledge, and now endorse an idea that all of us can do without.

The second layer pertained to the disbelief that TVR is unable to distinguish between what is a scientific text – as he himself acknowledges as the reviewer – and text that chronicles various historical claims. He does write that Besant’s and Leadbetter’s “work” is “not modern science”, but then why try to shoehorn them in at all? By failing to maintain the distinction science and non-science, TVR has brought Besant/Leadbetter closer to the realm of scientific thinking – at least from the PoV of a non-scientist reader who either doesn’t know better or is looking to validate ill-founded beliefs of their own.

The third layer was that Current Science published this. Some might argue that it’s fair that they let Pasupathy respond at length but that wouldn’t spare what is fundamentally a journal of science and scientific research from the blame of unqualified claims – especially unqualified claims from a highly qualified scientist. (Amazingly, Current Science even failed to notice that the Leadbetter in question was a Charles, not a George.) It’s comforting that Pasupathy saw fit to rebut various other aspects of TVR’s review but to have him respond to the comments about Besant/Leadbetter is a waste of time, a pseudo-debate where there should’ve been none.

Excerpt from Pasupathy’s response:

The discovery of plethora of resonant states of the proton and strange particles was made possible by building high-energy accelerators which then forced physicists to reluctantly invent the quark model in 1964. But the quark model was not taken seriously by everyone till Feynman came up with his parton model in 1969, triggering intense research leading to the theory of gluons and quarks in 1973. … If one can believe that Besant and Leadbetter came up with the quark model using their yogic clairvoyant microscope, we can close all labs and get rid of the expendable theorists. …

Vivekananda attended the Paris Exposition 1900, held to celebrate the achievements of the past century and to accelerate development into the next. To Vivekananda’s deep distress, he found that there was just one Indian scientist, J. C. Bose, among the large number of famous European scientists. During this Paris visit, Vivekananda sent a passionate appeal to Indian youth to shed their superstitions and take to the study of science. Vivekananda disliked theosophy and strongly disapproved closed minds.

The fourth layer was, of course, the lengthening shadow of hopelessness. I’ve no clue what Besant or Leadbetter really did – nor am I interested. But a Google search showed that the most detailed description of their “ESP experiment” was penned by one Stephen Phillips in 1995, and promptly derided by an independent peer-reviewer – also a pseudoscientist! – as speculative and resorting to strawmen. What dark comedy.

Featured image credit: dimitrisvetsikas1969/pixabay.

Did the Indian Air Force strike the various structures at the madrasa in Balakot with lethality sufficient to have caused “heavy casualties”, as foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale told reporters on February 26?

Sections of the Indian media and of course BJP politicians believe it did and have even put a figure on the number of dead terrorists that ranges from 250 to 400. Pakistan has denied any damage or casualties and said the Indian payload landed on a nearby forest. On their part, international analysts have raised doubts about the Indian version based on their reading of pre- and post-airstrike satellite imagery of the madrasa.

While the truth is known to both the Indian and Pakistani governments, neither side appears keen to allow independent verification of its claims. The Pakistani military has prevented reporters from visiting the madrasa while the Indian government has also been circumspect about sharing imagery of the sort the US, Israeli and western air forces routinely release into the public domain.

In this vacuum, different people are resorting to different ways to settle the matter for themselves – including chest-thumping. In this clamour, there is now a debate among ammunition and aviation experts, who are trying to piece together what they know about the bombs the IAF dropped to figure out what might have happened on the ground.

Since World War II, missiles and their warheads have been designed to do things other than just be dropped and blow up. In the Balakot case, virtually the entire Indian media has reported that the IAF dropped 2,ooo-pound (lb ) bombs over the madrassa. This claim, which has never been properly sourced, seems extremely unlikely based on post-airstrike satellite imagery.

It also reinforces the need for authentic, verifiable information about what happened in Balakot. However, with the governments’ silence and campaigns for the national elections gaining momentum in India, it is important to understand what is possible and why, and to keep from getting carried away.

According to media reports, the bombs were delivered using a guidance kit called SPICE, which can convert unguided bombs into guided ones. It is manufactured by Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, an Israeli company, and is used by the Israeli and Indian air forces.

The SPICE 2000, which can carry 2,000 lbs of bombs, is one of India’s most powerful (non-nuclear) air-to-surface weapons, depending on its configuration. And thanks to its precision guidance and long range, such weapons are often used as ‘bunker busters’: devices that can penetrate heavily fortified structures to blow them up from the inside.

At the same time, a bomb weighing 2,000 lbs (907 kg) can effect different kinds of damage on the ground, depending on its own specifications as well as those of the targets.

This forms the crux of the current debate, which takes off from sections of the media sharing higher resolution satellite images than were previously available of the Balakot madrasa after the IAF strike. The images show a clump of small buildings surrounded by a forest. Small dark smudges are visible on the roof of the main structure.

The confusion and uncertainty assailing the wider debate are relevant here. An official Indian statement claimed – before the images were released – that these buildings were a Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) training camp. Journalists who spoke to people living nearby say it is a madrasa and a school linked to the Jaish. Al Jazeera reported that the madrasa was run by the JeM and, according to Reuters, a signboard attesting to this was subsequently removed.

Whatever the purpose of the structure, it looks like a regular brick-and-mortar building. And many have claimed that the dark smudges are evidence of a SPICE bomb (or perhaps four SPICE bombs, since there are four smudges or holes) penetrating the roof’s outer shell to burrow in and kill everyone inside using explosives.

In the face of initial satellite images showing limited damage to the buildings, senior government officials had told reporters that the Pakistani army had been able to go back and put the roofs back on in two days, thus fooling the world that India hit nothing. But with the latest satellite imagery with its smudges on the roof, the briefing given to defence reports has changed. Now, the claim is not that the roofs were replaced but that the smudges/holes still visible on it are actually evidence of India having successfully struck its target.

The latest account of Indian “sources”, however, has been challenged by Western analysts.

George William Herbert, an expert on missile systems, tweeted on March 6 that a 2,000-lb non-penetrator warhead comprises 945 lbs of explosive filling and 1,055 lbs of metal casing. Assuming the filling is made either of tritonal (TNT + aluminium powder) or Composition B (TNT + RDX), the Gurney equation for a cylindrical casing indicates the explosion will set the metal – assumed to weigh 478.5 kg – off at 1.83-2.13 km/s. So if it went off inside a madrasa, the shrapnel would have obliterated the building.

Herbert continued on Twitter, “The thousand pounds of explosive becomes hot gas at over a thousand degrees kelvin, and that’s about 1,000 cubic meters of air equivalent. [This] will approximately double the pressure inside a typical three-story building around 25 meters [wide]” – further contributing to explosive damage.

As a result, the most popular claims that the SPICE 2000 dealt damage on the inside but not on the outside don’t hold up. Forget about Pakistani forces replacing the roof in two days. If a SPICE 2000 with a 2,000-lb bomb had hit the madrasa, they would have had to refill the crater, re-lay the foundation and rebuild the whole structure in two days.

However, Herbert told The Wire he wanted to make it clear that he does not know what actually happened, that he wasn’t proposing any particular theory and was simply clarifying the technical aspects.

Now, this analysis did assume that the warhead on the SPICE 2000 was a non-penetrator Mk 84 (which uses tritonal, Composition H6 or minol for the explosive filling). If it had been a penetrative weapon, most of the weapon’s mass would’ve been contained in the casing so that the weapon can smash through a strong outer layer first.

For example, the BLU-109 is another 2,000-lb bomb that can be used with SPICE guidance kits. As a bunker buster, it can penetrate up to six feet of reinforced concrete with a casing that weighs 634 kg, to deliver a 240-kg payload of tritonal. A BLU-116 weighs the same 874 kg but carries only 109 kg of tritonal filling to be able to penetrate over 10 feet of reinforced concrete.

As Angad Singh, an aviations expert, commented on Twitter, “Depending on effects required at the target (for example, fragmentation) the explosive filling in the bomb could be even less. So there is no hard and fast rule that a 2000-lb class bomb will wipe out half a hillside.”

He also noted that if India’s defence procurement was anything to go by, the SPICE units were likelier to be all-up rounds, where the bomb is already configured and attached to the guidance kit at the time of purchase. However, he told The Wire, “We have no good information on the exact bomb mated to the Indian SPICE munitions,” although it was “not an Mk 84”.

As a result, he said on Twitter, India’s “Spice 2000 [could all be] earmarked for high-value targets” and “that all but guarantees they have low-mass warheads”.

On March 8, the Indian Express quoted an unnamed “top” military officer as saying, “Each warhead used by the IAF to target buildings on the campus of the JeM madrasa at Balakot … had a net explosive quantity (NEQ) of only 70-80 kg of TNT.” This is further indication that a low-mass warhead was used – and it also indicates the kind of warhead that might have been used.

This is because, if the filling was made of a high explosive like tritonal, the Gurney equation poses a problem. The shrapnel from a BLU-109 would still be released at 1.3 km/s and from a BLU-116 at 0.8 km/s. If, say, an NEQ of 80 kg of TNT was used in the BLU-116 configuration, it would still release shrapnel at nearly 1 km/s, and have a range of 14 metres. The madrasa is likely to have received significant damage any which way.

These numbers also hold for all conventional explosives of other kinds – not just bunker busters – as long as they use tritonal, which has a relatively lower Gurney constant of 2.3, similar to TNT, and which have a similar casing-to-filling mass ratio.

Second: considering neither the IAF nor the Government of India have released any official statements about which warhead was used, the radius of possibilities becomes longer.

A second military officer reportedly told the Indian Express:

It is a precision weapon meant to hit specific targets but without any collateral damage. … This time the target was Balakot. If the target was Muzaffarabad instead, which is heavily inhabited and where no collateral damage would be acceptable, we would need to take out the people staying in a particular room without causing any damage to the adjacent room. We have the capacity to do that with this weapon.

Why the IAF wanted to use expensive ordnance that minimised the damage to buildings that were located far away from any population is not clear.

That said, one option that fits the bill is a fuel-air explosive (FAE), which – according to the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) – is “highly effective against soft targets like light vehicles, drop tank, trenches, bunkers and antitank mines”. They use fuels to consume oxygen from the air and burn at over 1,500º C for a long time. They are effective against targets enclosed in inaccessible niches like caves and tunnels.

As a result, the dark smudges in the images could be burn marks from the use of an FAE flown with a SPICE 250 kit – which means the total weight of the weapon was only 113 kg (250 lbs). This mass is close to an FAE developed by the DRDO that can carry 38 kg of propylene oxide and deal damage in a circle of radius 8 metres. If an NEQ of 70 kg of TNT was used, then each FAE could have carried 18-19 kg of propylene oxide, adjusted for the amount of physical damage dealt at 7-9 metres.

This is sufficient to have killed people inside a madrasa-sized structure, and the multiple dark smudges on the roof of the main structure could simply be signs of fire damage. However, there is the overpressure to deal with.

Herbert explained to The Wire that FAEs have a reaction detonation pressure determined by the materials used and how they mix with the air. This is called the Chapman-Jouget detonation pressure (P_CJ). And if the FAE is detonated inside a structure, the fuel “tends to fill” large parts of the structure and pressurise it from the inside.

For a typical FAE, the P_CJ can be hundreds of pound-force per sq. inch (PSI). A hundred PSI is equal to 6.8-times the atmospheric pressure (atm). This kind of pressure, Herbert said, “tends to break every wall apart very effectively” but does not throw the walls “very hard or throw fragments very far.”

For its part, the DRDO has estimated that the blast pressure of a rocket-delivered FAE is 0.8 kg-force/cm² at 16 metres. This is a little less than the atmospheric pressure that regular buildings can withstand. Extrapolating the findings of one DRDO study, 18.5 kg of propylene oxide has a blast peak overpressure of 2.1-3.4 atm at about 8 metres from the canister. Even if multiple units were not fired, structural damage seems likely.

The satellite images also show burn marks of varying sizes, as well as a few craters. Col. Vinayak Bhat (retd.) reasoned in The Print that the smaller burn marks, found on the landscape surrounding the building, could have been human-made whereas the larger ones could have been the result of FAEs. Assuming they are contemporary, this suggests FAEs with a larger impact range could also have been used.

One possible way out, as Col. Bhat suggested, is that there were two waves of IAF fighters. The first carried FAEs used on the madrasa and against fleeing people. Then, a second wave carried high-explosive weapons to bomb the surroundings.

But while this seems to be able to explain some of the features of the satellite images, the theory does not square with the detailed briefings that reputed defence reporters like Indian Express‘s Sushant Singh received from the government, which spoke of only one group of four Mirage-2000s firing their precision-guided munitions from the Indian side of the Line of Control.

Angad Singh also told The Wire that he does not think an FAE was used – “certainly not the DRDO one, which as far as I am aware, is not in wide service yet.” He added that “the attack direction and profile seems to suggest SPICE 2000, not 1000 or 250.”

An FAE mated to a SPICE 2000 seems excessive: while it could explain the burn marks on the ground, it doesn’t explain what appears to be an erect, intact structure. If the kit had been mated with a high-explosive, then the unnamed military officer’s comment implies that the casing on the weapon was really heavy.

This in turn could mean one of two things. First, that the madrasa had a roof full of holes/smudges to begin with, and that they are not signs of damage.

Second, the madrasa was – or presumed to be – very heavily fortified. If the madrasa wasn’t fortified, it wouldn’t be standing. But if it was, there is no way to confirm.

So there we have it: multiple intersecting theories, led by a SPICE kit and low-mass warheads that may or may not have been FAEs, Mk 84s or something else – something the Government of India is keeping mum about. At the centre of all this stands the Ship of Theseus: a madrasa that journalists are being kept away from, a building that may or may not be fortified, which even may or may not be the same building it was before.

The Wire
March 10, 2019

I wrote the following analysis for chinaindiadialogue.com and China Pictorial. A big thank you to Mithila Phadke for the opportunity and for working on the text to make it sharper and more readable.

Beyond the Far Side

China has always publicly advocated for the peaceful use of outer space. It adopted its current Constitution in 1982 and ratified the UN Outer Space Treaty (OST) in 1983. And since 1985, it has been working together with the US and the UK, among other countries, to develop space technologies.
But for this early eagerness, China still lacks a space law, especially one that can mediate between domestic ambitions and the requirements of multilateral instruments like the OST.
In fact, it has been difficult to balance China’s publicised stance with its activities. It began its space programme in the 1950s, after a period of civil unrest and during one of economic instability. It had no option but to go it independently.
The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in 1953, so China’s space ambitions from the start were linked to its military’s purpose: to safeguard the country’s borders and to maintain its independence during the Cold War. After a formal start in 1956, it launched its first satellite to space in 1970. Until the early 1990s, its operations were overseen by the country’s military leaders.
Today, it is an elite spacefaring nation, with an operational heavy-lift launch vehicle, a space station and crewed spaceflight programmes, a functional collaboration with a dozen world-class universities around the country and a flourishing private space sector.
Of course, it also has a space science division but it isn’t quite as expansive or full-fledged as its space technologies counterpart. Together with its failure to distinguish between civilian and military space aspirations, its capabilities are thus seen as a demonstration of its power more than of its technical prowess. The centrality of spacefaring assets in its 2015 military reform under President Xi Jinping attests to this.
Its Moon missions have only bolstered this image. When its Chang’e 4 mission deployed a rover on the far side on January 3, observers were surprised. The Chinese space agency aims to build an ‘outpost’ on the Moon’s south pole. As futuristic as that sounds, Chang’e 4’s success was a reminder that China might just achieve that goal in the 2030s, with the complicated mission profile attesting to the country’s capabilities.
Since the first Chang’e mission in 2007, China has sent two orbiters, two landers, two rovers, and is expected to undertake two sample-return missions by 2021. Three decades from orbiter to outpost is bristling.
At the same time, China’s cislunar and lunar missions can’t be written off entirely as pilots to greater non-lunar endeavours. The Moon is not simply a springboard. Although crewed lunar missions ceased to be of interest in the 1990s, the natural satellite has been reborn as a ‘superpower destination’.
In November, NASA announced the selection of nine companies to “deliver services to the lunar surface”, starting as soon as 2019. Although the organisation’s chief called it the first step to “feed forward to Mars”, it still involves long-term scientific explorations of the body itself.
India is another country interested in the Moon, and its trajectory to the body and beyond is very similar to China’s. In fact, Chandrayaan 2 will land on the Moon at a spot close to where Chang’e 4 did, exploring a similar region with similar instruments. Both countries have also announced a similar suite of interplanetary missions and have built or are building capabilities that will allow them to launch both very heavy and very light satellites, send humans to space and ultimately to the Moon, and colonise Mars in the (not so) distant future.
The two countries are clearly locked in a space race that reflects the polarisation of powers on ground. Asia itself boasts of two major space cooperation organisations, led by China and Japan, with little collaboration between them. No points for guessing which side India is on.
In this context, India-China cooperation in space is highly unlikely, especially where potential military applications are concerned. In fact, it is possible India is paying more attention to space diplomacy only because China is, and getting a move on its human spaceflight programme – after many years of dismissing its value – because of the possibility of a Chinese space station in low-Earth orbit by 2024.
However, there remains one area where cooperation is still possible, not least because more than half of all countries to have independently developed spaceflight are from Asia, and because at least seven other countries from around the world are keen to get back to the Moon. If India, China and Japan join hands, they can effectively represent a conglomerate of 15 nations that can set the terms of the world’s return to the Moon.
And it is here that the OST, and China’s lack of a space law, becomes relevant. After NASA shut down its Space Shuttle programme in the 1990s, it hasn’t had the ability to launch astronauts to space, let alone to the Moon, and was in the outrageous situation of using Russian rockets to access the International Space Station. In effect, its choices had passively set up a gatekeeping situation.
It’s likely that China plans to do the same with the Moon. The OST is still in effect but it has become outmoded. It doesn’t have clear answers about who can own off-world resources and how their trade should be managed. In this framework, China has an opportunity to be the country that gets to decide, in a manner of speaking, who can access which lunar resource depending on their relationship with China on Earth, and lead the way for India and Japan as well.
This is only to be expected. Space exploration has a long way to go until it is completely democratic, thanks mostly to the cost and technological maturity it demands. Until then, China – as much as India, the US or Russia – will seek to extend its diplomacy where its rovers go, and build up spatio-economic leverage in this new world order.
The incentive here would be that other actors wouldn’t even have to want to go to Mars, which is the way Moon missions are justified at first. Instead, China could simply provide access to space like a PaaS endeavour, ‘unlocking’ access to the cislunar region together with its attendant prospects of space-rock mining, Moon-based manufacturing and off-world research.

On February 12, K. VijayRaghavan, the principal scientific advisor to the Government of India, announced that India would join a global consortium of countries that is attempting to standardise the way their scientists publish their papers, such that the papers are freely available to the public.
The consortium is grounded in a scheme called Plan S. It was originally mooted by Science Europe, a nongovernmental body of “research-funding” and “research-performing” organisations headquartered in Brussels, in September 2018. The burden of achieving Plan S’s goals is borne primarily by the research-funders, including the national government in India’s case, and the journals they will be working with.
At present, there are various ways for a scientist to have her paper published. They can be divided broadly into two groups: open access (OA) and subscription. OA “refers to the practice of making peer-reviewed scholarly research and literature freely available online to anyone interested in reading it” (source).
In OA publishing – specifically, in a paradigm called ‘gold OA’ – the publisher recoups their cost of publishing through an article-processing charge (APC), paid for by the scientists or the scientists’ funders. In subscription publishing, the publisher recoups their cost of publishing by placing the paper behind a paywall, charging readers hefty sums to rent or purchase it.
Against this background, Plan S released a now-famous 10-point guideline specifying the researchers’ rights and the funders’ responsibilities, all with the following goal:

After 1 January 2020, scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies must be published in compliant OA journals or on compliant OA platforms.

In effect, research-funders are required to pay the APCs so that the research they fund can be published in OA journals, and the funders can mandate that studies they enable only be published in such journals.
If India is set to join the Plan S coalition, this means the Government of India, through its Ministry of Finance and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), will pay to have Indian scientists’ papers published in OA journals. In turn, everyone in the world will be able to access publicly funded research from India, and vice versa.
At the outset, Plan S’s participants want to set up a global commons of scientific knowledge. This is admirable because OA publishing removes barriers to knowledge that people working in less-developed and resource-poorer areas might not be able to access – but to which they can contribute or which they can use. However, it’s not all rosy: gold OA, as well as Plan S, come with multiple problems, and if they aren’t addressed, the coalition could fail.
First: The most immediate issue is the APC. PeerJ, a noted OA title, publishes a “life and environmental sciences” journal whose APC is $1,095 (Rs 77,300). According to Scimago, Indian scientists publish 145,000 papers a year (2015-2017 average). Considering 55% of India’s R&D expense is currently borne by the government, and assuming the PeerJ APC as the baseline, that’s an additional expense of Rs 616.46 crore. And PeerJ is among the more affordable ones.
Where is the government going to get this money from? Its R&D expense is already considered insufficient. State-run institutions are generally worse off than centrally funded ones, PhD scholars have been agitating since last year for higher stipend and fewer arrears, and increasing allocations belie funding for pure science, which has taken a hit.
One quick way out is to turn to business enterprises, whose participation in national R&D expenditure increased from 34.2% in 2009 to 43.6% in 2014, and is likely to have increased further since. Another is to increase private sector participation, which languishes at 38.1%, among the lowest in countries of comparable power. A third is to have the government allocate its existing resources better: in 2014, a full 66% of R&D funds went to the DRDO, DoS and DAE alone. (Source for all numbers here.)
But a common issue with these options is that Indian R&D could become even more biased in favour of “national priorities” and business interests, considering they’re already treated poorly. If the Government of India is considering one of these routes, it will have to ensure research priorities don’t become enslaved by profit motives.
Second: Plan S in its current form is an aggressive push towards OA that foists a lot of the burden on research-funders. It doesn’t deal with the problem of research-publishers – i.e. the journals – maintaining gargantuan profit margins, which led to the ‘access to knowledge’ crisis in the first place.
In fact, because scientists are also concerned with notions like “prestige” and regularly seek to have their work published in fancy journals like Nature, Science and Cell, there’s no way to keep them from looking at Nature Communications instead of PeerJ. And Nature Communications charges Rs 3.43 lakh per paper.
Third: While it’s admirable to make publications available to everyone through the gold OA mode, Plan S simply pushes the cost from the people to the government, and forces tax money towards atrocious fees charged by private vendors like Nature. Plan S does have a specification that the APCs will be capped, such that no journal can charge more than the cap.
However, “a price cap is de facto unenforceable, as authors pay any price above the cap if they deem the cost worth the benefit,” Björn Brembs, a neurobiologist at the University of Regensburg, Germany, wrote on his blog. “Here in Germany, it has become routine in the last decade, to pay any APC above the €2,000 cap imposed by the [German Research Foundation] from other sources.”
So if Plan S has to work, researcher-funders also have to help reform scientists’ and administrators’ attitude towards notions like “prestige”. A top-down mandate to publish only in certain journals won’t work if the institutions aren’t equipped, for example, to evaluate research based on factors other than ‘prestige’. And it’s nigh impossible to understate the difficulty of this challenge, especially in India – so much so that a new idea the DST is mulling to boost research plays along instead of trying to fight it.
Fourth: This DST scheme proposes paying researchers to have their papers published, with Rs 50,000 for publishing in foreign journals and Rs 20,000 for publishing in Indian ones. This already shows a preference towards foreign titles, although that’s partly understandable (such as because of the pressures of universities wanting to achieve good global rankings).
More importantly, it also raises concerns about how the government’s negotiations with journals over the APCs will go. Rs 20,000-50,000 sounds like a big figure but in international scientific publishing, it’s really not. Even domestically speaking, India spent Rs 85,326 crore on R&D in 2014, when 130,891 papers were published (indexed by Scimago), which works out to Rs 65 lakh per paper, excluding patents and other outcomes. However, if the government is not willing to spend more, then Plan S journals might not be keen on working with India.
Fifth: Indeed, for all the machinations, it’s an unwritten truth that the centre of power in scientific publishing lies with the publishers – not with the people who pay the funders, the funders who pay the researchers, not even the researchers who fill the publishers’ pages. Apart from reforming academics’ attitudes, Plan S also has to take this beast head-on, lest it is left kowtowing to the journals’ interests.
In 2012, Ross Mounce, the open access grants manager at Arcadia Fund, noticed that the Nature Publishing Group was charging more for admitting papers on which a CC BY license had to be attached – i.e. the gold OA route. Such a license, which stands for Creative Commons Attribution, allows readers to reproduce the contents of the paper elsewhere at no additional cost and together with proper attribution.
Mounce wrote, “Applying a license to a digital work costs nothing. By charging £100-400 more for CC BY, they’re really taking the piss – charging more for ABSOLUTELY NO ADDITIONAL EFFORT on their part” (emphasis in the original). His comment spotlights the central animus well: journals can arbitrarily increase their APCs because they can, the researchers and universities will still want to publish there because they think they ought to – and a Plan S that doesn’t prepare for this will simply recast the problem, postponing its tipping point instead of resolving it.
This in turn could come back to bite India in the back, as it will every other country where the government wants research output to grow together with quality even as it underspends on R&D and education.
Sixth: The larger publishers aside, Plan S will also hit numerous society journals – i.e. journals published by societies dedicated to the study and popularisation of specific areas of science – in which many Indian researchers publish.
These publishers are relatively smaller in scale and more diminutive in their influence on the relationship between research administrators and publishers. In other words, they are less able to modify their business models to make room for Plan S by 2020.

#PlanS is a step in the right direction. Details matter please bring society journals with associated activities into the discussion as well @Co_Biologists @EMBOPress @SfNJournals @GeneticsGSA @ASCBiology @briscoejames @BerndPulverer. Encourage @biorxivpreprint

— Sandhya Koushika Lab (@WormlockHolmes) February 12, 2019

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A position paper by the UK-based Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers drew attention to Plan S’s encouragement of what it calls “transformative deals”, or “agreements”. Through these deals, Plan S wants publishers to waive APCs for low-income countries and discounted rates for middle-income countries, like India and China.
If such deals do come through, it will be great for Asian, African and Latin American researchers, who will suddenly have unfettered access to high-quality titles like PLOS One, PeerJ, etc. But it’s not clear how society publishers, such as the European Molecular Biology Organisation, will be expected to deal with the costs and (not insignificant) technical issues.
As Michael Clarke wrote on The Scholarly Kitchen,

… society journals tend to publish hybrid titles, providing authors with a choice. For authors who wish to have their work immediately accessible via liberal reuse licenses, gold OA options are readily available. For those authors who cannot, or do not wish to pay an APC, society journals nearly all support green OA with embargo periods ranging from 3 to 24 months, depending on the field…

According to Publisso, “Gold open access is where an author publishes their article in an online open access journal” together with an APC. “In contrast, green open access is where an author publishes their article in any journal and then self-archives a copy in a freely accessible institutional or specialist online archive known as a repository, or on a website.” (The DST and the Department of Biotechnology already maintain a green OA repository of studies they fund.)
So Plan S will effectively expect society publishers to ‘flip’ their publishing model towards gold OA starting 2020. And society publishers might not be ready to do so by then, especially since Plan S also doesn’t offer any helpful suggestions on this front.
The Wire
February 13, 2019