India Reports Successful Test Fire of Locally Built Nuclear-Ready Missile

As tensions between India and Pakistan escalate due to border disputes in Kashmir, India on Tuesday announced it had successfully test fired its locally built nuclear-ready missile.

Developed by the country's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the nuclear-ready Prithvi-II ballistic missile was fired from the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at Chandipur off Odisha coast on Monday.

"The missile was randomly chosen from the production stock and the total launch activities were carried out by the specially formed SFC and monitored by the scientists of the DRDO as part of practice drill," local news portal dnaindia.com said, quoting unidentified sources.

Equipped with advanced high accuracy developed navigation that was perfected domestically as well as maneuvering system, the missile achieved all targeting and technical parameters set out specifically for the particular launch.

"The missile reached the predefined target in the Bay of Bengal with a very high accuracy -- of few metres," M.V.K.V. Prasad, test range director, told IANS.

"The test was a hundred per cent success," he said.

A liquid-fuelled surface-to-surface short-range ballistic missile (SRBM), Prithvi-II has a range of 350 km, payload of 500 kg to 1000 kg and can deceive anti-ballistic missiles.

The missile particularly fired on Monday covered a distance of nearly 261 km in around eight minutes. It carried a dummy payload.

The last user trial of the Prithvi-II was successfully carried out from the same base on on 20 December 2012.