Chapter 136: Material Shortages

Bangalore

22 July 1950

The tarmac at the BAL airfield was hard and bright under a clean Deccan sun, and the monsoon had left the surrounding hills green. Ram came down from the Avro York with Patel, Nehru, Shroff and Shaktidas. Patel took the stairs without a hand on the rail. Dr. Roy’s secretary, in a dark suit, stayed at the top of the steps, and Patel did not look round.

"The cough," Nehru said under his breath. "I had thought..."

"Gone, Jawaharlal. Almost. Dr. Roy put me under the fluoroscope on Tuesday. The shadow on the left lung is lighter than it was in April. Not gone. Lighter." Patel’s voice was gruff, but the pride in it was plain. "I have gained eight pounds. I am told I look like a different man."

"You do."

"I also feel like a man who has been fed boiled gourds for three months. Do not praise it too much."

The BAL chairman, Dr. Ghatage, met them at the hangar with Dr. Krishnakant Sharma, Kurt Tank and Dr. Yamada. The two design chiefs shook hands with formal politeness that seemed designed to cover a hot rivalry. Kao, who was standing by the door, thought it was the best arrangement he had seen in the whole enterprise.

"The 5-kilonewton competition concluded in April, Prime Minister," Ghatage said. "I did not bring you here for the result. I brought you to see what it is for."

The test cell was bigger than the one that had run the 1 kN engine. The winning engine sat on its test bench, a long, slim, axial-flow turbojet with a nine-stage compressor and an annular combustor, its casing scarred and blued by a hundred hours of running. Beside it, the losing Japanese centrifugal, stouter and mechanically simpler, stood under a tarpaulin.

It had been a close contest. Dr. Yamada’s design had a fraction less thrust and a fraction more reliability. But the Wieland team under Kurt Tank had solved the problem that had defeated them at 1 kN: at larger scale, an axial compressor built with tolerances the Indian foundries could actually hold.

"The Wieland Bureau won," Ghatage said. "Herr Tank said last October that the axial layout would prove its superiority at higher thrust. At 1 kN, the blades were too small to hold their tolerances. At 5 kN, they are large enough to cast and finish. This engine produced 5.2 kilonewtons for two hundred and forty hours without a stall. The specific fuel consumption is ninety-six per cent of the design target. The compressor tolerances are within the capability of the Madras and Jabalpur foundries. I am pleased to report that production drawings are complete."

"And the Yatagarasu entry?"

"Four point six kilonewtons, Prime Minister. A magnificent engine. Reliable, simple, easy to build. But in the end, the weight and frontal area counted against it." Ghatage glanced at Yamada. "I have asked Dr. Yamada whether his bureau would care to adapt the centrifugal design for the smaller applications we discussed last October."

"Dr. Yamada?"

Yamada bowed. "We have begun, Prime Minister. A one-point-five kilonewton variant for target drones. It is a good design."

Yamada bowed slightly towards Tank. "It is a fine engine. The difference is in the compressor, as Herr Tank said."

"The Yatagarasu Bureau’s turbine was better," Tank said at once. He said it stiffly, but he said it. "We have taken their blade cooling passages for the next iteration. Dr. Yamada’s people are, I must say, extremely quick."

"Professor Tank is generous," Yamada said, with a faint smile. "Also correct. We will adapt for the next tier."

Ram looked at them both. "Does it work as a trainer engine?"

Ghatage moved to the drafting board. "The 5 kN engine is, in our view, ideal for a twin-engine basic jet trainer, with two engines at roughly the thrust of the Ministry’s requirement. The Indian Air Force has asked for a tandem-seat, straight-wing, pressurised trainer to replace the Harvard. Dr. Tank’s bureau has drawn up a design. The prototype could fly by the end of 1951."

"Two engines?" Ram asked.

"A single 5 kN is too small for a trainer of that size, Prime Minister. Twin engines also give a safety margin for a pupil pilot, and I am told the Air Marshal likes it."

We call it the Kiran. A student who has done sixty hours on a Tiger Moth can go directly to jets. It cuts two years from pilot training."

"Mukherjee will be delighted."

"The Air Marshal has been to see the mock-up twice. He has tried to move the delivery date forward by six months."

"Can it be moved?"

"No, Prime Minister. He has been told so."

Dr. Krishnakant Sharma stepped forward with a second set of drawings.

"The same engine suits other work. There are four other applications. First: A reconnaissance drone, pilotless, launched by rocket-assist from a rail, with a camera in the nose and a range of six hundred miles. It will fly over any border we like at fifty thousand feet, and no one on the ground will see it go.

"A second variant, the Agnidoot, carries two hundred kilograms of explosive and flies a pre-set course to a target. A flying bomb, if you will, along the lines of the German V-1 but with a better guidance system, or a cruise missile. Third, auxiliary power for the new heavy transports. Fourth, and most speculative, a small twin-jet executive aircraft, perhaps four to six passengers, for the state airline and for the Ministry. I do not say it is practical. But Dr. Tank’s designers think it is possible."

"Possible," Tank said, "in the sense that a bridge is possible before the steel is rolled. We can draw it. Whether the pressurisation and the avionics can be built in India within five years, I do not know."

"Draw it," Ram said. "We shall go ahead with it, too, even if it will not make money for ten years. It will make something more useful."

"What?"

"A generation of Indian engineers who have built a jet airliner."

Then, as they were about to move on, Yamada spoke quietly.

"Prime Minister. Before we continue, there is a matter I would ask to put to you privately. Herr Tank and I have discussed it. We do not agree on everything, but we agree on this."

"Please."

They went into a small office at the end of the hangar with a window looking over the field. Yamada and Tank sat on one side of a plain table, Ram, Patel, Nehru, Shroff and Ghatage on the other. Yamada did not open a folder. He laid his hands flat on the wood.

"We have reached a limit," he said.

"Of design?"

"Of material. The 5 kN engine we have shown you uses ordinary steel in the compressor, a nickel-chromium alloy in the turbine blades, and a light aluminium alloy in the casing. It works because the thrust is low and the temperatures moderate.

"At 10 kilonewtons, it will not. The turbine inlet temperature must rise by two hundred degrees, and the blades must be made of a cobalt-nickel superalloy with tungsten, molybdenum, niobium and titanium additions. At 15, we must have directionally solidified castings. At 25, the alloys we need do not exist in India at all."

"What do you lack?" Patel asked.

"Cobalt. Tungsten. Titanium in sponge form. Molybdenum. Niobium. Chromium of high grade. Nickel, in quantity." Tank spoke flatly, ticking them off. "And platinum, or rhodium, for the thermocouples that measure blade temperature, for the coating on the combustor liners, and for catalysts in the fuel plants. We have some. We do not have enough."

"How much do you have?" Shroff asked.

"Enough for the 10 kN engine, if we are careful. Not for the 15, and certainly not for the 25."

"And the fighter engine?"

"The fighter engine is out of the question until the alloys can be made." Tank looked at Ram directly. "Prime Minister, I will be as blunt as Dr. Yamada is courteous. We have reached the limit of what intelligence can do without material. We can design a better engine on paper than any we can build. The bottleneck is not in Bangalore. It is in the ground."

There was a silence.

"Apart from the metals?" Ram asked.

"Heavy presses. A turbine disc for a 15 kN engine is a forging of nearly two tons, and the grain structure depends on forging it in a single stroke. We have a press of two thousand tons. We need ten thousand for the next stage, and twenty thousand for the one after. We cannot make them."

Ram sat for a moment looking at the table. "How much of this is known to the Ministry of Industry?"

"Dr. Mookerjee has the list," Ghatage said. "It was sent in May."

"It was sent, and read, and put on the pile," Patel said grimly. "I remember it now. We had a war."

"We have still a war, Vallabhbhai. But we have a plan too." Ram looked up. "Gentlemen, I shall not ask you to design your way out of a shortage of metal. I shall ask the country to supply it. There are three tasks, and I want your help with each."

"First, we find out what we have. Sardar Patel’s Survey Institutes are being built, but surveys take years. I want a crash programme, now, with every available geologist, to look specifically for cobalt, nickel, tungsten, molybdenum, titanium, chromium and niobium. The Geological Survey knows of chromite in Orissa, nickel and cobalt at Sukinda, tungsten at Degana in Rajasthan, and ilmenite and monazite on the Kerala coast. Burma has tungsten at Mawchi, in the Karen hills, which the Karen chiefs are, I believe, willing to see developed. Ceylon has graphite and mica. We will have the maps in three years.

"Second, we recover what already exists. Dr. Yamada, Herr Tank, I want your suggestions here. What would you do?"

Tank looked at Yamada. Yamada nodded slightly.

"In the Ruhr," Tank said slowly, "before the war, there were plants that recovered nickel, cobalt and chromium from scrapped armour plate and turbine blades. The process is chemical and not difficult. It requires a large volume of scrap, a good supply of acid, and electrical power. India has the acid and will have the power."

"On the Japanese side," Yamada said, "we recovered platinum from spent catalysts in the sulphuric acid plants and the petroleum refineries. A catalyst contains perhaps half a per cent platinum by weight. A large refinery has several tons of spent catalyst every year. We can dissolve and refine it."

"You are proposing a ship-breaking facility, where?" Nehru asked.

"Alang, on the Gujarat coast, has a long, flat beach with a steep tidal range," Ghatage said. "Ships can be run ashore at high water and broken up in place. A second site on the Burmese side, perhaps Syriam or Akyab, would serve the Bay of Bengal. We have seen the reports."

"Then both are approved," Ram said. "Alang and Syriam. Not a lot of money, but a lot of work. Mookerjee will provide it. The Navy will supply the first ships, the old Liberties we take off the Americans, and the British and Pakistani wrecks in Karachi harbour. Shroff-ji, we need to aggressively buy every pile of scrap from the Europeans and the Americans, on the cheap. Dr. Yamada, I want you to design the recovery plant for the scrap yards. Herr Tank, the same for the alloy extraction."

"And platinum?" Shroff asked.

"Buy the spent catalysts from every refinery in Asia and Europe before anyone else thinks to. Burmah’s refineries, Standard-Vacuum at Visakhapatnam when it opens, the Abadan plants through the Burmah holding. Shroff-ji, quietly, through intermediaries. The price will be a fraction of the metal’s value because no one yet understands what it is worth."

Shroff wrote. "Anything else?"

"There is a third point, and the primary reason you are here, Doctors." Ram looked at Yamada. "Can substitutes be found for the metals we lack? Can the thermocouples be made from something cheaper? Can the coatings be reduced? Can a process be redesigned to use less catalyst?"

Yamada considered. "Some of it, yes. The platinum thermocouples can be replaced by nickel-chrome types at lower temperatures. We will have to accept shorter life. The coating on the combustor can be a ceramic instead of a platinum-aluminide. It is less durable, but it is made from alumina. As to catalysts, I believe the Institute can develop a cobalt-molybdenum catalyst for the refineries that uses no platinum at all."

"Dr. Ghatage, how many Indian apprentices have we trained in metallurgy?"

"Four hundred and twelve, Prime Minister. About a third are graduates of the first year. The rest are still in training."

"And how many foreign metallurgists?"

"Fifty-four, Prime Minister. Dr. Tank’s team has the aerodynamicists. The metallurgists are mostly Germans from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and a few Japanese from the Nippon Steel research laboratory."

"Perhaps senior apprentices can conduct inter-departmental research studies on the substitutions, their limitations, changes in efficiency, the works?" Ram asked.

"It is a sound research area, at the very least." Dr. Yamada replied, "We will look into it."

He turned to Shroff. "The last item is presses. Shroff-ji, what does a 10,000-ton press cost?"

"New, from Germany or America, perhaps six million dollars delivered. A 20,000-ton, fifteen."

"We buy both. The 10,000 from Europe, from the Germans who are anxious to sell. The 20,000 from the Americans, who are anxious for India to open its markets to their products. We will make do with these presses for now, and when we have enough financial leeway, we buy a couple more, take them apart and learn how to make our own. In five years, we build our own 20,000. In eight, a 30,000. In ten, a 50,000 and beyond."

Shroff made a careful, exact calculation. "Twenty-one million dollars for the two. It is a great deal of money."

"It buys a country its own turbines and countless downstream technologies."

"Approved, then," Shroff said, and wrote it down.

The Bhabha laboratory

23 July 1950

The Atomic Energy Establishment occupied the old northern wing of the Institute, a stone building with deep verandahs and a fenced yard. The fence was new, as were the three guards at the gate. They checked Ram’s pass with great care and did not seem impressed by his face.

Dr. Homi Bhabha received him in a long room on the second floor. A blackboard covered one wall, and a model of a reactor core in brass and glass stood in the middle of the floor. There were no windows. Dr. Sarabhai sat in a corner with a notebook on his knee. Patel and Shaktidas had come with Ram. Nehru had not. The invitation had said the Prime Minister and one other, and Ram had brought two. No one remarked on it.

"The Foreign Minister is not here," Bhabha said.

"Jawaharlal will be told when there is something to tell him."

"I understand." Bhabha did not seem troubled. "I should like to begin with the whole design. I will be brief. It will take an hour."

It took nearly two.

"India has very little uranium," Bhabha said. "We have perhaps eight thousand tons of ore in Bihar and Rajasthan, much of it low in grade, and we have not looked everywhere. But we have thorium. The monazite sands of Travancore and Madras hold the largest reserves in the world, perhaps a third of the global total. Thorium is not fissile. It will not sustain a chain reaction by itself. But it can be transformed. If it absorbs a neutron, it becomes protactinium, and then uranium-233, which is fissile, and better in several ways than uranium-235."

"Then why not use thorium at once?" Patel asked.

"Because we have no uranium-233 to begin with. We must make it. That is the whole difficulty." Bhabha turned to the blackboard and drew three boxes in a line. "I propose a three-stage program.

"The first uses natural uranium as fuel in a reactor moderated by heavy water. Natural uranium is only seven-tenths of one per cent fissile, and an ordinary water reactor cannot use it. Heavy water absorbs fewer neutrons, and a pressurised heavy-water reactor can burn natural uranium directly. It yields heat, which we convert into power, and as a by-product it makes plutonium."

"Plutonium?" Patel asked.

"Plutonium-239, from the uranium-238 which makes up most of the fuel. In the first stage, we take it from the spent fuel. In the second stage, we use it."

He tapped the second box.

"The second stage is a fast breeder reactor. It uses plutonium as fuel, with no moderator, and surrounds the core with a blanket. If the blanket is uranium-238, the reactor makes more plutonium than it consumes, hence breeder. If the blanket is thorium, it makes uranium-233. We use the plutonium from stage one to start stage two, and stage two to make the uranium-233 that fuels stage three."

"And the third stage?"

"Reactors burning thorium and uranium-233 in a closed cycle. They can run for centuries on the thorium that India has. There is no energy problem the Republic cannot solve if we reach it." Bhabha put down the chalk. "I want to be honest about the dates. This is a work of decades. But we are ready to begin."

"How long?" Ram asked.

"For the first stage, I have been focusing on training people until now; I feel we finally have enough to start experimenting. The prototype of a pressurised heavy-water reactor, a power-producing experimental unit, can be running in about six years. Its heavy water must come from somewhere. Heavy water is made by concentrating the deuterium in ordinary water. The cheapest route is as a by-product of hydrogen manufacture at a fertiliser plant. The Nangal plant on the Sutlej is being built for that purpose. A large heavy-water facility there will take five years. A smaller one, enough for a zero-power research reactor and the first experiments, can be built in two."

"That is the timeline for stage one."

"Yes, Prime Minister. It is a prototype, not a power station. For the second stage, the fast breeder, I would say seven to eight years before we have even a zero-power critical assembly, the first demonstration that the physics is correct. A power experiment, producing electricity, would take ten to twelve. Stage three is slower. We can irradiate thorium in a pilot reactor in eight to ten years, and run a small thorium reactor perhaps a decade beyond."

"And a grid-connected power plant?"

"A nuclear power station that feeds a city? About ten years for the first heavy-water unit on the grid. An experimental unit, smaller, and not commercial, in six."

Ram wrote nothing. He said, "And the weapon?"

The room was very quiet. Sarabhai, in his corner, raised his eyes from his notebook and lowered them again.

"I will be careful," Bhabha said. "It is a question of plutonium. We cannot make a bomb without it, and we cannot have it until the first reactor is running and we have built a plant to separate it from the spent fuel. The separation chemistry is not difficult, but it is dangerous. If you wish, if the Government wishes, we could begin the chemistry in parallel. I estimate eight to ten years for a crude device. One that could be delivered by an aircraft."

"Crude?" Patel said.

"Crude. Heavy. Unreliable. A device, not a weapon. But it would explode."

"And if we wished it sooner?"

"We could not get it sooner without borrowing material from someone else. We shall not do that. I believe, Prime Minister, that is your wish."

"It is," Ram said. He sat without moving. "Dr. Bhabha, I must be very clear on this. No one outside this room is to be told of the schedule. The Cabinet will be told that the Atomic Energy Establishment is researching thorium power. Which is true. The fence is for security, which is also true. The three stages are for your colleagues, and for me, and for the Home Minister. Nothing in writing leaves this building. Nothing is discussed in Delhi."

"I have not told my wife," Bhabha said, with a ghost of a smile.

"You do not have a wife, Doctor."

"No. It has made the secrecy easier."

Patel gave a short bark of laughter. Even Ram smiled.

"A word on the morality, Prime Minister," Bhabha said, more slowly. "I know the Foreign Minister’s view. I know what he said in Allahabad in 1945. I think he is right that the weapon is an evil. I also think that a nation which cannot make one will be at the mercy of those that can. I do not ask you to decide. I ask only that you know what we are building."

"I know," Ram said. "I have known for a long time."

Bhabha looked at him oddly, and then looked away.

"A final matter," Sarabhai said, from the corner. He rose, a slender, quiet man in a white shirt, and went to the blackboard. He did not take the chalk. "If I may, Prime Minister. I wish to speak of rockets."

"Please."

"The Soviet freighters brought German propellant chemistry and machinery for solid-fuel motors. Like Homi, I have been focused on training people up until now. Finally, we have a team of people in Bangalore that is interested in experimenting on cosmic rays, space and other phenomena that were only theorised about in the past. I believe they are the best in Asia." He smiled slightly. "They are not very happy about being the only ones."

"What can we build?"

"Solid-fuel rocket motors, in two years. A motor of five tons of thrust, a small sounding rocket that can carry instruments to a hundred kilometres. By itself, it is of use to the meteorologists, and to our friends in the Navy who want to know what the upper atmosphere does to radio. It is also, with a guidance system, a missile."

"What range?"

"With a single stage, perhaps eighty miles. With two stages, three hundred. The accuracy is poor at first. We will improve it."

"And beyond?"

"An orbital rocket is a different order of difficulty." Sarabhai chose his words. "To put a small satellite, a few dozen kilograms, into orbit around the Earth requires a vehicle of about thirty tons that can reach eight kilometres per second. It requires liquid propellants, stable guidance, and a very large amount of money. I believe it can be done, but not in less than ten years."

"What is the use of a satellite?" Patel asked with curiosity.

"The first would only be a signal. A metal ball that goes beep. It would prove we could do it." Sarabhai paused. "The second would carry a camera, and a third, a radio relay. A country with a hundred languages could speak to itself across an ocean of mountains. I should like that very much."

Ram looked at the small man by the blackboard.

"You have the approval for the motors," he said. "The orbital programme, too, has provisional approval until the motors work; after that, we can consider making it a separate department. Dr. Sarabhai, you will want a name for it."

"I have thought of one, Prime Minister. Anantha. It means without end."

"Very well," Patel said.

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