1/ So, I fell down a rabbit hole this week
On 27 March 2019, India fired a missile that hit one of its own satellites, landed within 10 cm of centre
Only three other countries had ever done it
Mission Shakti is twenty years of engineering compressed into 168 seconds
Thread 🧵 2/ To understand the why, you have to go back to 11 January 2007
China had just launched a SC-19, a modified DF-21 missile, and destroyed its own Fengyun-1C weather satellite at 865 km altitude
It was the worst debris event in history, over 3,000 trackable fragments that will persist for decades, but the strategic message to New Delhi was unmistakable
The enemy to the east was posturing

0/ Been researching India's sea-based nuclear deterrent for a while now and the K-series SLBM programme is genuinely one of the more underappreciated strategic stories in modern defence
It starts not with a missile but with a moment of geopolitical hostility in 1971
Thread 🧵 1/ In December of 1971
The US Seventh Fleet's Task Force 74, led by USS Enterprise, enters the Bay of Bengal as a coercive signal during the Indo-Pakistani War
The Soviet Navy responds by dispatching a nuclear-armed submarine flotilla from Vladivostok to shadow the Americans
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi watches all of this and quietly orders preliminary work on an indigenous nuclear-propelled submarine