When yoga pics give you nuclear clues

Yoga diplomacy has been great for Indian soft power evangelism. But could the funky contortions have been overstretched to adversely affect India's hard power - specifically, helping to spill the beans on the whereabouts of the country's nuclear arsenal? Or rather, where some warheads are no longer located? India n-stuff, like for other nuclear nations, is scattered across as air-launched, land-based and sea-based nukes. For the third variety, submarines are the best storage sites. But India launched its first n-submarines only in 2016. Till then, two Sukanya-class patrol vessels, INS Suvarna and INS Subhadra, did the sea-based storage. Enter the picture, yoga.

In Feb this year, the Indian Navy posted a pic of people yoga-posing on board INS Subhadra. Boffins at Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a US non-profit that tracks movement of the world's nuclear arsenal, spotted the pic and noticed that Subhadra's deck no longer has missile stabilisers needed for launching nuclear missiles. This meant, FAS reckoned, that at least some Dhanush nuclear-capable missiles had been shifted to submarines - and, more importantly, that INS Suvarna is currently without nuclear missiles-launching capability. The sort of info you'd hire a spy to get but you can now get by simply seeing publicity pics of people doing yoga on board an Indian Navy ship.