Researched by: Sara Varghese & Nivedita Bobal 

What happened here?

Here’s a timeline of events according to Islamabad:

• A “high-speed projectile” was fired from India at around 7:13 pm on Wednesday, March 9 from Sirsa, Haryana. 
• It travelled for 6 minutes and 46 seconds—at an altitude of 40,000 feet. It accelerated from Mach 2.5 (or 2.5X the speed of sound) to Mach 3 as it headed toward Rajasthan.
• But then it suddenly changed course and went across the border—where it cruised for another 100 km. 
• The missile finally hit a wall and exploded without causing any casualties.
• It landed 124 km inside Pakistan and it spent 3 minutes and 44 seconds flying within its territory.

Map to note: This is the route taken by the missile:

The Indian response: The incident was first revealed at a press conference held on Thursday by the Pakistani military—who flagged a “high-speed flying object.” A day later, the Indian defence ministry offered this mea culpa:

“On 9 March 2022, in the course of routine maintenance, a technical malfunction led to the accidental firing of a missile. The Government of India has taken a serious view and ordered a high-level Court of Enquiry. It is learnt that the missile landed in an area of Pakistan. While the incident is deeply regrettable, it is also a matter of relief that there has been no loss of life due to the accident.”

The Pakistani comeback: This vague apology did not appease the Pakistanis who demanded a joint probe and raised a number of questions: 

• Given the “profound level of incompetence,” was the missile was handled by its “armed forces or some rogue elements”?
• What are the measures and procedures in place to prevent accidental missile launches?
• What was the type and specifications of the missile that fell in Pakistani territory?
• Why did the missile alter its course and turn toward Pakistan?
• Was the missile equipped with a self-destruct mechanism? Why did it fail to kick in?
• Why did New Delhi fail to inform Islamabad soon after the missile launched?
• Are Indian missiles kept primed for launch even under routine maintenance?

All of these are very good questions for Indians to ponder, as well. But the answers are limited and based mostly on speculation. 

What’s this missile?

We have no official confirmation but the expert consensus is that this was a BrahMos cruise missile—jointly developed by India and Russia—hence BrahMos (a portmanteau of the Brahmaputra and Moskva rivers). It is the fastest cruise missile in the world and can carry a nuclear warhead—and can be launched from submarines, ships, aircraft, or from land platforms. All three arms of the Indian Defence services, the Army, Air Force and Navy have BrahMos missiles in their arsenal. 

The misfired missile: appears to have been a practice version and was unarmed. And since Sirsa does not store BrahMos, experts speculate that it was fired from a mobile launcher fitted on a truck. Interestingly, the Indian Navy tested the missile on March 5 in the Indian Ocean without incident.

What’s notable: According to its website: [T]he missile operates on the “fire and forget principle”—so its path cannot be altered once they are entered on launch. Also: Times of India claims the missile does not have a self-destruct mechanism—though other reporting states otherwise.

So why did it change course??

Let’s start with why it was launched at all. The missile has “multiple mechanical and electronic locks” that should have prevented such an accident—and it has “multiple geo-locations of targets fed into the system, which need to be selected or new ones added.” So why did they fail?

The popular theories: According to Times of India:

“[S]ources said the in-built locks in the BrahMos missile in question were ‘probably accidentally bypassed’ by the operators in the training exercise or there was ‘a technical malfunction’. ‘The target coordinates and data, with the requisite waypoints, fed into the missile during such an exercise would also be realistic. But it was certainly not meant to be launched,’ a source said.”

The Wire, however, quotes a former air marshal VK Bhatia who says this was “a routine BrahMos training exercise on March 9 by firing the cruise missile from Sirsa to the Mahajan Field Firing Range in Rajasthan.” Point to note: This is weird since we rarely conduct such tests on our Western borders with Pakistan. 

To sum up: We don’t even know if the intent was to actually fire the missile—or not.

The course ‘miscorrection’: According to Bhatia, a technical glitch altered the missile’s course:

“[A]fter travelling some 100km towards its objective in Rajasthan, the missile abruptly lost control, turning into a ‘twirler’, due possibly to the uneven burning of its solid propellant. This, in turn, Bhatia conjectured had adversely impacted its on-board guidance system into which all the target coordinates had been toggled, propelling it on a totally different north-westerly direction towards Pakistan.”

More alarming possibilities: Retired Air Marshal Anil Chopra told the Indian Express, if the coordinates programmed into the missile were “wrong,” it doesn’t explain why the missile turned in the last stage—as opposed to directly heading to its “incorrect” destination. Chopra raises the possibility of someone jamming “the missile while in flight, by some cyber means”—or this:

“What can also cause a malfunction is ‘if the target data that has been fed into the missile gets corrupted, then takes a different direction all together.’ Had the missile crashed, ‘then we know some controls had failed… She had flown straight, then turned, then flown straight. She has not done any funny manoeuvres. Considering that, if she has not done any fancy manoeuvres, has sometime during flight the destination got corrupted?’”

The alternate theory of events: was put out by The Print—based on “sources in the defence and security establishment.” According to this extremely hazy version: 

• An “inspection and protocol” exercise was carried out at “a secret satellite base”—not Sirsa, as claimed by the Pakistanis. 
• It seems to imply that the coordinates entered into the missile were correct—but it was never meant to be fired. 
• And this: “The trajectory of the missile as shown by Pakistan is wrong, which clearly shows that it does not have the capability to track either the flight or the launch site.” 
• What they seem to be most smug about: The incident “showed that the country’s air defence did not work against the missile.”

What’s the big picture?

One big takeaway is that this was a close call. We were lucky that the missile did not cause any casualties—hit any civilians or military targets or commercial airlines midair. And it did not provoke a knee-jerk reaction from the Pakistanis—despite the poor state of our relationship. As one Indian defence analyst says: “The Pakistani side has shown great maturity. We have been lucky this time. We should not make the mistake to think we will be lucky every time.” 

The other cause for concern: The absence of safety protocols. Mistakes have happened in the past. There have been 32 recorded nuclear weapon accidents since 1950—the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft or loss of nuclear weapons. So this is not an ‘India’ problem. Defence sources claim that the Indian court of inquiry (CoI) will be “swift” and “fix responsibility for acts of omission and commission.” A senior defence officer says: 

“Heads certainly need to roll. Such an incident between two hostile nuclear-armed neighbours, which do not have robust risk-reduction protocols in place as well as extremely short reaction times, could have led to a disastrous conflict.”

The bottomline: Do we need one—other than a big sigh of relief?

Reading list

New York Times and CNN have the clearest overviews. The Indian Express offers a good explainer on missiles—which includes protocols to be followed while testing. The Wire has the best analysis of what went wrong. For an alternative (if vague) theory, check out The Print.