BHUBANESWAR: India successfully test-fired an anti-ballistic missile on Sunday capable of intercepting targets outside the planet’s atmosphere, a major step in development of a missile defence system available to only a handful of nations.

Sharing borders with nuclear-armed China and Pakistan, India is developing a two-tier missile defence system that aims to provide a multi-layered shield against ballistic missile attack.

“This (test) is part of the ballistic missile defence system which we are developing...,” said Ravi Kumar Gupta, spokesman for the Defence Research and Development Organisation.

“The mission has been com­pleted and the interception parameter has been achieved.” The system is intended to destroy an incoming missile at a higher altitude in the exo-atmosphere, and if that fails in the endo-atmosphere, within the Earth’s atmosphere.

Currently, only a small club of nations including the United States, Russia and Israel possess an anti-ballistic missile system.

In the light of changes in geo-political situation in its neighbourhood, many analysts have suggested revisiting India’s nuclear doctrine whose central principle is that New Delhi would not be the first to use atomic weapons in a conflict.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has promised to revise the doctrine if it comes to power, but has ruled out the first use of nuclear weapons.—Reuters