Baadalon Ne Radar Ko Chakma Diya?
Narendra Modi, Prime Minister · 2019-05-11
In a News Nation television interview during the 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign, describing the decision-making behind the February 26, 2019 Balakot air strike.
Exhibit A · The claim
“The clouds could actually help our planes escape the radars and provide us much needed cover.”
Exhibit B · What the record says
Radar detects aircraft by bouncing radio waves off them, and those radio waves pass through cloud water droplets largely unaffected. Cloud cover is a visual-concealment idea, not a radar one. Retired Indian Air Marshals publicly rejected the claim on record, and fact-checkers noted the only Balakot-strike systems genuinely hindered by cloud cover were the SPICE-2000 guided bombs, which use optical/scene-matching guidance in their terminal phase, an entirely separate system from radar detection.
Radar has shrugged off cloud cover since roughly the Second World War. Nobody told the clouds they had a stealth assignment.
The JUMLE