PU-238 On The Summit

A couple of months ago I read an article that caught my interest.  Having been raised during the cold war along with the accompanying promise and threat of nuclear technology, secret agent espionage and as an avid reader of National Geographic Magazine for almost six and a half decades you would understand.

In response to Communist Red China's nuclear ambitions and tensions between India and China - in 1965 a joint US-India mission conceived by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched Operation Blue Mountain.  The objective was to monitor telemetry collected from Chinese missile tests conducted from the Xinjiang region. 

To do so, it was proposed to install a surveillance (listening) device on the summit of Nanda Devi, India's second-highest peak with a commanding view of China from India's northern border.  Expert mountaineers from the US, India and Nepal would carry a long-range listening antenna powered by a SNAP-19C radioisotope thermoelectric generator.  The generator was fueled with seven capsules of plutonium-238, roughly one-third the amount used in the Nagasaki bomb.

Nuclear-powered device that was installed by CIA climbers on another mountain near Nanda Devi. It’s the same as the model that is still missing.

Rob Schaller, via Pete Takeda collection

It is useful to note that in the mid 1960s compact nuclear power generation had proven itself in space and undersea exploration and in the absence of readily available and robust solar technology a portable nuclear power generation set-up that could power the station remotely for years was considered a near perfect solution.

Arriving in mid September it was already the close of climbing season yet the CIA rushed to complete deployment of the listening station.  Without sufficient time to acclimate the team of climbers and Sherpas were already suffering from altitude sickness at 15,000 feet.  They faced a climb of an additional 10,000 vertical feet requiring the establishment of four camps along a dangerous ridge line.  The mission was led by Indian Captain, and expert climber, M.S. Kohli.  High winds, near constant snow, a shortage of food and frostbite hampered progress as the team struggled to attain the summit.  Finally, out of water and out of food, on October 16 a sudden and violent blizzard near the summit forced the small expedition to withdraw.  Abandoning the mission the team secured the heavy equipment, including the nuclear power generator, to an ice ledge and descended the mountain.  The plan was to retrieve it in the spring.

Returning in May 1966, the team discovered that the entire ledge where everything was cached had been swept-away by an avalanche.  

The nuclear device was gone.

Subsequent searches using heat detectors, metal detectors, infrared detectors and radiation detectors failed to locate it.  Presumably, it had been buried somewhere within the Nanda Devi glaciers.  

For decades both the US and Indian governments had an official policy of neither confirming or denying the mission citing intelligence security.  But that did not deny the reality of the device being out there, possibly sinking deeper into the ice from heat generated by plutonium decay, in a melting, shifting glacier that supplied the headwaters of the Ganges River.  Millions of people down stream could be impacted by contamination risks.

Whoa!

This is excellent journalism on the part of the Times revealing the CIA's loss of a nuclear device sixty years ago.  I unblocked the paywall as it's a terrific read.  I wonder how many more US Government and CIA misadventures/debacles remain to be discovered?  Probably enough to keep investigative journalists busy for decades.

If they're found out.

Read the article in its entirety here.

And, by the way, I'm still reading National Geographic Magazine each and every month...