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How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device? (nytimes.com) 73

Posted by msmash from the grave-concerns dept.
Sixty years after a team of American and Indian climbers abandoned a plutonium-powered generator on the slopes of Nanda Devi, one of the world's most forbidding Himalayan peaks, the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge that the mission ever happened. The device, a SNAP-19C portable generator containing plutonium isotopes including Pu-239 -- the same material used in the Nagasaki bomb -- was left behind in October 1965 when a sudden blizzard forced climbers to retreat from Camp Four, just below the summit.

The mission originated from a cocktail party conversation between General Curtis LeMay and National Geographic photographer Barry Bishop, who had summited Everest in 1963. China had just detonated its first atomic bomb in October 1964, and the CIA wanted to intercept radio signals from Chinese missile tests by placing an unmanned listening station atop the Himalayas. Barry Bishop recruited elite American climbers and coordinated with Indian intelligence to haul surveillance equipment up the mountain.

Captain M.S. Kohli, the Indian naval officer commanding the mission, ordered climbers to secure the equipment and descend when the blizzard struck. Jim McCarthy, the last surviving American climber, recalled warning Kohli he was making a mistake. "You can't leave plutonium by a glacier feeding into the Ganges!" he recalled. "Do you know how many people depend on the Ganges?" When teams returned in spring 1966, the entire ice ledge where the gear had been stashed was gone -- sheared off by an avalanche. Search missions in 1967 and 1968 found nothing.

The device remains buried somewhere in the glaciers that feed tributaries of the Ganges River.
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How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device? More

How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device?

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  • Related tidbit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Monday December 15, 2025 @12:06PM (#65859477) Journal
    A subsequent mission did install a similar listening station and RTG. But each time they visited it thereafter, the RTG had buried itself deeper into the surrounding snow. So the thinking now is that the one on Nanda Devi, after falling in an avalanche, gradually melted its way down deeper into the glacier until it hit rock.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )
      I forgot to mention: the subsequent mission installed on a different, easier-to-access peak.

    • Re:Related tidbit (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Monday December 15, 2025 @12:33PM (#65859551) Homepage
      Which would mean its casing is currently being (or already has been) abraded by the bedrock and all the bits and pieces of gravel and larger detritus that typically lies at the bottom of a glacier and get churned around as the glacier slowly flows downslope. From there, it'll be seeping into the glacial runoff water and, as TFS notes, eventually make its way into the River Ganges.

      Of course, if you've actually seen (or smelled) the Ganges once it gets deeper into India, combined with what other purposes the locals use it for, including raw sewage and cremation residue disposal, you'll be well aware that it's far from the most pristine water in the world to start with. Adding a little Pu-239 over a number of years into that soup probably isn't going to make all that much of a difference in the larger scheme of things.

  • SNAP (Score:5, Informative)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Monday December 15, 2025 @12:09PM (#65859483)
    Since the article is somewhat vague about it, a SNAP generator is a thermal generator mostly used to power satellites. It uses the heat from nuclear decay to generate power. It's not a nuclear reactor. If you've seen The Martian, that tube with fins that Watney digs out of the ground is what a SNAP generator looks like. They used to be top-secret classified, but just about everyone knows how to make one nowadays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Rather amusing that they are flagging this as an issue, and not the six (known and admitted to) actual nuclear weapons that the Pentagon has lost. At least one of those is known to have been fully armed and over three megatons in power.

  • Pretty sure the article is wrong (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kobun ( 668169 ) on Monday December 15, 2025 @12:22PM (#65859523)
    Radiothermal generators use plutonium 238. This is a strong alpha emitter, it is highly active with a half-life of 87 years and heats itself red hot. Plutonium 238 is not used in nuclear weapons, it seems that perhaps the author mixed up their isotopes in their rush to put a hysterical spin on the story. Plutonium 239 has a 24,000 year half-life and would be worthless in a RTG.
    • "containing plutonium isotopes including Pu-239"

      There would likely be a tiny amount of Pu-239 in it, which is all the "Oooh nookklar bad" lobby need to get worked up about.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wagnerer ( 53943 )

        Pu-239 is everywhere due to all the detonations that have been done throughout the world. The average person urinates a few hundred million atoms of Pu-239 every trip to the bathroom. So yes Virginia, your body contains "Plutonium isotopes including Pu-239".

      • Pu-238 concerns me a lot more than micrograms of Pu-239.
        Pu-238 is hot as hell. Pu-239 is barely radioactive.

    • The article looks correct to me. It clearly says that the Pu238 is not suitable for an explosive device and that the danger is from ingestion. It does say however, that the device also contains Pu239.

      • Re:Pretty sure the article is wrong (Score:4, Interesting)

        by wagnerer ( 53943 ) on Monday December 15, 2025 @01:53PM (#65859775)

        The fine print is its an impurity. For RTG's you want the short half life of Pu238 but it's not worth the lift to do isotopic separation. They just use production methods that primarily produce Pu-238 but there are very low probability paths in those production cycles that still make some 239.

        • I still don't see anything in the article that is incorrect. I think the commenter above who says the article is wrong didn't actually read the article and just assumed the author said the device could be used as an explosive device.

    • This is how NASA powers some space-probes. Further from the sun, solar panels often can't do the job such that RTG's are used. But currently there's a shortage of P238 because the USA changed the way it processes nuclear material, and thus doesn't have it as a by-product like we used to. It now has to be explicitly manufactured, requiring expensive setups. We used to buy it from Russia for a while, but since the war that's part of the sanctions.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )

      Radiothermal generators use plutonium 238

      Regardless of the isotope used, plutonium in any form is a toxic heavy metal. The radioactivity just makes things worse. Leaving the RTG behind could cause all kinds of problems in the future.

      • The concentration matters. It takes quite a bit of material to become chemically toxic, around half a gram.

        If glacier melt is leeching it into the river system, it's extremely unlikely that anyone will absorb anywhere near that amount. The flow rate of large rivers is measured in thousands of cubic feet per second; that's a massive dilution of any single source of contamination.

        The routine pollution--including both sewage and industrial waste--is almost certainly a much larger health risk.

        The article is mos

        • The article is mostly fearmongering and science fluff. If India is unwilling to tackle the clear and present dangers of pollution in the Ganges, I don't see any justification to worry about a hypothetical threat.

          Did you even read the article? The story is primarily about the mission, not the current danger. Any danger posed by the device is a small footnote to the story and is called "negligibly small". There are some quotes by local residents who have concerns, but "fearmongering" is a mischaracterization.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

            Yes, why would anyone think that invoking Nagasaki is fearmongering? It's crazy to think "Nagasaki" is anything but a reference the reader can identify with (like "as long as ten football fields" or "more books information than the library of congress") and the choice of the phrase "nuclear device" is anything other than the author's desire to be technically correct (the best kind of correct) in his descriptions.

            Crazy, I say.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yep. They're wrong because these so-called "journalists" used Damn Interesting as a source, parroting misinformation, and failed to do original research and fact-checking.
    • Absolutely correct. Pu-238 is NOT fissionable and NOT used in nuclear weapons. See https://artsandculture.google.... [google.com]

  • They just don't know where in the glacier it fell.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by vivian ( 156520 )

      If it's radioactive enough to be a problem I would imagine it's easily detectable, considering that there are solid state sensors that can detect as little as 1 nSv/h of radiation and are apparently sensitive enough to be sometimes triggered by bananas.
      If it's so radioactively inert that it can't be detected, then is it really a problem?

  • Add to list of odd units of measure (Score:3)

    by edi_guy ( 2225738 ) on Monday December 15, 2025 @01:00PM (#65859617)

    "...beach-ball-size nuclear device"

    A soccer ball, basketball, volleyball, rugby, at least these have some standards unto themselves. But I honestly have no idea the diameter of your average beach ball.

  • Cheryl Rofer has a good post on this over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money:

    https://www.lawyersgunsmoneybl... [lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com]

  • Look, I know "nuclear device" is correctly generic, so that RTGs and things like them, legitimately count. But let's be serious: right around the very same time this real stuff happened, some really great fake stuff happened too: the movie Goldfinger.

    And once you've watched Goldfinger, "nuclear device" is just a euphemism for a bomb. So don't go calling RTGs "nuclear devices," please.

    • I get where you're coming from, but at the same time, you can't just call an RTG "technically a nuclear device".
      They are radiologically significant. They're not a smoke detector.
  • the article says pu239 was in the device but there is no evidence that says that so it's pure speculation on the writer's part. pu238 yes, pu239 no.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      It would have been a very minor impurity from the refining process, so it's there but not an actual issue.

      • maybe an impurity, i agree, not an issue. pu238 is an alpha emitter so it's only an issue if you breath eat or eat it. and it's easily detected in the river., which it never has been.

  • It takes a lot of effort to coordinate bringing in cocaine in USFS planes, turning it into crack, and putting it on the street. They were busy.

  • Getting Ready To Rupture (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Monday December 15, 2025 @03:25PM (#65859961)

    Most of the other comments already pointed out that this is a non-issue/nothing-burger.

    But if my math is right, the generator, currently 60 years old, has been building up helium pressure inside the vessel. That pressure should be around 12,000 to 13,000 PSI right now. That means that sometime between now and the next 40 years, probably 15 years, the vessel should rupture under the pressure. This will leak an explosive fart of helium and perhaps some ungoodness.

    But it will still almost certainly be a nothing-burger.

    • Helium doesn't actually stay inside any container due to diffusion, so chances are that pressure buildup will actually not happen.

  • Damn Interesting covered this (Score:3)

    by sinkskinkshrieks ( 6952954 ) on Monday December 15, 2025 @04:58PM (#65860145)
    Spies on the Roof of the World [damninteresting.com]

  • Oh, if only there were some sort of a detector (or counter) that could be used to locate the 60 year-old nuclear device... Maybe we could ask Hans Geiger, I bethe's got some ideas...

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Geiger counters- super useful at finding concentrated alpha emitters under hundreds of meters of ice.

      Keep throwing those good ideas out there, buddy. I'm sure no actual physicists have thought of them.
  • Hardly surprising that that psychopath was involved in such a thing in the first place.

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