How did the CIA lose a nuclear device?

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 inaccessible Himalayan peaks, the US government still denies that this mission ever took place.

The device, a portable SNAP-19C generator containing plutonium isotopes, including Pu-239 – the same material used in the Nagasaki bomb – was left behind in October 1965, when a sudden snowstorm forced the climbers to retreat from Camp Four, which was located just below the summit.

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The mission began as 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 therefore recruited select American climbers and coordinated with Indian intelligence to transport the necessary surveillance equipment to the mountain.

Captain MS Kohli, the Indian naval officer leading the expedition, ordered the climbers to secure their equipment and descend when a snowstorm rolled in. Jim McCarthy, the last surviving American climber, recalled warning Kohli that he was making a mistake.

“You can’t leave plutonium next to a glacier that feeds the Ganges! Do you know how many people depend on the Ganges?”

Of course, when the teams returned in the spring of 1966, the entire ice rink where the equipment had been stored had disappeared – it had been cut off by an avalanche. Search expeditions in 1967 and 1968 found nothing.

The device remains buried somewhere in the glaciers that feed the tributaries of the Ganges River.

nytimes.com

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