Last week, I went into the rabbit hole and researched about the whole incident as my drinking water comes from one of the tributaries of Ganga river and this device has polluted a source glacier of the river - with plutonium. Great.
One of the climbers, Jim McCarthy claimed he got cancer due to the time he spent in close proximity of the device and according to him, the local people who helped them in the trek are long dead because they spent much more time huddled close to the device. They were not cautioned about the dangers as the mission was "top secret".
When this story came to light back in 1978 after an article was published in a magazine and someone in US congress wrote a letter to the president, Indian govt. finally felt the need to assess the consequences of their blunder.
Researchers hypothesized that the device melted through the snow before reaching the mountain rock surface where it remains stuck to this day. They tested water samples from the river for a year or two while the story was hot and public pressure was on. Ideally, they should have continued periodic testing forever and annual search missions to locate the device.
For people who don't want to slog through the long-form article for the few tidbits of actual information:
"Nuclear device" does not refer to a nuclear weapon in this case, it was a radio signal capturing device powered by a RTG.
They had to abandon the first one when trying to install it due to bad weather and couldn't find it again. Maybe it was stolen, maybe it just melted its way under many meters of ice and snow.
They placed a second one, realized that it melts itself into the mountain (who would have thought), and retrieved that one.
Comments like yours about "slogging through long form writing" are becoming more common. I find it concerning. Your summary bis quite inadequate to me and misses many points while assuming the one you're clarifying is the point. It isn't. Longer writing has great value; let's give it more room.
The story mentions this as being a concern at the time, but if we take the story to be substantially correct, the idea that a foreign government would learn about the device, and then mount a secret expedition to find and recover it during the season climbing is regarded as infeasible, just seems to be paranoid nonsense.
In a nice bit of symmetry, another RTG is lost in an ocean trench: The fuel cask from the SNAP-27 unit carried by the Apollo 13 mission currently lies in 20,000 feet (6,100 m) of water at the bottom of the Tonga Trench in the Pacific Ocean. This mission failed to land on the moon, and the lunar module carrying its generator burnt up during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, with the trajectory arranged so that the cask would land in the trench. The cask survived re-entry, as it was designed to do,[18] and no release of plutonium has been detected. The corrosion resistant materials of the capsule are expected to contain it for 10 half-lives (870 years).[19]
This is totally off-topic but related to your post: The CIA LSD testing was completely off the books. The journalists who uncovered it relied on hundreds of interviews. The CIA simply hired Sidney Gottlieb to do whatever he wanted to with zero oversight because the CIA wanted to achieve mind-control before the Russians. Gottlieb literally bought all of the LSD in the world at one point, and it was given to people such as Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and Whitey Bulger.
I'm starting to suspect there this is something pretty widespread thought history. I've been reading The Anarchy, which is a history of the East India Company (EIC), and it is full of blunders on all sides.
When the EIC first set out from London on their maiden voyage to India, they we're becalmed (stuck without wind) in the mouth of the Thames for 6 months. Just sat there, maybe 50 miles from home.
During some battle, one of the leaders was so high on opium that he was just dawdling around and got shot in the head.
At one point the EIC captured a fort next to one of their factories, then got so distracted looting that a few hours later the enemy returned, re-captured the fort, then forced the EIC out of their original factory.
The more I talk to people in positions of power (which is not many, but a few) the more I get the impression that everyone is just going the best they can against the randomness of the universe. (Side note - one of the may reasons I find conspiracy theories hard to believe)
Its not just the CIA its almost everyone else at the time. I just finished Rise and Kill first, a book on Mossad's targeted killings ops. Its full of really silly and clumsy stuff. My favorite story from the book is that back in the 60's Mossad tried to do the Manchurian candidate routine with a PLO guy, they hired a hypnotist and gave it a few months. The PLO dude eventually got smart,
started playing along, acting as if he got hypnotized and they believed it and let him go with a gun. Once he crossed Israel, he handed his gun to his PLO folks and told them about it.
Intel agencies back in the day were more like startups.
The KGB were definitely the shrewder operation (this is why people effectively giving their modern counterparts the benefit of the doubt via blind equivalency irks me). The CIA did some absolutely insane things during the Cold War (and after), but the KGB was in some ways the backbone of the Soviet Union - it doesn't even begin to compare.
The saying "No one does it better" is apt when it comes to things like active measures and the Russians.
The Russians put multiple nuclear reactors in orbit and crashed one on Canada. Many of their nuclear cores are still in storage orbits. Look up RORSAT :)
Just saying the CIA wasn't the only one acting crazy. Of course this was all before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Nuclear tech was really viewed as less dangerous than it is now.
Because the kind of American that understands that not everyone knows how big a foot is already puts the actual length in brackets so the people that cause problems wouldn't use it even if it was a feature.
Also, if it worked like <date> you'd have to put the value in a standardised unit (eg SI units) which would also annoy the Americans and they'd refuse to do it.
Funny counter-legend here. So this place is the source glacier for...well about a 100 million people of so.
Nobody has kind of died. And yes, we do have a semblance of a free press in India. Which is fairly strange - 12 researchers working on nuclear devices in the past decades dying is not a big deal. But how come not even a few thousand died downstream? Plus this place is religiously significant. Given Indian religious beliefs are around dunking your children in holy waters...it's very surprising really.
The other "not so popular" theory is that India has an active base towards China positioned here. Which is a diplomatic shitfest because of Nepal, Pakistan, China..etc. However most of India's strategic advantage is about geography - we have higher peaks on our side overlooking roads. So it's kinda advantageous to have nobody poking here.
Nanda Devi could be the "Devil's Tower gas leak" of India's nuclear deterrence towards China.
India has a pretty awesome mountain climbing culture and a huge tourism industry (fueled by the best weed in the world).
This wasn't a nuclear weapon, it was a poorly contained RTG and from the sound of it the fuel rods weren't even inside the device yet. A good sized hunk of Pu-238 in the glaciers feeding the Ganges is cause for concern to say the least. The half life of Pu-239 like what would be used for a nuclear bomb is 275x times as much so even just the small amount present for the RTG is releasing many many times more fission products and radiation than a sizeable nuclear weapon.
I don't think anyone that has commented so far (or the article itself) really understands how problematic it really is. I don't either for sure, but it's a few 10s(?) of kgs of heavy metal. It's probably going to act like a rock in the glacier, eroding slowly over a long period of time. I don't know how much is problematic, but consider the concentration of naturally occurring Uranium as a point of comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Nat.... Even factoring in a few orders of magnitude for refined Plutonium vs. naturally occurring Uranium, it's still a relatively low concentration, and that assumes it erodes entirely and quickly, neither of which seems likely at all.
Yes, ingesting plutonium can cause serious problems. I’m surprised that the Indian Government hasn’t commissioned an exhaustive, multi year search for this device. Maybe the snow is too deep? But I can’t see why one couldn’t carefully skewer into the snow, tessellate the whole mountain with such probes and see if it picks up any radioactivity.
Helicopters don't do great at high altitudes like that. Honestly I'm a little surprised that they even attempted to recover the second SNAP with a helicopter.
Spying...
It is fascinating how nuclear was not seen at he time so dangerous.
So much risk on the environment for 'just' listening the Chinese telecom.
I wonder if they could locate it with an antineutrino detector? Though I suspect there isn't a lot of fission happening in a radioisotope thermal generator fuel cell, and maybe the signal would be too weak. Granted, I don't really know how antineutrino detectors work (and for that matter anything nuclear seems like a weird sort of magic to me).
[+] [-] wewake|5 years ago|reply
One of the climbers, Jim McCarthy claimed he got cancer due to the time he spent in close proximity of the device and according to him, the local people who helped them in the trek are long dead because they spent much more time huddled close to the device. They were not cautioned about the dangers as the mission was "top secret".
When this story came to light back in 1978 after an article was published in a magazine and someone in US congress wrote a letter to the president, Indian govt. finally felt the need to assess the consequences of their blunder.
Researchers hypothesized that the device melted through the snow before reaching the mountain rock surface where it remains stuck to this day. They tested water samples from the river for a year or two while the story was hot and public pressure was on. Ideally, they should have continued periodic testing forever and annual search missions to locate the device.
[+] [-] baybal2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|5 years ago|reply
"Nuclear device" does not refer to a nuclear weapon in this case, it was a radio signal capturing device powered by a RTG.
They had to abandon the first one when trying to install it due to bad weather and couldn't find it again. Maybe it was stolen, maybe it just melted its way under many meters of ice and snow.
They placed a second one, realized that it melts itself into the mountain (who would have thought), and retrieved that one.
[+] [-] getlawgdon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannykannot|5 years ago|reply
The story mentions this as being a concern at the time, but if we take the story to be substantially correct, the idea that a foreign government would learn about the device, and then mount a secret expedition to find and recover it during the season climbing is regarded as infeasible, just seems to be paranoid nonsense.
[+] [-] closeparen|5 years ago|reply
https://xkcd.com/2115/
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morsch|5 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliar...
[+] [-] nafizh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ericson2314|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoSoRoCoCo|5 years ago|reply
This is totally off-topic but related to your post: The CIA LSD testing was completely off the books. The journalists who uncovered it relied on hundreds of interviews. The CIA simply hired Sidney Gottlieb to do whatever he wanted to with zero oversight because the CIA wanted to achieve mind-control before the Russians. Gottlieb literally bought all of the LSD in the world at one point, and it was given to people such as Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and Whitey Bulger.
Absolute frikken insanity:
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...
https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-ci...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/buried-treasure-the-ci...
[+] [-] adamcharnock|5 years ago|reply
When the EIC first set out from London on their maiden voyage to India, they we're becalmed (stuck without wind) in the mouth of the Thames for 6 months. Just sat there, maybe 50 miles from home.
During some battle, one of the leaders was so high on opium that he was just dawdling around and got shot in the head.
At one point the EIC captured a fort next to one of their factories, then got so distracted looting that a few hours later the enemy returned, re-captured the fort, then forced the EIC out of their original factory.
The more I talk to people in positions of power (which is not many, but a few) the more I get the impression that everyone is just going the best they can against the randomness of the universe. (Side note - one of the may reasons I find conspiracy theories hard to believe)
[+] [-] srikanthkrish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
The saying "No one does it better" is apt when it comes to things like active measures and the Russians.
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|5 years ago|reply
Just saying the CIA wasn't the only one acting crazy. Of course this was all before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Nuclear tech was really viewed as less dangerous than it is now.
[+] [-] jamiek88|5 years ago|reply
Bond movies give an impression of British intelligence intelligence that is unwarranted.
Riddled by KGB spies with very little inside Moscow themselves.
[+] [-] rossmohax|5 years ago|reply
Why does Web have localization for time values (date format, first day of a week, etc), but not for dimensional or weight measurements?
[+] [-] lexicality|5 years ago|reply
Also, if it worked like <date> you'd have to put the value in a standardised unit (eg SI units) which would also annoy the Americans and they'd refuse to do it.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|5 years ago|reply
"An astonishing 8000 meters" is about as astonishing as 7,817
Machines are already 'correcting' our spelling, do we really want to lose our estimation skills too?
[+] [-] TheGallopedHigh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandGorgon|5 years ago|reply
Nobody has kind of died. And yes, we do have a semblance of a free press in India. Which is fairly strange - 12 researchers working on nuclear devices in the past decades dying is not a big deal. But how come not even a few thousand died downstream? Plus this place is religiously significant. Given Indian religious beliefs are around dunking your children in holy waters...it's very surprising really.
The other "not so popular" theory is that India has an active base towards China positioned here. Which is a diplomatic shitfest because of Nepal, Pakistan, China..etc. However most of India's strategic advantage is about geography - we have higher peaks on our side overlooking roads. So it's kinda advantageous to have nobody poking here.
Nanda Devi could be the "Devil's Tower gas leak" of India's nuclear deterrence towards China.
India has a pretty awesome mountain climbing culture and a huge tourism industry (fueled by the best weed in the world).
You can climb everywhere...except Nanda Devi.
[+] [-] doggydogs94|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MertsA|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumedh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] albertgoeswoof|5 years ago|reply
I don’t know better, but if I did I’d compare this to the DuPont C8 Teflon scandal
[+] [-] creato|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdeadringer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ranger207|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmilard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graderjs|5 years ago|reply
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81M00980...
[+] [-] privong|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hudvin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elihu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] octoberfranklin|5 years ago|reply
At least that way you could ping the damn thing from a helicopter and triangulate the replies.
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|5 years ago|reply
Given the vibe of story, I'd wager the climbers weren't given specific instructions for an abandonment scenario.
[+] [-] K33P4D|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threwawaysoff|5 years ago|reply
https://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-wor...