13 ms·

Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

209 points by hudvin 6y ago

Ericson2314 6y ago
The more one learns, the more it seems like the CIA spent the whole cold war poorly executing silly stunts,
- jamiek88 6y ago
  UK too. Bond movies give an impression of British intelligence intelligence that is unwarranted. Riddled by KGB spies with very little inside Moscow themselves.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    British Intelligence was a complete clusterfuck roughly until Peter Wright's generation came of age within the services and were finally able to institute things like Vetting(!!!!!!!!!!). After that, however, starting slightly dubiously with Polyakov (Possibly a dangle) and highlighted by Gordievsky they were "winning". I don't have a citation on hand, but I believe Gordievsky stated that a set of diplomatic expulsions in the mid 1970s absolutely crippled KGB operations in the UK and the station never really recovered. I personally just about (70/30) believe that Hollis was ELLI, it's just too good to be true with the lack of offical resolution and correlation with SONYA. If he was really a double agent, then the Russian's would have nearly had the heads of both MI5 and SIS in their control (Philby was in line for the throne). I am currently writing a hands on (Zachtronics-style even, e.g. build your own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)) dialogue-y game set roughly in this time period set inside MI5, I hope to be able to capture how crap they were.
    - Retric 6y ago
      The complete failure of British Intelligence to predict the fall of the USSR shows they might have gotten better at counter espionage, but still failed at their primary job. The tricky bit isn’t collecting intelligence, the tricky bit is being able to turn raw data into something worth all the effort of collecting it.
      - mhh__ 6y ago
        True, but economics predicting 2*n of the last n crashes and Noam Chomsky predicting 17 of the last 0 revolutions indicates that it's an impossibly difficult problem than mere incompetence. SIS do not publish their archival material so we'll probably never know exactly which side of that argument they deserve to be placed.
        Retric 6y ago
        Predicting the timing of a crash is basically impossible, but predicting instability is more straightforward. To use a recent example the US stock market basically ignored COVID until mid February, but in January people where talking about an economic risks of a possible pandemic and the signs just kept getting worse.
  - billfruit 6y ago
    Lecarre's works give a better portrayal of British Intelligence than James Bond.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  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.
  - octoberfranklin 6y ago
    > (this is why people effectively giving their modern counterparts the benefit of the doubt via blind equivalency irks me) It's Career Inertia. For half a century CIA hired people who had invested massive resources in becoming completely fluent in Russian, well versed in Russian culture, and who had cultivated contacts in Russia. These are the sorts of skills that take a lifetime to develop. All of the most senior staff at the intelligence agencies fall into this category. This is why the intelligence agencies stick their fingers in their ears and sing "LALALALALALA... I can't hear you" every time Chinese intelligence humiliates them. They're a one-trick pony: anti-Russian operations. That's all they know how to do. They're just trying to get to retirement, no matter what it costs the country.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      I had a thought that it could be something worse than that. In a normal war, you don't start off with your military at full strength before the war. Most of your people are new and drawn from your general population, and it's hard for anyone to predict who it will be. Makes it hard to infiltrate ahead of time. But if you've been fighting a cold war using a wartime-sized apparatus for decades, in which adversarial powers have been trying to infiltrate your organizations the entire time, what happens if they succeed? Get someone into the clandestine organizations in a position to direct hiring. Then hire their own people. They're career bureaucrats, not political appointees, so once they're in, they're in. These organizations are expected to operate in secret, so there is no oversight. Hanlon's razor and everything, but I'm not sure that applies in a situation where strong attempts at malice are actually expected. It would explain a lot about their behavior in recent memory.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  Imagine what happened that WASN'T documented. 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-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que... https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-ci... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/buried-treasure-the-cias-lsd-freak-out/id1333621434?i=1000467196055 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/buried-treasure-the-ci...
  - pstuart 6y ago
    Wow indeed. And oh, the irony -- LSD is the ultimate anti-mind-control drug.
    - traceddd 6y ago
      I’m sure you’re aware of the concept of “set and setting.” The environment can greatly influence the character and content of a psychedelic experience. Mind control can be as simple as attaching trauma to a particular ideology, or invoking a spiritual experience with some specific subject matter. I think it could probably be done although it would be wildly unwieldy and unethical.
      - pstuart 6y ago
        Yes, I'm very aware. The CIA was engaging in torture in the name of research. My quip was based on the fact that under proper set and setting LSD has the ability to "open the mind" beyond the "normal world" and its associated conventions.
    - walleeee 6y ago
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  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.
- srikanthkrish 6y ago
  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.
- adamcharnock 6y ago
  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)
tmilard 6y ago
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.
- graderjs 6y ago
  People were aware of the danger at the time. Here's a collection of press clippings after the story was exposed by Outside magazine. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81M00980R001200070031-8.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81M00980...
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Funny how they publish this on their own website given as they still don't officially confirm the operation according to the other article linked above
    - graderjs 6y ago
      Well this is just a set of press clippings, and you could consider it's just part of their open-source collection of things relevant to them. It's neither an admission nor a denial. But I get your perspective on it being funny, and it is. Just like there's data in there on UFOs and aliens even tho CIA doesn't officially confirm those. I think the FOIA reading room is basically like a library of interesting things. I'm surprised more people don't see the value of the stuff in that library. It's one of the best digital collections online, I think. And the search through scanned PDFs is pretty great...I suppose you can expect that from an intelligence agency.
albertgoeswoof 6y ago
That sounds like a complete disaster, can plutonium in the water supply of 200 million people cause real problems? I don’t know better, but if I did I’d compare this to the DuPont C8 Teflon scandal
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  RTGs like this are made to withstand orbital reentry, pressure from the bottom of the ocean, etc. It's fairly unlikely it's gonna leak in the snow.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Are you sure this one was like that? I'd assume RTGs are a small enough market that they would be pretty much all be custom-made and tailored to the current requirements, and given this isn't a space probe and must be covertly transported by people on foot I would be surprised if they have the same amount of shielding/protection than the ones made for space.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      Yes; even the Earth-bound ones are made to withstand major vehicle crashes, corrosion, etc. Ignorant humans dissembling them is a bigger concern.
      - saboot 6y ago
        Yes, this has happened many times with medical radioisotopes. People find them in a scrap yard, get amazed by the glowing blue powder, and leave a deadly trail of contamination until it's discovered what happened.
        GekkePrutser 6y ago
        Yeah like the Goia incident. Terrifying and that wasn't material nearly as dangerous as Plutonium
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
morsch 6y ago
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] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliary_Power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliar...
- nafizh 6y ago
  So after 870 years, it begins to pollute the water?
  - AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
    10 half lives means it will have reduced radioactivity to (1/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/1)*100 % of original or .19% of its original radioactivity. Also keep in mind radioactive decay is not even. The faster, thus more dangerous, particles inherently decay faster and will be even more degraded, I'm not going to do the math on it, but, probably another order of magnitude or three.
    - GekkePrutser 6y ago
      True but plutonium is pretty poisonous too. Luckily the ocean is very big
      - garmaine 6y ago
        Source? Other than the radioactivity, plutonium isn’t any more poisonous than other heavy elements, afaik. And it’s not a lot of material.
threwawaysoff 6y ago
Another story source (2007): https://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-world/ https://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-wor...
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
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.
- closeparen 6y ago
  "We could use a power orb." https://xkcd.com/2115/ https://xkcd.com/2115/
- mannykannot 6y ago
  > Maybe it was stolen. 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.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    We have a long and rich history of people who have no idea about radiation finding something radioactive, taking it home, and showing everyone. I can only imagine that some device that stays hot without any fuel would be of great interest to people who are habitually cold.
    - mannykannot 6y ago
      You will not find people wandering around near the summit (or in the avalanche chutes, where the device probably ended up, buried in snow and ice) of Nanda Devi in the season when even the accomplished mountaineers who left the device there considered it too dangerous to climb - this is one of the tallest and more lethal of the Himalayan peaks.
hudvin 6y ago
Some info: I found this story while reading Fallen Giants (Maurice Isserman) - history of mountaineering in himalayas.
rossmohax 6y ago
> towering at an astonishing 25,646 feet Why does Web have localization for time values (date format, first day of a week, etc), but not for dimensional or weight measurements?
- TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
  SI units
- lexicality 6y ago
  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.
- 8bitsrule 6y ago
  24/3 = 8 "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?
vl 6y ago
They retrieved the second device by flying there! Why not to place it on the mountain by flying there in the first place instead of climbing?
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  Perhaps like in 'Lord Of The Rings', don't think too hard about Gandalf and the Great Eagles.
  - smegger001 6y ago
    Or that he sent a hobbit with the one ring into a mountain alone where one of the two thing that were capable of destroying the ring happened to be located. Gandalf sent Bilbo on a suicide mission into the lonely mountain to get burnt by a dragon to melt the ring avoiding the war of men and orcs entirely.
    - thombat 6y ago
      Except it's only after escaping from the Misty Mountains that Gandalf can have any idea that Bilbo possesses such a ring, but I don't remember him modifying the plan in response to that knowledge. Meaning that if it was a suicide mission, it was set up that way all along, so rather than this being Gandalf the realpolitik puppetmaster it's Gandalf the Rollercoaster Tycoon player, erecting a lengthy and complex scheme just for the joy of watching the ensuing catastrophe.
      - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago
        Is there a Godwin’s Law for discussions eventually leading to LotR topics?
        Intermernet 6y ago
        Éowyn's Law
- 6y ago
doggydogs94 6y ago
At the mention of the word "nuclear", otherwise rational people turn into bumbling idiots.
- sumedh 6y ago
  What do you mean?
- MertsA 6y ago
  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.
  - LorenPechtel 6y ago
    It doesn't sound like there was a containment breach. Pu-238 is hot, that's why it can be used for a RTG. That doesn't mean it's frying you. And it doesn't release more radiation than a bomb. Pu-238 is an alpha emitter--and alpha emitters can only hurt you if they get inside your body (or from simple heat--pick up one of those rods and you'll get burnt just like if you picked up any other hot piece of metal.) The decay product is U-234, also an alpha emitter and with a quarter of a million year half life. Likewise, it's Pu-239 contaminant is an alpha emitter and decays to U-235, likewise an alpha emitter, this time with a half life of three quarters of a billion years. You also don't understand about half lives--you get one decay per atom. If one isotope has a half life a thousand times as long as another you get one thousandth as many decays per second and thus one thousandth the radioactivity per unit of time. A bomb converts material with a long half life into material with short half lives and thus greatly increases the amount of radioactivity.
    - MertsA 6y ago
      >It doesn't sound like there was a containment breach. Trace amounts were detected in the melt water. Plutonium does not exist in nature, all significant amounts are man made. I think it's likely that that plutonium came from the lost RTG fuel rods. The article explicitly mentioned that the American climber was tasked with handling the fuel rods and loading and unloading the device. They lost it at their base camp, not where they intended to deploy it. I believe that would mean that most likely the fuel rods were not yet loaded and sealed into the device and were instead still inside whatever lead lined box they were transported in. I don't know what the actual fuel assembly would have been for a plutonium RTG fuel rod from the 60s but I have a feeling it wouldn't stand up to 60 years worth of corrosion in a wet and warm environment outside of the generator it was supposed to be assembled in. As for the radiation amount, I meant in the hypothetical scenario of comparing it to a lost but undetonated nuclear weapon which would be substantially less radioactive. I'm well aware of what a half life of an isotope is. The half life of Pu-238 is basically as bad as it gets because at 87.7 years it'll take a substantial amount of time for the radioactivity to subside yet as far as half lifes go that's pretty low and would still be highly radioactive. Pu-238 in a water source is pretty bad and while it might be trace amounts now, if the fuel rods are compromised after all that time they're only going to get worse and start leaching out more and more.
octoberfranklin 6y ago
Why on earth did they not turn on the telemetry system before abandoning the device? At least that way you could ping the damn thing from a helicopter and triangulate the replies.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  They would have had to assemble it during an imminently deadly storm. Given the vibe of story, I'd wager the climbers weren't given specific instructions for an abandonment scenario.
privong 6y ago
Issue 63 of Alpinist magazine had a climbing history of Nanda Devi, that I recall included some discussion of the nuclear device: https://shop.holpublications.com/products/alpinist-magazine-issue-63 https://shop.holpublications.com/products/alpinist-magazine-...
wewake 6y ago
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.
- baybal2 6y ago
  There are already things way worse than plutonium in Ganga.
  - tobylane 6y ago
    What are you referring to?
    - wu_187 6y ago
      dead bodies
    - ignoramous 6y ago
      Pollution of the Ganges: https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/pollution-on-river-ganga?sort=mostpopular https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/pollution-on-river-ganga?s...
  - wewake 6y ago
    What's worse than radioactive isotopes that can't possibly be filtered out in conventional water treatment plants? Pollution is an issue in majority of rivers in the world, especially in developing countries but doesn't justify or discount radioactive waste in there.
sandGorgon 6y ago
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). You can climb everywhere...except Nanda Devi.
elihu 6y ago
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).
K33P4D 6y ago
Rest in Peace Homi J. Bhabha

209 points by hudvin 6y ago

Ericson2314 6y ago

The more one learns, the more it seems like the CIA spent the whole cold war poorly executing silly stunts,

jamiek88 6y ago
UK too. Bond movies give an impression of British intelligence intelligence that is unwarranted. Riddled by KGB spies with very little inside Moscow themselves.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  British Intelligence was a complete clusterfuck roughly until Peter Wright's generation came of age within the services and were finally able to institute things like Vetting(!!!!!!!!!!). After that, however, starting slightly dubiously with Polyakov (Possibly a dangle) and highlighted by Gordievsky they were "winning". I don't have a citation on hand, but I believe Gordievsky stated that a set of diplomatic expulsions in the mid 1970s absolutely crippled KGB operations in the UK and the station never really recovered. I personally just about (70/30) believe that Hollis was ELLI, it's just too good to be true with the lack of offical resolution and correlation with SONYA. If he was really a double agent, then the Russian's would have nearly had the heads of both MI5 and SIS in their control (Philby was in line for the throne). I am currently writing a hands on (Zachtronics-style even, e.g. build your own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)) dialogue-y game set roughly in this time period set inside MI5, I hope to be able to capture how crap they were.
  - Retric 6y ago
    The complete failure of British Intelligence to predict the fall of the USSR shows they might have gotten better at counter espionage, but still failed at their primary job. The tricky bit isn’t collecting intelligence, the tricky bit is being able to turn raw data into something worth all the effort of collecting it.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      True, but economics predicting 2*n of the last n crashes and Noam Chomsky predicting 17 of the last 0 revolutions indicates that it's an impossibly difficult problem than mere incompetence. SIS do not publish their archival material so we'll probably never know exactly which side of that argument they deserve to be placed.
      - Retric 6y ago
        Predicting the timing of a crash is basically impossible, but predicting instability is more straightforward. To use a recent example the US stock market basically ignored COVID until mid February, but in January people where talking about an economic risks of a possible pandemic and the signs just kept getting worse.
- billfruit 6y ago
  Lecarre's works give a better portrayal of British Intelligence than James Bond.
mhh__ 6y ago
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.
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  > (this is why people effectively giving their modern counterparts the benefit of the doubt via blind equivalency irks me) It's Career Inertia. For half a century CIA hired people who had invested massive resources in becoming completely fluent in Russian, well versed in Russian culture, and who had cultivated contacts in Russia. These are the sorts of skills that take a lifetime to develop. All of the most senior staff at the intelligence agencies fall into this category. This is why the intelligence agencies stick their fingers in their ears and sing "LALALALALALA... I can't hear you" every time Chinese intelligence humiliates them. They're a one-trick pony: anti-Russian operations. That's all they know how to do. They're just trying to get to retirement, no matter what it costs the country.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    I had a thought that it could be something worse than that. In a normal war, you don't start off with your military at full strength before the war. Most of your people are new and drawn from your general population, and it's hard for anyone to predict who it will be. Makes it hard to infiltrate ahead of time. But if you've been fighting a cold war using a wartime-sized apparatus for decades, in which adversarial powers have been trying to infiltrate your organizations the entire time, what happens if they succeed? Get someone into the clandestine organizations in a position to direct hiring. Then hire their own people. They're career bureaucrats, not political appointees, so once they're in, they're in. These organizations are expected to operate in secret, so there is no oversight. Hanlon's razor and everything, but I'm not sure that applies in a situation where strong attempts at malice are actually expected. It would explain a lot about their behavior in recent memory.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
Imagine what happened that WASN'T documented. 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-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que... https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-ci... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/buried-treasure-the-cias-lsd-freak-out/id1333621434?i=1000467196055 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/buried-treasure-the-ci...
- pstuart 6y ago
  Wow indeed. And oh, the irony -- LSD is the ultimate anti-mind-control drug.
  - traceddd 6y ago
    I’m sure you’re aware of the concept of “set and setting.” The environment can greatly influence the character and content of a psychedelic experience. Mind control can be as simple as attaching trauma to a particular ideology, or invoking a spiritual experience with some specific subject matter. I think it could probably be done although it would be wildly unwieldy and unethical.
    - pstuart 6y ago
      Yes, I'm very aware. The CIA was engaging in torture in the name of research. My quip was based on the fact that under proper set and setting LSD has the ability to "open the mind" beyond the "normal world" and its associated conventions.
  - walleeee 6y ago
GekkePrutser 6y ago
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.
srikanthkrish 6y ago
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.
adamcharnock 6y ago
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)

tmilard 6y ago

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.

graderjs 6y ago
People were aware of the danger at the time. Here's a collection of press clippings after the story was exposed by Outside magazine. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81M00980R001200070031-8.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81M00980...
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Funny how they publish this on their own website given as they still don't officially confirm the operation according to the other article linked above
  - graderjs 6y ago
    Well this is just a set of press clippings, and you could consider it's just part of their open-source collection of things relevant to them. It's neither an admission nor a denial. But I get your perspective on it being funny, and it is. Just like there's data in there on UFOs and aliens even tho CIA doesn't officially confirm those. I think the FOIA reading room is basically like a library of interesting things. I'm surprised more people don't see the value of the stuff in that library. It's one of the best digital collections online, I think. And the search through scanned PDFs is pretty great...I suppose you can expect that from an intelligence agency.

albertgoeswoof 6y ago

That sounds like a complete disaster, can plutonium in the water supply of 200 million people cause real problems? I don’t know better, but if I did I’d compare this to the DuPont C8 Teflon scandal

ceejayoz 6y ago
RTGs like this are made to withstand orbital reentry, pressure from the bottom of the ocean, etc. It's fairly unlikely it's gonna leak in the snow.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Are you sure this one was like that? I'd assume RTGs are a small enough market that they would be pretty much all be custom-made and tailored to the current requirements, and given this isn't a space probe and must be covertly transported by people on foot I would be surprised if they have the same amount of shielding/protection than the ones made for space.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Yes; even the Earth-bound ones are made to withstand major vehicle crashes, corrosion, etc. Ignorant humans dissembling them is a bigger concern.
    - saboot 6y ago
      Yes, this has happened many times with medical radioisotopes. People find them in a scrap yard, get amazed by the glowing blue powder, and leave a deadly trail of contamination until it's discovered what happened.
      - GekkePrutser 6y ago
        Yeah like the Goia incident. Terrifying and that wasn't material nearly as dangerous as Plutonium

deleted 6y ago

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morsch 6y ago

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] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliary_Power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliar...

nafizh 6y ago
So after 870 years, it begins to pollute the water?
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  10 half lives means it will have reduced radioactivity to (1/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/1)*100 % of original or .19% of its original radioactivity. Also keep in mind radioactive decay is not even. The faster, thus more dangerous, particles inherently decay faster and will be even more degraded, I'm not going to do the math on it, but, probably another order of magnitude or three.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    True but plutonium is pretty poisonous too. Luckily the ocean is very big
    - garmaine 6y ago
      Source? Other than the radioactivity, plutonium isn’t any more poisonous than other heavy elements, afaik. And it’s not a lot of material.

threwawaysoff 6y ago

Another story source (2007): https://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-world/ https://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-wor...

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

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.

closeparen 6y ago
"We could use a power orb." https://xkcd.com/2115/ https://xkcd.com/2115/
mannykannot 6y ago
> Maybe it was stolen. 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.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  We have a long and rich history of people who have no idea about radiation finding something radioactive, taking it home, and showing everyone. I can only imagine that some device that stays hot without any fuel would be of great interest to people who are habitually cold.
  - mannykannot 6y ago
    You will not find people wandering around near the summit (or in the avalanche chutes, where the device probably ended up, buried in snow and ice) of Nanda Devi in the season when even the accomplished mountaineers who left the device there considered it too dangerous to climb - this is one of the tallest and more lethal of the Himalayan peaks.

hudvin 6y ago

Some info: I found this story while reading Fallen Giants (Maurice Isserman) - history of mountaineering in himalayas.

rossmohax 6y ago

> towering at an astonishing 25,646 feet Why does Web have localization for time values (date format, first day of a week, etc), but not for dimensional or weight measurements?

TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
SI units
lexicality 6y ago
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.
8bitsrule 6y ago
24/3 = 8 "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?

vl 6y ago

They retrieved the second device by flying there! Why not to place it on the mountain by flying there in the first place instead of climbing?

drdeadringer 6y ago
Perhaps like in 'Lord Of The Rings', don't think too hard about Gandalf and the Great Eagles.
- smegger001 6y ago
  Or that he sent a hobbit with the one ring into a mountain alone where one of the two thing that were capable of destroying the ring happened to be located. Gandalf sent Bilbo on a suicide mission into the lonely mountain to get burnt by a dragon to melt the ring avoiding the war of men and orcs entirely.
  - thombat 6y ago
    Except it's only after escaping from the Misty Mountains that Gandalf can have any idea that Bilbo possesses such a ring, but I don't remember him modifying the plan in response to that knowledge. Meaning that if it was a suicide mission, it was set up that way all along, so rather than this being Gandalf the realpolitik puppetmaster it's Gandalf the Rollercoaster Tycoon player, erecting a lengthy and complex scheme just for the joy of watching the ensuing catastrophe.
    - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago
      Is there a Godwin’s Law for discussions eventually leading to LotR topics?
      - Intermernet 6y ago
        Éowyn's Law
6y ago

doggydogs94 6y ago

At the mention of the word "nuclear", otherwise rational people turn into bumbling idiots.

sumedh 6y ago
What do you mean?
MertsA 6y ago
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.
- LorenPechtel 6y ago
  It doesn't sound like there was a containment breach. Pu-238 is hot, that's why it can be used for a RTG. That doesn't mean it's frying you. And it doesn't release more radiation than a bomb. Pu-238 is an alpha emitter--and alpha emitters can only hurt you if they get inside your body (or from simple heat--pick up one of those rods and you'll get burnt just like if you picked up any other hot piece of metal.) The decay product is U-234, also an alpha emitter and with a quarter of a million year half life. Likewise, it's Pu-239 contaminant is an alpha emitter and decays to U-235, likewise an alpha emitter, this time with a half life of three quarters of a billion years. You also don't understand about half lives--you get one decay per atom. If one isotope has a half life a thousand times as long as another you get one thousandth as many decays per second and thus one thousandth the radioactivity per unit of time. A bomb converts material with a long half life into material with short half lives and thus greatly increases the amount of radioactivity.
  - MertsA 6y ago
    >It doesn't sound like there was a containment breach. Trace amounts were detected in the melt water. Plutonium does not exist in nature, all significant amounts are man made. I think it's likely that that plutonium came from the lost RTG fuel rods. The article explicitly mentioned that the American climber was tasked with handling the fuel rods and loading and unloading the device. They lost it at their base camp, not where they intended to deploy it. I believe that would mean that most likely the fuel rods were not yet loaded and sealed into the device and were instead still inside whatever lead lined box they were transported in. I don't know what the actual fuel assembly would have been for a plutonium RTG fuel rod from the 60s but I have a feeling it wouldn't stand up to 60 years worth of corrosion in a wet and warm environment outside of the generator it was supposed to be assembled in. As for the radiation amount, I meant in the hypothetical scenario of comparing it to a lost but undetonated nuclear weapon which would be substantially less radioactive. I'm well aware of what a half life of an isotope is. The half life of Pu-238 is basically as bad as it gets because at 87.7 years it'll take a substantial amount of time for the radioactivity to subside yet as far as half lifes go that's pretty low and would still be highly radioactive. Pu-238 in a water source is pretty bad and while it might be trace amounts now, if the fuel rods are compromised after all that time they're only going to get worse and start leaching out more and more.

octoberfranklin 6y ago

Why on earth did they not turn on the telemetry system before abandoning the device? At least that way you could ping the damn thing from a helicopter and triangulate the replies.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
They would have had to assemble it during an imminently deadly storm. Given the vibe of story, I'd wager the climbers weren't given specific instructions for an abandonment scenario.

privong 6y ago

Issue 63 of Alpinist magazine had a climbing history of Nanda Devi, that I recall included some discussion of the nuclear device: https://shop.holpublications.com/products/alpinist-magazine-issue-63 https://shop.holpublications.com/products/alpinist-magazine-...

wewake 6y ago

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.

baybal2 6y ago
There are already things way worse than plutonium in Ganga.
- tobylane 6y ago
  What are you referring to?
  - wu_187 6y ago
    dead bodies
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    Pollution of the Ganges: https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/pollution-on-river-ganga?sort=mostpopular https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/pollution-on-river-ganga?s...
- wewake 6y ago
  What's worse than radioactive isotopes that can't possibly be filtered out in conventional water treatment plants? Pollution is an issue in majority of rivers in the world, especially in developing countries but doesn't justify or discount radioactive waste in there.

sandGorgon 6y ago

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). You can climb everywhere...except Nanda Devi.

elihu 6y ago

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).

K33P4D 6y ago

Rest in Peace Homi J. Bhabha