How many people know that in 1965 the US’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) joined hands on a clandestine mission to install two nuclear-powered sensing devices on the summit of India’s second-highest peak, Nanda Devi, and Nanda Kot, a feature nearby? Both the devices lie abandoned in Uttarakhand’s Garhwal Himalayas and keep ticking, each with its deadly stock of plutonium about half the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Bag,2015).
According to Beckhausen (2013), after China exploded its first nuclear device in 1964, the Pentagon and the CIA were worried about how to monitor Chinese missile tests which were being conducted at a top-secret facility a few hundred kilometers north of the Himalayan mountains. They desperately needed to find out the performance parameters of the Chinese missiles and their compatibility with nuclear warheads. The mountain range blocked ground-based sensors which could have picked up the missiles’ radio telemetry signals. Worse, Pakistan had just kicked out America’s spy planes and, back in the 1960s, precision satellite imagery was still primitive.
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Understanding the matter better
In 1963, USAF General Curtis LeMay, along with a small team of Sherpa guides, had led an expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. The General was tasked by the CIA to head the second expedition in October 1965, this time in a clandestine operation to carry a plutonium-powered generator — known as a SNAP Unit— and a sensor device to a Himalayan peak high enough to secure a direct line of sight to the Chinese missile test site. Once at a suitable summit, the team would assemble the device and aim it towards China.
With the cooperation of India’s Intelligence Bureau, Nanda Devi, a 25,645 ft (7815M) mountain within Indian territory was picked for planting the surveillance equipment. Installing the device, however, meant carrying up equipment weighing around 56kg, including an 8-10ft-high antenna, two transceiver sets, and the most vital component, a system for nuclear auxiliary power (SNAP) generator. The generator’s nuclear fuel, consisting of seven plutonium capsules, came in a special container (Beckhausen, 2013).
However, due to heavy snowfall and declining oxygen levels, the expedition was forced to abandon a summit attempt. The nuclear-fuelled generator, nicknamed Guru Rinpoche by the climbing Sherpas, after the Buddhist god, was already emitting heat, and those who knew about its radioactive dangers were apprehensive. Unable to take the generator with them, the team, therefore, secured it near their camp and returned to safety (Bag,2015; Coburn, 2013).
A follow-up Indian expedition that was sent to retrieve the device told the Americans later that it had gone missing, apparently having slid down the mountain in a landslide, carrying its plutonium with it. Another American expedition, sent in spring 1966 to retrieve the device, flew into the area in helicopters and scanned Nanda Devi for many months with neutron detectors, but failed to pick up any signals. The Americans suspected that Indian intelligence had secretly hiked up there before that spring mission, retrieved the device, and whisked it away, presumably in order to study it and gather scientific and technical information for their own nuclear weapons programme.
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In 1967, the CIA eventually did get a SNAP unit and signal device planted below the summit of Nanda Kot, a 22,510 ft mountain nearby. It was buried in snow three months later and stopped working, although having gleaned enough data from Chinese tests to indicate — at the time — that Beijing did not yet have a long-range nuclear warhead. The plutonium capsules, which have a longevity of over five hundred years, could still be buried somewhere in the snow. The area has been virtually closed for decades. Barring a few exceptions, such as the army or Indian Mountaineering Foundation (IMF) sponsored expeditions, nobody is allowed to climb or explore Nanda Devi, purportedly for environmental reasons (Beckhausen, 2013).
Is the world on the brink of harmful radiation?
Fears have been expressed in the Indian and American media about large-scale plutonium contamination of the Rishi Ganga, the river that drains the Nanda Devi glaciers into the Ganga. According to Manmohan Singh Kohli, the Indian team leader, the “lives of millions of Indians would be affected, especially those living along the Ganga, right up to Kolkata”. Water sources and rocks were tested for hints of radiation, but the real results were always doctored by the GOI (Bag, 2015).
Forty years after leading the expedition which, in 1965, hid the first SNAP generator in a crevice atop Nanda Devi, Kohli (2005) makes a startling revelation by expressing the scare when, in the summer of 1968, an Indian team went to retrieve the second SNAP generator from Nanda Kot :
“When the team reached the Dome (the Nanda Kot Dome where the device was installed), they were shocked to see no sign of the entire equipment. They dug a couple of feet and saw an amazing sight. There was a perfectly sound cave formed with the hot generator at the centre. With the continuous heat emitted from the generator, the snow had melted up to 8ft in all directions, creating the spherical cave!” (Kohli,2005).
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Uranium Smuggling in Meghalaya
According to BBC News, in 2008, police in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya arrested five people for smuggling uranium ore. The packets containing uranium, seized from the culprits, had the seal of India’s Atomic Minerals Division on them. Police were not sure whether those detained were part of a global racket. The arrests were an embarrassing time for India, just days after the Nuclear Suppliers Group ended a ban on civilian nuclear trade with India.
Indian officials had a hard time persuading members of the group that their nuclear industry was in safe hands. This was just one instance of smuggling in radioactive materials. Over the years, scores of nuclear thefts in India have been reported in the international, and even Indian media.
Saleem Akhtar Malik is a Pakistan Army veteran who writes on national and international affairs, defense, military history, and military technology. He Tweets at @saleemakhtar53. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Global Village Space.