Utterly wild story about a nuclear generator lost atop a Himalayan mountain by the CIA 60 years ago. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/13/world/asia/cia-nuclear-device-himalayas-nanda-devi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8k8.jOUn.daSfdUlyfo3e [Gift Link]
Discussion
Loading...
@mattblaze I read that from reddit. That is crazy. The cold war was a crazy time.
@mattblaze I love the casual mention of their plan to take explosives up to the summit of Nanda Devi & blow things up as deemed necessary. “Galaxy brain” doesn’t begin to describe that idea.
@mattblaze Something tells me that the Indians recovered it already, but can't admit to it.
@mattblaze This beautifully-presented story seems to be a total beat-up. Radio Thermal Generators like this do not contain fissile Pu-239, but Pu-238, which emits harmless low-energy alpha radiation that doesn't even penetrate the skin. They were even implanted to power some early pacemakers - an uncle had one of those.
@mattblaze Thanks for sharing this - what a ridiculous mission. And the tragedy of sinking a self-warming plutonium device into a giant mountain glacier, especially now with global warming thawing out everything.
That generator will certainly wash up below the glacier in the coming decades and the locals will be lucky if it is still contained.
@mattblaze Ah yeah. I remember a story about that in either "Rock & Ice" or "Climbing Magazine" 15 years ago or so.
Jogging my memory, Pete Takeda (Editor at Rock & Ice) wrote a book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Eye-Top-World-Terrifying-C-I/dp/1560258454
ETA: A lot of new details in the NYT article.
@mattblaze It is politically especially convenient to blame the recent string of disasters (floods, landslides) in the state on a CIA plot than on climate change and unrelenting and unregulated ongoing construction/dams/mining/etc. Anyway, here's what Nanda Devi looks like from "our" angle, further to the south-east (the photos in the article are from the south west, and much closer-up).
@mattblaze The more I learn about the CIA, the more convinced I become that this is an agency full of folks who think they're the smartest, sneakiest people in the world, when in fact they're just a bunch of bumblesome blowhards.
@mattblaze Oooh, you'd think that much metal would be visible on SAR (though maybe not if encased in hundreds of feet of snow and ice).