How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device?

The mission demanded the utmost secrecy. A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills - and their willingness to keep their mouths shut - were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas. Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice. One misplaced foot, one careless slip, and it was a 2,000-foot drop, straight down. Just below the peak, the Americans and their Indian comrades got everything ready: the antenna, the cables and, most crucially, the SNAP-19C, a portable generator designed in a top-secret lab and powered by radioactive fuel, similar to the ones used for deep sea and outer space exploration. The plan was to spy on China, which had just detonated an atomic bomb. Stunned, the C.I.A. dispatched the climbers to set up all this gear - including the 50-pound, beach-ball-size nuclear device - on the roof of the world to eavesdrop on Chinese mission control. But right as the climbers were about to push for the summit, the weather went haywire. The wind howled, the clouds descended, a blizzard swept in and the top of the forbidding mountain, called Nanda Devi, suddenly disappeared in a whiteout. From his perch at advance base camp, Capt. M.S. Kohli, the highest-ranking Indian on the mission, watched in panic. “Camp Four, this is Advance Base. Can you hear me?” he recalled shouting into a walkie-talkie. No response. “Camp Four, are you there?” Finally, the radio crackled to life with a faint voice, a whisper through the wash of static. “Yes ... this ... is ... Camp ... Four.” “Come back quickly,” Captain Kohli remembered ordering them. “Don’t waste a single minute.” “Aye, aye, sir.” Then Captain Kohli made a fateful decision. He needed to, he said - to save the climbers’ lives. “Secure the equipment. Don’t bring it down.” “Aye, aye, sir.” The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb. It hasn’t been seen since. And that was 1965. Capt. M.S. Kohli with fellow Indian mountaineers at the 1965 World’s Fair in New York. Captain Kohli’s archive Buried beneath the rock and ice of the Himalayas, in one of the most remote places on earth, lies a sensational chapter of the Cold War, and it’s not over yet. What happened to the American nuclear device, which contains Pu-239, an isotope used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and even larger amounts of Pu-238, a highly radioactive fuel? Nobody knows. Sources: Pete Takeda, Global Runoff Data Centre, Copernicus Global Human Settlement Layer, Google Earth After losing it at the top of that mountain 60 years ago, the American government still refuses to acknowledge that anything ever happened. The whole mission was wrapped in deception from the very beginning. A trove of...

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