In 1965, Indo-US espionage mission lost five kilograms of plutonium in the Himalayas

by VINOD K. JOSE

The first major joint operation conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the IB was facilitated by the tense geopolitical developments of the period: only three years earlier, India had faced a humiliating defeat in its war with China, which erased Jawaharlal Nehru’s unadulterated faith in the communist bloc—until then, slogans like ‘Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai’ had sounded a promising post-colonial world order. The Americans, for their part, were anxiously waging military and ideological wars against communism. Over the course of 1965, 200,000 US soldiers were sent to fight a futile and costly war in Vietnam.

The material intended for the summit of Nanda Devi was deposited at a camp along the ascent, where the climbers expected to find it at the start of the next season. But that winter the equipment—including a 17-kilogram nuclear assembly—was swept away by an avalanche. When Kohli and his team returned in 1966, they discovered that the five kilograms of plutonium 238 and 239 that powered the nuclear device—only one kilogram less than the quantity of plutonium used in ‘Fat Man,’ the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki—were nowhere to be found.

It may not have been the worst failure in the history of Indian and American intelligence, but it would prove to be the one with the most long-lasting consequences. After three consecutive years of searching for the missing nuclear device, the CIA and the IB decided it would never be retrieved. Today, 45 years later, the generator is still at large in the vicinity of Nanda Devi.

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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

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