Tucked in a village in the Indian Himalayas, over the ages, inhabitants have believed that nuclear device in the Himalayas lie hidden under the snow and rocks holding on to a mysterious tale of high-altitude espionage, involving some of the globe’s top mountain climbers hiding radioactive material to run electronic spy operations, and spooks to control India.
Behind this tale relays the events of how the USA collaborated with India in the 1960s to place nuclear-powered monitoring devices across the Himalayas to spy on Chinese nuclear tests and missile firings. China had detonated its first nuclear device in 1964.
When one of the residents got hit by a huge flood earlier in February, villagers panicked and rumours flew that the devices had “exploded” and triggered the disaster. Behind this event, some scientists believe that the piece of the broken glacier was responsible for the flooding in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, where more than 70 lost lives and others went missing.
The people living there say, “We think that the devices could have played a role. How can a glacier simply break off in winter? We think the government should investigate and find the devices,” Sangram Singh Rawat, the headman of Raini, told a BBC correspondent.
It is believed that at the peak of the Cold War, this conspiracy took place. In October 1965, a group of Indian and American climbers carried seven plutonium capsules along with surveillance equipment – weighing around 57kgs (125 pounds) – which were meant to be placed on top of the 7,816-metre (25,643-ft) Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest peak, and near India’s north-eastern border with China.
A snowstorm forced the climbers to leave the climb well short of the peak. As they hurried down, they left behind the devices – a six-foot-long antenna, two radio communication sets, a power pack, and the plutonium capsules – on a “platform”.
One magazine reported that they were left in a “sheltered cranny” on a mountainside which was sheltered by the wind. “We had to come down. Otherwise many climbers would have been killed,” Manmohan Singh Kohli, a celebrated climber who worked for the main border patrol organization and led the Indian team, said.
When the climbers returned to the mountain next spring to look for the device and haul it back to the peak, they had disappeared.
More than half a century later and after a number of hunting expeditions to Nanda Devi, nobody knows what happened to the capsules.
“To this day, the lost plutonium likely lies in a glacier, perhaps being pulverized to dust, creeping towards the headwaters of the Ganges,” wrote Mr Takeda.
Sources say that “Until the plutonium [the source of the radioactivity in the power pack] deteriorates, which may take centuries, the device will remain a radioactive menace that could leak into the Himalayan snow and infiltrate the Indian river system through the headwaters of the Ganges.”
Captain Kohli, now 89, when asked if he regretted being part of an expedition that ended up leaving nuclear devices in the Himalayas
“There is no regret or happiness. I was just following orders,” he said.
It may not be long before another glacier bursts causing untold damage, or is this just another conspiracy theory, is it just deforestation that is causing glaciers to melt and break, but as usual, one has to divert the real issues by creating intriguing tales?
It will be interesting to find out, but not at the cost of more lives.
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