Why on earth did they not turn on the telemetry system before abandoning the device?
At least that way you could ping the damn thing from a helicopter and triangulate the replies.
Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
51–60 of 129 posts
Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
#52That sounds like a complete disaster, can plutonium in the water supply of 200 million people cause real problems? I don’t know better, but if I did I’d compare this to the DuPont C8 Teflon scandal
I don't think anyone that has commented so far (or the article itself) really understands how problematic it really is. I don't either for sure, but it's a few 10s(?) of kgs of heavy metal. It's probably going to act like a rock in the glacier, eroding slowly over a long period of time. I don't know how much is problematic, but consider the concentration of naturally occurring Uranium as a point of comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Nat.... Even factoring in a few orders of magnitude for refined Plutonium vs. naturally occurring Uranium, it's still a relatively low concentration, and that assumes it erodes entirely and quickly, neither of which seems likely at all.
Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't thermal vision be better at finding it? Presumably the thing is hot (especially compared to ambient) and should be visible with some advanced thermal imaging solutions?
It's not switched on, so it wouldn't be hot. It was supposed to be switched on and activated at the peak which they never reached.
You can't switch radioactive decay on and off. The heat source is always on.
Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
10 half lives means it will have reduced radioactivity to (1/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/1)*100 % of original or .19% of its original radioactivity. Also keep in mind radioactive decay is not even. The faster, thus more dangerous, particles inherently decay faster and will be even more degraded, I'm not going to do the math on it, but, probably another order of magnitude or three.
True but plutonium is pretty poisonous too. Luckily the ocean is very big
Source? Other than the radioactivity, plutonium isn’t any more poisonous than other heavy elements, afaik. And it’s not a lot of material.
Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
#55Issue 63 of Alpinist magazine had a climbing history of Nanda Devi, that I recall included some discussion of the nuclear device: https://shop.holpublications.com/products/alpinist-magazine-...
Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
People were aware of the danger at the time. Here's a collection of press clippings after the story was exposed by Outside magazine. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81M00980...
Funny how they publish this on their own website given as they still don't officially confirm the operation according to the other article linked above
Well this is just a set of press clippings, and you could consider it's just part of their open-source collection of things relevant to them.
It's neither an admission nor a denial. But I get your perspective on it being funny, and it is. Just like there's data in there on UFOs and aliens even tho CIA doesn't officially confirm those.
I think the FOIA reading room is basically like a library of interesting things. I'm surprised more people don't see the value of the stuff in that library. It's one of the best digital collections online, I think. And the search through scanned PDFs is pretty great...I suppose you can expect that from an intelligence agency.
Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine what happened that WASN'T documented. This is totally off-topic but related to your post: The CIA LSD testing was completely off the books. The journalists who uncovered it relied on hundreds of interviews. The CIA simply hired Sidney Gottlieb to do whatever he wanted to with zero oversight because the CIA wanted to achieve mind-control before the Russians. Gottlieb literally bought all of the LSD in the worl…
Wow indeed. And oh, the irony -- LSD is the ultimate anti-mind-control drug.
Not necessarily. LSD reduces the influence of implicit priors. What gets reintegrated depends on context ("set and setting").
Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The KGB were definitely the shrewder operation (this is why people effectively giving their modern counterparts the benefit of the doubt via blind equivalency irks me). The CIA did some absolutely insane things during the Cold War (and after), but the KGB was in some ways the backbone of the Soviet Union - it doesn't even begin to compare. The saying "No one does it better" is apt when it comes to things like active…
> (this is why people effectively giving their modern counterparts the benefit of the doubt via blind equivalency irks me) It's Career Inertia. For half a century CIA hired people who had invested massive resources in becoming completely fluent in Russian, well versed in Russian culture, and who had cultivated contacts in Russia. These are the sorts of skills that take a lifetime to develop. All of the most senior st…
I had a thought that it could be something worse than that.
In a normal war, you don't start off with your military at full strength before the war. Most of your people are new and drawn from your general population, and it's hard for anyone to predict who it will be. Makes it hard to infiltrate ahead of time.
But if you've been fighting a cold war using a wartime-sized apparatus for decades, in which adversarial powers have been trying to infiltrate your organizations the entire time, what happens if they succeed? Get someone into the clandestine organizations in a position to direct hiring. Then hire their own people. They're career bureaucrats, not political appointees, so once they're in, they're in. These organizations are expected to operate in secret, so there is no oversight.
Hanlon's razor and everything, but I'm not sure that applies in a situation where strong attempts at malice are actually expected. It would explain a lot about their behavior in recent memory.
Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine what happened that WASN'T documented. This is totally off-topic but related to your post: The CIA LSD testing was completely off the books. The journalists who uncovered it relied on hundreds of interviews. The CIA simply hired Sidney Gottlieb to do whatever he wanted to with zero oversight because the CIA wanted to achieve mind-control before the Russians. Gottlieb literally bought all of the LSD in the worl…
Wow indeed. And oh, the irony -- LSD is the ultimate anti-mind-control drug.
I’m sure you’re aware of the concept of “set and setting.” The environment can greatly influence the character and content of a psychedelic experience.
Mind control can be as simple as attaching trauma to a particular ideology, or invoking a spiritual experience with some specific subject matter.
I think it could probably be done although it would be wildly unwieldy and unethical.
Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi
#60Last week, I went into the rabbit hole and researched about the whole incident as my drinking water comes from one of the tributaries of Ganga river and this device has polluted a source glacier of the river - with plutonium. Great.
One of the climbers, Jim McCarthy claimed he got cancer due to the time he spent in close proximity of the device and according to him, the local people who helped them in the trek are long dead because they spent much more time huddled close to the device. They were not cautioned about the dangers as the mission was "top secret".
When this story came to light back in 1978 after an article was published in a magazine and someone in US congress wrote a letter to the president, Indian govt. finally felt the need to assess the consequences of their blunder.
Researchers hypothesized that the device melted through the snow before reaching the mountain rock surface where it remains stuck to this day. They tested water samples from the river for a year or two while the story was hot and public pressure was on. Ideally, they should have continued periodic testing forever and annual search missions to locate the device.