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

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/13/world/asia/cia-nuclear-device-himalayas-nanda-devi.html

https://archive.ph/STNMp

How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device?
A plutonium-packed generator disappeared on one of the world’s highest mountains in a covert mission that the U.S. will not talk about.
By Jeffrey Gettleman, Hari Kumar, Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles
Dec. 13, 2025

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.

...

[Captain Zero]

1. One of their hanf picked climbers was Chinese

Intelligence?

My guess.

[underpants]

2. The C. I. A. gas its own bombs?

[Boo1]

5. No

a nuclear powered generator that was going to be used to spy on the Chinese in the mid 60's.

Probably fell off the ledge it was on and it buried somewhere on the glacier.

[MineralMan]

8. There was no bomb. It was a generator of electricity.

Did you read the OP?

[cliffside]

3. Very interesting and well written article, thanks for posting, a bit more from the article ....

"According to Captain Kohli and the once-secret Indian government documents, a team of climbers finally managed to install a new batch of surveillance equipment, powered by radioactive fuel, on a flat ice shelf on a lower summit, near Nanda Devi, in the spring of 1967.

But the Himalayan snows constantly buried it, cutting off signals it might have picked up. Once, when Indian climbers scaled back up to see what was wrong, they were astonished by what they found.

The warm generator had melted straight through the flat ice cap, Captain Kohli said. It sat in a strange cave, like a tomb, several feet under the snow, burrowing itself deeper and deeper into the ice. It was as if the device was hiding itself.

That sputtering telemetry station was shut down in 1968, with the equipment retrieved and sent back to the United States, according to Indian documents. But the C.I.A. still didn’t give up..."

[EX500rider]

4. Soviet Union did much more:

USSR Sprinkled More Than 2,500 Nuclear Generators Across The Countryside

Hundreds of these tiny atomic terrors are still unaccounted for in the rugged landscape of the former Soviet Union

https://www.jalopnik.com/ussr-sprinkled-more-than-2-500-nuclear-generators-acros-1850501190/

[hunter]

6. One can't help but wonder if India retrieved it for it's own nuclear program.

That's not the kind of thing the CIA would want to talk about.

[dalton99a]

7. +1