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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCIA Planting Plutonium-Powered Spy Device Atop the Himalayas? What Could Go Wrong?
from Wired:
Somewhere on this mountain, Nanda Devi, a CIA surveillance device is buried. Photo: Michael Scalet/Flickr
Inside the CIA Mission to Haul Plutonium Up the Himalayas
It was 1965, and the Pentagon and CIA were worried. The Vietnam War was beginning to ramp up. The Peoples Republic of China had recently conducted its first nuclear test, but intelligence was limited. Chinese missile tests were being conducted at a secretive facility a few hundred miles north of the Himalayan mountains, but intelligence estimates for the missiles range and compatibility with nuclear warheads was unclear. The mountain range blocked ground-based sensors, which could have picked up the missiles radio telemetry signals. Worse, Pakistan had just kicked out Americas spy planes, and precision satellite imagery was still primitive.
There was another option. Two years prior, the first successful American expedition to the summit of Mount Everest had completed its trip with a small team of Sherpa guides. Gen. Curtis Bombs Away LeMay, the Air Forces top officer and who secured some funding for the 1963 expedition, wanted to know if the mountaineers would go back.
Le May was wondering if these hardy Sherpa people who had worked in support of the 1963 expedition and the members themselves might be interested in participating in a clandestine operation, Broughton Coburn, author of the book The Vast Unknown: Americas First Ascent of Everest, tells Danger Room. Their job: carry a plutonium-powered generator known as a SNAP unit and a sensor device to a Himalayan peak high enough to secure a direct line of sight to where Chinas missiles were flying. Once at a suitable summit, the team would assemble the device and aim it towards China.
But the expedition ran into several problems. Everest was out of the question, as the mountain bordered China, leaving a surveillance device vulnerable to being discovered by a potential Chinese summit attempt. Nanda Devi, a 25,645-foot mountain within Indian territory was picked instead with the cooperation of Indian intelligence. However, the expedition was forced to abandon a summit attempt under heavy snowfall and declining oxygen levels. They stashed the equipment in a crevice and anchored it with the expectation they would return the following spring, carry it to the summit and piece it together to make it operational, Coburn says . . .
read more: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/cia-himalayan-spies/?cid=co7547414
The first American team to ascend Everest, several of whom would go on to mountaineer for the CIA. Dave Dingman, kneeling on left, was one of them. Photo: Courtesy of Marie Abercrombie
MineralMan
(146,189 posts)MineralMan
(146,189 posts)that use plutonium use plutonium238, which is useless for nuclear weapons, and primarily emits alpha radiation. If it's buried in a landslide, it will do no harm. Nuclear weapon use plutonium239, a fissile isotope.
hunter
(38,263 posts)... but little about our own.
Mind you, Soviet methods of accounting for these things may have been sloppier, and they may have been under more pressure to "get the job done" ignoring safety, but both sides in the Cold War had and still have a lot of dirty radioactive secrets.