The Untold Story Behind CIA’s Lost Nuclear Device in the Himalayas
High in the Indian Himalayas, where the air thins and the world is carved from rock and ice, a secret from the Cold War continues to cast a long, chilling shadow. It’s a story not of ancient myths, but of modern dread, passed down through generations in the villages clinging to the slopes below the majestic Nanda Devi. It’s the untold story of the CIA’s lost nuclear device, a tale that begins with espionage and ends in an enduring, palpable fear.
In 1965, against the backdrop of simmering tensions with China, a clandestine mission unfolded. A joint team from American intelligence and India’s Intelligence Bureau, aided by local porters, undertook a perilous journey. Their goal: to install a nuclear-powered surveillance system on the remote peaks to monitor Chinese nuclear activity. Their cargo: a device containing a significant amount of highly radioactive plutonium-238.
Nature, however, had other plans. A fierce blizzard forced the team to abandon their cargo before reaching the summit. When they returned to retrieve it, the spy device was gone—swallowed by the mountain’s glacial embrace.
For years, the mission remained classified, a hidden footnote of the Cold War. But for the porters like Dhan Singh Rana, who felt the strange warmth of the device through his pack, and for the villagers who heard their hushed stories, the secret was a living thing. They learned a danger was buried in their sacred snows, a silent guest on their doorstep.
“He told me there was a danger buried in the snow,” says Narendra Rana, Dhan Singh’s son, voicing a fear shared by his community. The villagers live with a haunting logic: as long as the glacier holds, they are safe. But if it bursts? It would mean contamination of the very source of life—the air and the waters of the Ganges, a river vital to hundreds of millions across South Asia.
This local terror broke into public consciousness in 1978, sparking political uproar in India. Prime Minister Morarji Desai convened a committee of scientists to assess the risk. Their report, submitted months later, sought to allay fears, concluding that even a rupture would not contaminate the river. Officially, the case was closed.
But in the villages, the heart is not swayed by a decades-old report. The fear is kept alive by the mountain’s own rhythms. When a glacier near Nanda Devi burst in 2021, causing devastating floods, the first thought in many minds was not climate change, but the lost device. “They feared the device had burst,” Rana explains. Every strange noise, every unexplained plume of mist, rekindles the anxiety.
The mystery is compounded by the belief that the device, hot and heavy, may have melted its way deeper into the glacier, shifting over decades in the slow, grinding flow of ice. Subsequent American searches, accompanied by villagers, found nothing. Its exact location remains a ghost in the machine of the mountain.
This absence of a concrete answer is, for the community, the source of deepest unease. As environmentalist Atul Soti notes, “The apprehensions are genuine.” The call from the ground is simple: for transparency, for a clear government statement, for a white paper that addresses their fears directly. The official silence since the 1970s only feeds the speculation and reinforces the dread.
The story of the lost device is more than a historical curiosity. It is a powerful parable about the long afterlife of geopolitical secrets, and how they become embedded in the landscape and psyche of the people who live with them. It highlights the chasm between scientific reassurances issued in distant capitals and the intimate, daily fear of a potential calamity lurking in one’s backyard.
Six decades on, the peaks of Nanda Devi stand as silent sentinels guarding a Cold War relic. For the world, it’s a forgotten mission. For the villagers below, it’s a lost piece of a dangerous past, waiting in the ice, reminding us that some secrets, once buried, are never truly gone. They simply freeze, and wait.
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