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Message: <blockquote data-quote="1sam" data-source="post: 27507336" data-attributes="member: 557062">Cont.American author and climber Pete Takeda, who authored the book An Eye At The Top Of The World: The Terrifying Legacy Of The Cold War’s Most Daring CIA Operation, says it’s a “tricky" question. “Some experts will say that the plutonium represents a major health threat. Others dismiss the danger as no more hazardous than an airport X-ray machine. The truth lies somewhere in between," he writes over messages on Facebook.During his research, Takeda had sent water and silt samples collected from the Nanda Devi area between 2004-07 for testing to two American laboratories; the results came in 2008. “One claimed there was no evidence of Pu (Plutonium) other than naturally occurring. The other lab claimed there was proof of Pu from the device in the sample," he says. Kapadia says these findings were ignored by the Union government. “I don’t feel the Indian Government has enough concern about this issue to take note," Takeda adds.Calls and emails to the director of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, one of the organizations that Morarji Desai appointed to investigate the issue of radiation, went unanswered.IMF vice-president Amit Chowdhury, a former air force officer, says: “There is no proposal to allow climbing of the Nanda Devi main peak or allowing anybody inside the inner sanctuary. I don’t want to hazard a guess on whether the sanctuary and the peak is closed partly because of the missing device from the 1965 expedition. I don’t have any data and haven’t heard about this from anybody, so my guess is as good as anybody’s. I haven’t really followed the story of the missing plutonium. Permission for all climbing expeditions has to go through the IMF and over the last 10 years I haven’t heard of any search operation conducted by the government or anybody else."In his book, Takeda describes what went into SNAP. “The SNAP-19’s plutonium consists of seven fuel capsules, small rods inserted in a graphite block. They were arranged in a radial pattern—one axial rod dead centre with the remaining six arranged evenly spaced and equidistant, like a compass with six cardinal points.“The material is an alloy of Pu-238 with 18 percent Pu-239. Pu-238 gives off far more heat than Pu-239, which... is the fissile material that ‘explodes’ in nuclear weapons. Pu-238 has a half-life of 87 years—half-life is the time required for the material subject to exponential decay, in this case a radioactive element, for half its atoms to lose radioactivity. Alloying the two yielded the most effective combination of lifespan and energy generation. The SNAP was expected to last decades were it to be in the depths of space, or bleak mountaintop."In an article on the website Rockandice.com, Takeda writes about his meeting with Jim McCarthy, an elite American climber who claims to have handled the plutonium and loaded the device. McCarthy blames this exposure to radiation for his subsequent testicular cancer, from which he recovered. In the same article, Takeda quotes McCarthy: “I saw the sherpas fighting over who got to carry (the SNAP)," adding: “They had no idea of what it was. They’d put the thing in the middle of their tent and huddle around it. I guarantee none of them are alive now."A respected author of non-fiction titles on the Himalayas, Bill Aitken says that the first time he heard about the lost plutonium, he was “horrified but then realized that humanity is basically idiotic". “You have a primitive source like the Ganga, on which millions of lives depend, and then you do something extraordinarily stupid," he says on phone from Mussoorie.Given the issue of “national interest", the publisher of his 1994 book, The Nanda Devi Affair, dropped a chapter that detailed the 1965 incident. “I was annoyed but was later pleasantly glad that characters like (Henry) Kissinger, (Richard) Nixon and (Lal Bahadur) Shastri did not appear in my book on Nanda Devi. Possibly Nanda Devi, the goddess, herself intervened," says Aitken, laughing.Once thought to be the tallest mountain in the world, Nanda Devi is venerated in large parts of Garhwal as a temperamental goddess. Natural calamities are often attributed to the goddess’ anger, says Ganguli. Even as he considers himself an atheist, Ganguli says Nanda Devi played the role of a protector when lives were at stake. “When faced with some men’s limitless audacity, the mountain retained the generator," he says with a smile, adding, “For a lot of people, Nanda Devi means much more than a mountain."For at least one American family, Nanda Devi represents a very personal loss.On a climbing day in September 1976, a short window when expeditions were allowed, Nanda Devi Unsoeld lay dying on the high-altitude slopes of the same mountain from which she got her name. The 22-year-old girl was there to climb the peak along with a team that included her father, the veteran American climber Willi Unsoeld. She was suffering from an acute stomach ailment and high-altitude sickness, and Unsoeld, who named his daughter after a mountain that had left him besotted, couldn’t carry her down the mountain. He tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but felt her lips growing cold as tears coursed down his beard.Close to the Camp IV site where the nuclear-power generator was lost, Willi Unsoeld buried his daughter. Amid the murkiness of a nuclear arms race, espionage, and the still continuing narrative of threat, her body remains there as the definitive truth.</blockquote>

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