“How an India-US spy mission lost a nuclear device in the Himalayas”, India Today, July 25, 2025:
“In February 2021, devastating flash floods struck Uttarakhand, killing around 80 people, leaving 124 missing, and completely wiping out two hydropower projects. A theory resurfaced that a lost nuclear-powered surveillance device, abandoned at 25,000 feet in the Himalayas in 1965 during a joint US-India expedition to Nanda Devi, might have contributed to the disaster by melting snow and triggering avalanches. But that, thankfully, was not the case.
Scientific investigations identified a different cause: a massive rock and ice avalanche, triggered by the collapse of a hanging glacier near Ronti Peak. The sheer force of the falling mass generated enough heat and momentum to release a deadly surge of water, debris, and silt down the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga rivers, resulting in the sudden catastrophic floods.
The lost nuclear device from the Nanda Devi Plutonium Mission has returned to public discourse with every natural calamity in Uttarakhand, be it the 2021 disaster or the 2018 cloudburst, or the more recent incident of Joshimath’s subsidence……….”
Read the full article at Indiatoday.com
