[HN Gopher] How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device in the Himalayas?
___________________________________________________________________
How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device in the Himalayas?
Author : Anon84
Score : 21 points
Date : 2025-12-14 14:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| manarth wrote:
| https://archive.is/eTdkQ
| manarth wrote:
| For additional context, the "Nuclear Device" in question is a
| SNAP-19C, an RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator), which
| generates electricity via radioactivity decay (approx 30W for
| this model).
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Interesting to see this level of cooperation between the United
| States and India in 1965. Especially between the American and
| Indian intelligence agencies.
|
| Historians of this time period usually describe India as having a
| more frigid relationship with America by the mid 1960's with
| India moving closer to the Soviet Union and the United States
| moving closer to Pakistan. But articles like this demonstrate
| that the situation may have been more complex than that.
|
| Of course geopolitics can sometimes change quickly. The
| leadership in the US and in India did change between 1965, the
| early 1970's and the late 1970's so that was a factor as well.
| jhbadger wrote:
| As the article mentions, this was about their shared worry of
| Mao's China and their nuclear advances. India then as now has a
| strong connection to the USSR/Russia -- they flew, and still
| fly, MiG planes, for example.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It was mutual.
|
| The US shifted to becoming de facto allied with China in the
| early 1970s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, and Pakistan
| helped with the initial backdoor diplomacy [0][1] that lead to
| US-Chinese normalization in the 1970s.
|
| India, having fought a war against both Pakistan and China in
| the 1960s, pivoted to the Soviet Union as a result, who were
| also miffed at China because of the Sino-Soviet split and were
| looking for a bulwark.
|
| > Historians of this time period usually describe India as
| having a more frigid relationship with America by the mid
| 1960's with India moving closer to the Soviet Union and the
| United States moving closer to Pakistan
|
| A major reason was Brzezinski - LBJ and later Carter's foreign
| policy czar.
|
| He was a "realist" whose primary goal was boxing in the USSR
| (he spent his early childhood in Moscow during the Stalinist
| purge and Poland before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). As such,
| he pivoted the US away from India in favor of Pakistan and
| China.
|
| The is why the US went from building IITs and allowing it's
| tech companies like Burroughs and IBM building joint ventures
| in 1960s India to de facto sanctions in the 1970s.
|
| Kissinger followed a similar policy as Brzezinski, and IMO a
| major reason was that both grew up in pre-War Europe and their
| past experiences colored their views as a result.
|
| [0] - https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2015/10/pakistan-
| and-ch...
|
| [1] - https://www.isas.nus.edu.sg/papers/pakistan-china-
| relations-...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| There is an interesting video by Sarah Paine on Youtube
| discussing the geopolitics of this. (Paraphrasing from memory)
| she says that the US tried to be friends with both but, because
| the scars of partition were so painful, this wasn't possible
| and they just ended up pissing off both. Apparently Pakistan
| was very strategic due to the presence of US listening posts
| and U2 bases.
| alephnerd wrote:
| China played a role as well. The US pivoted to China from the
| 1970s to 1990s due to the rivalry with the USSR.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Sarah Paine is an expert on China and covers this (and lots
| more besides). If you are at all interested in geopolitics,
| then I recommend watching some of her videos.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Is she actually considered an expert, by other experts? I
| watched a couple clips of her which were recommended to
| me on YouTube, and she just came across as a self-
| congratulatory booster for the inevitable triumph of
| Western liberal democracy, the sort of end-of-history
| talk we all now mock when it comes from e.g. Fukuyama.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >she just came across as a self-congratulatory booster
| for the inevitable triumph of Western liberal democracy
|
| I've watched 2 or 3 hours of videos and that isn't what I
| took away. She does argue that a rules based
| international order, free trade, democracy and liberalism
| is a superior system to authoritarianism, but I don't
| think too many people (in the West, at least) would
| disagree with that.
| alephnerd wrote:
| As someone who was adjacent to China studies back in it's
| early days in the late 2000s/early 2010s (it was not
| mainstream back then - everyone was concentrating on
| Russia and the MidEast during that era and those of us
| who warned about China's potential were ignored), I think
| she is decent, but I wouldn't really call her a China
| expert (she is absolutely a Naval strategy expert
| though). To become a policy expert in a region, you need
| to understand it's institutional and organizational
| mores.
|
| I'd recommend following academics affiliated with the
| FSI@Stanford or the Fairbanks Center@Harvard instead.
| They tend to be the ones most in touch with policymakers
| on both sides of the Pacific, and are often a conduit for
| Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues.
|
| There has been a deluge of academics in the US entering
| "China studies" in the same way you saw "Mid East
| experts" proliferate in the 2000s and "Kremlinologists"
| in the 1980s-90s.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >I wouldn't really call her a China expert
|
| That was my take. I don't know that she calls herself
| that. She certainly seems very knowledgeable about China
| (and Japan and Russia).
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| "She spent ten years on her doctoral research in Russian
| and Chinese history at Columbia University, which
| included five years of research and language study in
| China, Taiwan, Russia, Japan, and Australia.'
| alephnerd wrote:
| I'd disagree with her bio on Wikipedia.
|
| Most of her early research on China was with regards to
| Imperial Russia and Imperial China's rivalry in East and
| North Asia (ended up being published into a book back in
| the 1980s [0]), but was largely superficial and done in
| the context of US-China normalization in the 70s as a
| check against the USSR. Her limited Putonghua fluency is
| a major issue as well for someone who is a supposed China
| scholar.
|
| Much of her work about that time period has been
| superseded by Yuhua Wang [1] and other younger and more
| quantitative scholars who took more of an
| institutionalist approach.
|
| Even during my time, she was not viewed as a significant
| academic in the space - that remains to be students of
| John Fairbanks, Kenneth Lieberthal, Mary Gallagher,
| Rodrick MacFarquhar, and Yasheng Huang because a large
| portion of Chinese decisionmakers today either studied
| under them or under faculty who were advised by them in
| the 1980s-2000s period.
|
| Furthermore, she has a history of media self promotion,
| and the loudest academics (especially on YouTube) tend to
| be the least regarded, because media engagements are such
| a time sink that it means you aren't really participating
| in policymaking adjacent work like Track Diplomacy.
|
| This is why I take a dim view of her - she started off in
| the 70s as a Latin America researcher who pivoted to
| Russian history in the 80s, Japanese history in the 90s,
| Naval policy in the 2000s, and China recently in the
| 2010s. These aren't the hallmarks of a domain expert and
| I say this as someone who studied under a couple of
| those.
|
| Heck, she's started trying to pivot/shoehorn India
| studies the same way as the others becuase there is a
| vacuum in the field now that the most relevant
| contemporary India academics in the US (Raghuram Rajan,
| Aravind Subramanian, Karthik Subramanian, Ashutosh
| Varshney, Karthik Muralidharan, and Nirupam Bajpai) have
| taken steps back from US academia because they are all
| either transitioning or transitioned into Indian
| policymaking roles.
|
| [0] - https://www.routledge.com/Imperial-Rivals-China-
| Russia-and-T...
|
| [1] - https://yuhuawang.scholars.harvard.edu/
| alephnerd wrote:
| The US also pivoted to de facto allying with China by the 1970s.
|
| In the eyes of contemporary NatSec leadership like Kissinger
| (Nixon, Ford) and Brzezinski (LBJ, Carter), leveraging the Sino-
| Soviet split to box in the Soviets was the ideal option.
|
| As such, from 1972-1992 the US posted soldiers in Xinjiang
| monitoring the USSR [0], sponsored govenrnent led tech transfers
| and scientific collaboration [1], provided support for Chinese
| military modernization [2][3], and expanded economic cooperation
| [4].
|
| This _also_ played a role as to why US intel in the 2000s assumed
| Xi Jinping would be pro-American [5], as he started his career
| working on the US supported modernization of the PLA as a junior
| secretary to Geng Biao [6] - who was the primary reason the
| Maoist regime was overthrown in the 1970s.
|
| By the 1970s, the _primary_ NatSec goal was blocking the USSR,
| and as a result realism became the primary foreign policy
| strategy used by the US. As such, you ended up seeing policies
| like ditching India and Taiwan in favor of Pakistan and China,
| supporting communist Somalia over not-really-communist Dergist
| Ethiopia during the Ogaden War, and swaying then Soviet-aligned
| Egypt in favor of the US by cultivating Anwar Sadat and
| culminating in the Camp David Accords.
|
| [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/18/world/us-and-peking-
| join-...
|
| [1] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93China_Agreement_o...
|
| [2] - https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/17/world/us-decides-to-
| sell-...
|
| [3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/04/archives/study-urges-
| us-a...
|
| [4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/26/business/us-china-
| investm...
|
| [5] - https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BEIJING3128_a.html
|
| [6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geng_Biao
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| I thought we've been led to believe that the US has sensitive
| radiation monitoring capabilities that could be capable of
| somewhat pinpointing the location of the device or at least
| detect it's still there or has spread? Satellite detection?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-14 20:01 UTC)