[sacw] South Asians Against Nukes Post (14 Jan 00)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asians Against Nukes Post
14 January 2000
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#1. US group to post India's N-site images on Web
#2. CIA Expedition Turned Indian Mountain Into Radioactive Peak
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#1.
The Hindustan Times
14 January 2000

US GROUP TO POST INDIA'S N-SITE IMAGES ON WEB

Washington, January 13 (UNI)
A DAY after a US non-profit group published top-secret spy satellite
photos of suspected long-range missile sites in North Korea on its
website, it says it will post nuclear and missile site images of India and
Pakistan.

Media reports said the non-profit group, the Federation of American
Scientists (FAS), bought pictures of N. Korea's suspected Taepodong
missile test site taken in November and published them on its website. The
pictures were reportedly purchased for $ 2,000.

These pictures are the first of a dozen nuclear and missiles site images
that the FAS plans to purchase from the Colorado-based space imaging. It
next plans to buy satellite images of Pakistan and India and put them up
at http//: www.Fas.Org.FAS was founded as the federation of atomic
scientists in 1945 by members of the Manhattan project who produced the
first atomic bomb.

=46AS appears to underplay North Korea's capability to develop a reliable
missile system stating, "it is quite evident that this facility was not
intended to support, and in many respects is incapable of supporting, the
extensive test programme that would be needed to fully develop a missile
system."

It is reportedly interested in raising a public debate by publishing the
images and wants to suggest that the US was overreacting to the threat
from North Korea.

State department spokesman James Rubin, speaking at his daily press
briefing yesterday, said the threat posed by the North Korean missile
development was 'genuine' and the US government's judgement is based "from
a panoply of intelligence sources."

Answering a reporter s query about the implication of the easy
availability of commercial 'spy satellites' material, Mr Rubin said US
companies were allowed to commercialise remote sensing imagery, "provided
it is consistent with national security and foreign policy objectives."

"The US retains the right at all times to restrict such commercial imagery
for national security or foreign policy reasons," Mr Rubin hastened to
add.
______________

#2.
[Book Review]

The Independent (London)
=46oreign News; Pg. 10
January 3, 2000, Monday

CIA EXPEDITION TURNED INDIAN MOUNTAIN INTO RADIOACTIVE PEAK;
HIMALAYAN TIMES NANDA DEVI

By Stephen Goodwin

CLIMBERS ARE urging India to reopen the Nanda Devi Sanctuary, one of the
mountain wonders of the world and a sacred place to Hindus. Unfortunately,
it may also harbour a nuclear time bomb.

The story of Nanda Devi, the highest peak in India, runs from the sublime
to the frighteningly ridiculous. Thought an impregnable shrine until two
English adventurers penetrated its rim in 1934, the sanctuary was the scene
of a CIA fiasco 30 years later when climbers recruited by the US agency
tried to plant a nuclear-powered listening device on the 25,600ft summit.

Nanda Devi's fearsome storms thwarted the "spies who went into the cold".
The device was caught in an avalanche and never found. One day its
radioactive remains may spew from a glacier into the headwaters of the
sacred Ganges.

The extraordinary events are catalogued in detail in an appendix to Nanda
Devi-Exploration and Ascent, a new compilation of the classic 1930s
accounts by Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, the two mountaineers who first
trod the hallowed ground.

Though the official Indian line is that the sanctuary is closed to protect
it from the kind of filth left by expeditions in the 1970s, the embargo may
have more to do with what is ticking away beneath the snows, argues the
publisher and climber Ken Wilson.

It can hardly be by chance that the only groups allowed into the sanctuary
in recent years have been of Indian scientists, medics and army engineers,
he says. And for all the litter along trekkers' trails and at base camps
elsewhere in the Indian Himalayas, the sanctuary is the only area closed,
officially, to recover from pollution.

"It is all so bizarre," says Wilson. "The sanctuary is such a wonderful
place, and if it isn't closed because of the nuclear device, surely it
could be re -opened on a restricted basis for low-impact expeditions-back
to the style of Shipton and Tilman?" Mr Wilson suggests a ban on commercial
trips and film crews.

Roger Payne, general secretary of the British Mountaineering Council,
looked down into the sanctuary in 1994 when he and Julie-Ann Clyma reached
the summit of the adjoining Nanda Devi East (24,400ft), outside the
forbidden zone.

"As time goes on, it seems increasingly unrealistic to maintain a total
ban," he says. "Maybe the turn of the millennium provides an occasion for
India to consider reopening the sanctuary. You cannot value mountains
unless you have access to them-though we all recognise it would have to be
carefully controlled."

Payne and Clyma would be early applicants for permits. Few mountain areas
offer such a feast of potential new routes, including Nanda Devi's
Eiger-like west face. Nor is the attraction just Nanda Devi-the bliss-
giving Goddess. The 70-mile sanctuary wall has 12 peaks of more than
21,000ft. The same ice ramparts that kept the high meadows of the sanctuary
inviolate until the 1930s and provided cover for the CIA's shenanigans are
the stuff of mountaineers' dreams.

And dreams they are likely to remain, thanks partly to fellow climbers.
Nine experienced US mountaineers took part, with Indians, in the CIA's
"Operation Blue Mountain"-some out of patriotism, though most just couldn't
believe their luck. The CIA and the Indian Intelligence Bureau wanted to
spy on China, but for the climbers it was a $ 1,000-a-month junket.

The mission and subsequent attempts to find the radioactive device stayed
secret until 1978 when Morarji Desai, Prime Minister at the time, owned up
after a devastating account in the American magazine Outside-later said to
have been based on a CIA leak.

The 13in cylindrical power pack contained nearly 3lb of radioactive
plutonium 238. The theory is that its heat-porters had actually enjoyed the
warmth of their strange load-melted the surrounding ice and the cylinder
burrowed its way to the underlying rock.

"Presumably it's incarcerated below the ice. The glaciers there aren't over
long and when it spews out at the snout the debris will have meltwater
flowing over it," says Wilson.

Harish Kapadia, editor of the Himalayan Journal, thinks it is "quite
likely" nuclear waste is the true reason for the ban. He does not believe
there is any prospect of it being lifted. Any decision would be at senior
ministerial level. False rumours of the sanctuary reopening have been
exploited by rogue travel agents-to the chagrin of at least one British
group, which reached the gateway to the mountains at Joshimath before being
turned back.

It all makes a sorry story beside Shipton's vivid account of how he, Tilman
and three Sherpas first entered the sanctuary via the precipitous gorges of
Rishi Ganga, and Tilman's sequel on the successful ascent of Nanda Devi.
With typical humility, Tilman wrote of a feeling of sadness that the
mountain had succumbed-"that the proud head of the goddess was bowed".
=46ortunately, he could not have remotely imagined the indignities that were
to follow.

'Nanda Devi - Exploration and Ascent', by Eric Shipton and H W Tilman,
Baton Wicks, pounds 10.99.

GRAPHIC: A lost nuclear power unit may be the reason India refuses to
reopen its highest mountain Reuters
(Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC)