Link Between Climate Change – Mont Blanc – Air India Crash And India’s Nuclear Program – PDF

• About a dozen Indian newspapers from 1966 were found by a local restaurant owner near the town of Chamonix in France
• The papers have surfaced in the French Alps, under the ice of a melting Mont Blanc glacier.
• They are believed to be from an Air India plane that crashed on 24 January, 1966.
• Mont Blanc, Europe’s third*-highest peak.
• 4,809-metre

The 2 Indian Plane crashes on Mont Blanc

• November 1950 – Air India Flight 245 ‘Malabar’ flying from Bombay to London (via Istanbul-Geneva) had crashed on Mont Blanc, killing all 48 on board.
• January 1966 – Air India flight 101 ‘Kanchenjunga’ was flying from Bombay to London (via Delhi-Beirut-Geneva)when it crashed near the summit of Mont Blanc, killing all 117 on board. The flight’s black box was never recovered.

Homi Jehangir Bhabha

• Among the 117 dead in the Air India 101 crash, was Homi J. Bhabha, who was then the head of India’s Atomic Energy Commission.
• Bhabha is generally acknowledged as the father of Indian nuclear power.
• 1964 – China’s first Nuclear Test
• 1964 – Bhabha had publicly claimed that India could develop its own nuclear device in less than 18 months.
• USA did not want nuclear proliferation in Asia.
• Did CIA explode a bomb in –air just to stop India becoming a nuclear power? **
• Bhabha was carrying classified documents containing Indian assessments of Chinese defences and nuclear weapons.
• The “Top Secret” documents were discovered in 2016 from the melting Bosse glacier near Mont Blanc.
• French inquiry commission report on the crash in 1967 ruled out any conspiracy.

Global Warming and Glacier Retreat

• Rising global temperatures are causing mountain glaciers to melt and polar ice sheets to retreat.
• Glaciers in the French Alps have lost a quarter of their area in the past 40 years, according to a research study in 2011.
• In the late 1960s/early 1970s, the ice fields slipping down Mont Blanc and the surrounding mountains of the European range covered some 375 sq km.
• By the late 2000s, this area had fallen to about 275 sq km.

La Mer de Glace

Trift Glacier in  Switzerland

• The Mont Blanc area, which has lost a quarter of its glacial ice due to climate change, has in recent years exposed remains of frozen hikers missing for decades.

Melting Glaciers unearthing History

• While the debris from the two catastrophes remained buried for decades in the high mountains, recent Alpine melting is causing the remains to surface; with many discoveries coming to the fore in the past decade.
• 2012 – A bag of diplomatic mail, stamped ‘On Indian Government Service, Diplomatic Mail, Ministry of External Affairs’,
• 2017 – some human remains
• In the Italian Alps, melting ice has even revealed bodies of fallen soldiers from the first world war.
• The most valuable relic from the Mont blanc crash was found in 2013 – a box of precious stones including emeralds, sapphires and rubies that was estimated to be worth Rs 2 crore

Latest Burning Issues | Free PDF

Sharing is caring!