In the world that talks about nuclear weapons, a device is a nuclear explosive without a delivery vehicle. This is fairly generally known, by physicists and political scientists, along with many of the general public. But “device” is, in other contexts, a neutral word referring to pretty much anything mechanical. If you want to get clicks, you can leverage the two definitions, which is what the New York Times did (gift link).

In 1965, the CIA tried to set up a detection station for Chinese nuclear tests on Nanda Devi in the Himalayas. The first several paragraphs of the Times article don’t give the date. Having been teased by the implication of nuclear weapons in the headline, I wondered if this was recent. The date eventually appears.

Those paragraphs include a very scary plutonium fact.

The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb.

Okay, something is wrong here. This “device” may not contain enough plutonium for a nuclear explosion, so it’s probably not a device. A little later,

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