US-based nuclear experts on Friday said that they suspected an accidental blast and radiation release in northern Russia earlier this week occurred during the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile vaunted by Russian President Vladimir Putin last year.
The Russian Ministry of Defense was quoted as saying by state-run news outlets that two people died and six were injured on Thursday in an explosion of what it called a liquid propellant rocket engine.
No dangerous substances were released, it said.
Russia’s state nuclear agency, Rosatom, early yesterday said that five of its staff members died.
A spokeswoman for Severodvinsk, a city of 185,000 near the test site in Arkhangelsk Oblast, was quoted in a statement on the municipal Web site as saying that a “short-term” spike in background radiation was recorded at noon on Thursday.
The statement was not on the site on Friday.
Two experts said in separate interviews that a liquid rocket propellant explosion would not release radiation.
They said that they suspected the explosion and the radiation release resulted from a mishap during the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile at a facility outside the village of Nyonoksa.
“Liquid fuel missile engines exploding do not give off radiation, and we know that the Russians are working on some kind of nuclear propulsion for a cruise missile,” said Ankit Panda, an adjunct senior fellow with the Federation of American Scientists.
Russia has called the missile the 9M730 Buresvestnik. The NATO alliance has designated it the SSC-X-9 Skyfall.
A senior official in the administration of US President Donald Trump, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that he would not confirm nor deny that a mishap involving a nuclear-powered cruise missile occurred. However, he expressed deep skepticism over Moscow’s explanation.
“We continue to monitor the events in the Russian far north, but Moscow’s assurances that ‘everything is normal’ ring hollow to us,” the official said.
“This reminds us of a string of incidents dating back to Chernobyl that call into question whether the Kremlin prioritizes the welfare of the Russian people above maintaining its own grip on power and its control over weak corruption streams,” the official added.
The official was referring to the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, which released radioactive airborne contamination for about nine days.
Moscow delayed revealing the extent of what is regarded as the worst nuclear accident in history.
Putin boasted about the nuclear-powered cruise missile in a speech in March last year to the Russian Federal Assembly, in which he hailed the development of a raft of fearsome new strategic weapons.
The missile was successfully tested in late 2017, had “unlimited range” and was “invincible against all existing and prospective missile defense and counter-air defense systems,” he said.
Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies’ East Asia Non-Proliferation Program, said he believed that a mishap occurred during the testing of the nuclear-powered cruise missile based on commercial satellite pictures and other data.
Using satellite photographs, he and his team determined that Russia last year appeared to have disassembled a facility for test-launching the missile at a site in Novaya Zemlya and moved it to the base near Nyonoksa.
The photographs showed that a blue “environmental shelter” — under which the missiles are stored before launching — at Nyonoksa and rails on which the structure is rolled back appear to be the same as those removed from Novaya Zemlya.
Lewis and his team also examined automatic identification system signals from ships off the coast on the same day as the explosion. They identified one ship as the Serebryanka, a nuclear fuel carrier that they had tracked last year off Novaya Zemlya.
“You don’t need this ship for conventional missile tests,” Lewis said. “You need it when you recover a nuclear propulsion unit from the sea floor.”
The ship signals showed that the Serebryanka was inside an “exclusion zone” established off the coast a month before the test to keep unauthorized ships from entering, he said.
“What’s important is that the Serebryanka is inside that exclusion zone. It’s there. It’s inside the ocean perimeter that they set up. It’s not there by accident,” Lewis said. “I think they were probably there to pick up a propulsion unit off the ocean floor.”
Lewis said that he did not know what kind of radiation hazard the Russian system poses, because he was unaware of the technical details, such as the size of the nuclear reactor.
However, he said that the US sought to develop a nuclear-powered missile engine in the 1950s that spewed radiation.
“It represented a health hazard to anyone underneath it,” Lewis said.
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