Russia Has Failed Another Nuclear Test
A nuclear-powered missile’s explosion is less important than the government’s failure to tell the whole truth about it.
Problems? What problems?
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/BloombergMoscow isn’t the only place where you can see signs that all is not well in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. A Russian missile test gone wrong on Aug. 8 took at least five lives. The confused partial explanations that followed confirmed that the Russian authorities can’t be trusted to tell the world or their own people the truth about nuclear accidents.
Soon after an explosion at the Nyonoksa testing ground in the Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia, the city authorities in Severodvinsk, a nearby city with a population of about 190,000, reported that radiation levels had jumped for about an hour, though remaining within safe limits. The report, however, was pulled from the city’s official website (only screenshots exist today). The Defense Ministry, however, issued a press release saying a “liquid fuel missile engine” had blown up, which would leave the radiation leap unexplained. It didn’t help that the military closed the part of the White Sea surrounding the testing ground for civilian shipping.