MESOPOTAMIA NEWS SPECIAL SAMPLER OF RELEVANT SOURCES : PUTIN’S  CATASTROPHIC NUCLEAR TEST  Top of the Agenda    13 August 2019

U.S. Investigates New Russian Missile After Explosion
U.S. intelligence officials are reportedly investigating whether a blast off the coast of northern Russia that killed at least seven people involved a test of a new nuclear-propelled cruise missile (NYT).

Russia’s state nuclear agency said rocket fuel being tested (Reuters) on a sea platform last Thursday caught fire, causing it to detonate. Five of those killed in the explosion were scientists, described by the nuclear agency’s head at their burial yesterday as the “pride of the country.” Moscow initially said radiation levels remained normal after the blast, but the state weather service later reported they rose by four to sixteen times (Reuters) in a nearby town. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the new missile is designed to evade U.S. missile defenses.

 

 

Analysis
“It’s unclear if someone in the Russian defense industrial bureaucracy may have managed to convince a less technically informed leadership that [developing an unlimited-range nuclear-powered cruise missile] is a good idea, but the United States tried this, quickly discovered the limitations and risks, and abandoned it with good reason,” Ankit Panda of the Federation of American Scientists told the New York Times.

“Russia’s catastrophic test of a nuclear-powered missile proves that a new global arms race will mean new nuclear accidents,” Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey writes in Foreign Policy.