Ksenia Yudina, a spokeswoman for the Severodvinsk regional administration, said planned military activities at the site were canceled and the town's 500 residents did not have to leave.Nyonoksa is about 30 miles from Severodvinsk, a city of 183,000, where the radiation spike was reported. Now, it's fighting back.“The system is one of several new strategic-range nuclear delivery systems that Russia is developing,” Reif said. Last Thursday, five nuclear specialists employed by Rosatom, Russia… “We are literally making electricity out of thin air.”“It’s not entirely clear what Russia tested but there is a suspicion that the test involved Russia’s globe circling nuclear powered cruise missile,” Kingston Reif, Director of Disarmament & Threat Reduction Policy at the Arms Control Association, said in an email. • Russia: Although initially denied, involvement of radioactive materials in the accident was later confirmed by Russian officials. The latest nuclear weapons — like the Burevestnik missile — are also nuclear powered, leveraging advances in Russian reactor design and miniaturization. On 13 August, the authorities initiated evacuation of the village of Nyonoksa. The missile that was being tested during the accident is believed to be part of a Russian effort to circumvent U.S. missile defenses, should Washington ever build a nationwide defense system. Second, the explosion hammers home that Russia is still years away from perfecting the weapons that it wants everyone to be frightened of.The Washington Post has reported that the Trump administration discussed conducting the first U.S. nuclear test explosion since 1992. The Russian military said radiation levels were normal but disclosed few details about the incident.The institute is working on small-scale power sources that use “radioactive materials, including fissile and radioisotope materials” for the Defense Ministry and civilian uses, Vyacheslav Soloviev, scientific director of the institute, said in a video shown by local TV. The US air defence network is configured on the assumption any air attack would come from the north, west, or east, but not the south. Russian authorities have confirmed that the explosion involved “an isotope power source in a liquid propulsion system”. He did not say how much fissile material had been involved in the accident, or what role it may have played in the explosion.According to what little is known about the project, the missile is designed to be launched using a traditional jet propulsion motor before the nuclear power plant takes over in the air.The slow release of information has heightened concerns that a major incident took place offshore from the Nenoksa missile testing site. An official state of mourning has been declared in the Russian city of Sarov.
Russia was believed to have moved Burevestnik testing to the current Nenoksa site earlier this year.The concept builds on an idea originally examined by the US in the late 1950s: a nuclear-powered missile able to fly vast distances powered by an on-board reactor, tracing a complex flight path to outflank enemy defences.The Burevestnik (Storm Petrel) experimental cruise missile – called "Skyfall" by Nato – is an ambitious nuclear-powered cruise missile in development by Russia's armed forces.Essentially the idea has been to develop a missile with effectively no limitation of conventional fuel range, which could fly around the globe multiple times or trace a flight path – for instance – over the Pacific and through South America to target the US via Mexican airspace, making conventional anti-missile defences, as they are currently deployed, redundant.Russian scientists have indicated that they were working on miniaturised sources of nuclear energy when a rocket engine exploded last week, increasing scrutiny of the possibility that the accident occurred while testing an experimental cruise missile powered by a small reactor.Test failure symptomatic of wider escalation of US-Russia nuclear tensions, expert saysExperts in Russia’s nuclear programme have also spotted the nuclear fuel carrier ship Serebryanka near the site of last week’s explosion, where it is believed to have been taking part in a recovery effort.