Dubai – Masaader News
The explosion at nuclear missile base in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region killed at least five scientists and caused radiation readings in neighbouring cities to spike to 20 times their normal level for half an hour, according to The Guardian.
Russia’s defence ministry said the explosion had taken place during testing of a rocket engine, but the country’s nuclear agency, Rosatom, later confirmed that several of its employees had been killed during testing of an “isotope power source in a liquid propulsion system”.
David Cullen, the director of the Nuclear Information Service in the UK, said on Monday that the view among independent experts was that the explosion appeared to have been caused by the failure of an experimental nuclear-powered cruise missile known in Russia as the 9M730 Burevestnik and by Nato as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall.