Following Putin’s speech, numerous US experts told media that they were aware Russia’s attempts to build something like what he described in his speech: A nuclear missile powered by an onboard nuclear reactor. The United States tried – and failed – to deliver something similar in the late 1950s.
The experts went on to tell ABC television that Russia has, in fact, been dabbling in something like this, but that Moscow’s version has been crashing over and over in the Arctic.
They didn’t supply a timeline for the crashes. But Bøhmer suggested that two incidents of iodine 131 pollution measured over Northern and Central Europe between January and March of 2017, and again in January and February this year, might have some connection to those possible wrecks.
The levels of iodine – which has a half life of only eight days – were picked up in both cases by measuring stations in Finland and Norway, which, of course, both abut the Arctic. In the earlier event the releases were confirmed by Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and France as well.
In the event of some sort of nuclear test, says Bøhmer, particularly in a country where nuclear safety wasn’t much of a concern – and both the Russia and the US have a dark history here – iodine could, as it has during nuclear tests in the past, show up in the atmosphere, along with a host of others isotopes on top, such as strontium and cesium.
Neither of these last two isotopes, which have a half lives measured in decades, showed up in the detected releases of iodine. But Bøhmer suggests that the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, which released massive amounts of both isotopes into the environment, could serve to mask their detection in the recent batch of readings.
On both occasions – and unlike the recent detection of radioactive ruthenium, in which Russia’s nuclear reprocessing facility Mayak remains a prime suspect – there were no culprits who could be traced to the not unhealthy but certainly suspicious blooms in iodine 131.