Russia’s Mystery Missile

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.3 • 107.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2019

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At least seven people were killed by a mysterious explosion in northern Russia, and U.S. officials believe it happened during the test of a prototype for a nuclear-propelled cruise missile. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has hailed the weapon as the centerpiece of Moscow’s arms race with the United States — but what will this mean for an arms race that both countries want to win? Guest: David E. Sanger, a national security correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Intelligence officials suspect the blast involved a prototype known as Skyfall, a missile that Mr. Putin has boasted can reach any corner of the earth and evade American missile defenses.As the death toll has risen from the explosion, Russia’s silence and contradictory accounts have conjured dark memories of Chernobyl.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, on Michael Barrow, this is the day of...
0:09.4	Today, the mysterious explosion of a Russian missile has left an entire team of scientists dead.
0:17.7	David Sanger, on what that means for an arms race between the United States and Russia,
0:24.1	that both sides seem too hot.
0:26.8	It's Friday, August 16th.
0:34.7	David, tell me what happened last Thursday in Russia.
0:39.6	Well, if you were in Moscow, Michael, and you were watching TV, all of a sudden your screen went
0:45.2	blue, and there was a big star that appeared on a blue background. There was wording up there,
0:52.0	basically telling people to take cover. It said,
1:01.2	a strong wind is expected. Take cover in a capital building. Do not shelter or park under trees
1:08.0	or rickety structures. Be careful.
1:10.6	So this is a storm warning? Yeah, it's a storm warning, but the oddity is there was no storm.
1:26.6	Meanwhile, if you were up in northern Russia, up near the white sea, this is the part of Russia that
1:32.6	sort of closes to Finland. And you were looking on the website of one of the local cities.
1:41.2	You saw an indication of a big surge, a brief surge in the afternoon in radiation levels.
1:49.8	This obviously led a lot of people to be concerned, and there were announcements, and there was
1:55.2	actually a rush to buy iodine, because if you remember back to the old Cold War days,
2:02.1	people used to stockpile iodine to keep their thyroid from absorbing radiation and causing thyroid
2:08.4	cancer. Then a few hours later, that warning just disappeared from the city website.
2:17.9	Hmm, so this is sounding kind of mysterious. It's sounding kind of mysterious and really
2:23.6	real aminus. And all of a sudden, there was pressure underway for either local officials or the Russian
2:32.5	to begin to offer some answers about what was going on.
	...

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