After lobbying the president and first lady of Afghanistan to help, activist Farhad Javid has some good news to share. But there’s still a lot of work to do.
August 27, 2019Read More
LONDON/BRUSSELS Aug 27 (Reuters) – Opposition parties said they would try to pass a law which would force Prime Minister Boris Johnson to seek a delay to Britain’s departure from the European Union and prevent a potentially chaotic no-deal exit at the …
August 27, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Terms of Trade is a daily newsletter that untangles a world embroiled in trade wars. Sign up here. Danes may be facing a gloomier economic outlook by the end of the year as the list of global threats grows more ominous.The country’s fina…
August 27, 2019Read More
About 40 people are feared dead or missing after the latest wreck of a boat carrying migrants bound for Europe off the coast of Libya, while about 60 people may have been rescued, the U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday. “Terrible news coming in of po…
August 27, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the German Social Democratic Party are barely holding their ground against the insurgent far-right Alternative for Germany in two states holding elections on Sunday, two polls showed.The…
August 27, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Brazil rejected 20 million euros in emergency funds to fight Amazon fires that had been offered by French President Emmanuel Macron on behalf of Group of Seven countries.The money, part of a G-7 plan to put out the fires and then protect…
August 27, 2019Read More
Yemeni officials say government forces have reclaimed more southern areas from separatists backed by the United Arab Emirates in clashes this week that killed at least 48 on both sides. The officials said Tuesday that government forces took back sever…
August 27, 2019Read More
A boat carrying dozens of migrants bound for Europe capsized Tuesday in the Mediterranean Sea off Libya, with at least 40 people missing and presumed drowned, U.N. officials said, as a support group reported it had gotten a call from someone on the ves…
August 27, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — Russia has released new data that appears to show a nuclear reactor was involved in a mysterious explosion when a weapons test went wrong on Aug. 8. The announcement narrows down the list of weapons that could have been undergoing testing – and, once again, poses the question of why Russia is giving out information piecemeal if the truth is going to come out anywayThe chronology of the official Russian reports of the accident is baffling. First, on Aug. 8, the authorities of Severodvinsk, a city close to the Nyonoksa test site, reported a radiation spike; the report was promptly pulled down from the city’s website. Then, the same day, the Defense Ministry reported that a liquid fuel missile engine had blown up, without explaining the radiation spike. On Aug. 10, Rosatom, the state company in charge of the Russian nuclear program, put out a press release saying its five employees who died in the accident had been “servicing isotope power sources on a liquid fuel engine.” The statement suggested that whatever weapon was being tested, it used, in addition to a rocket engine, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) – a kind of long-lasting battery that doesn’t run a chain reaction but uses the heat released by the natural decay of radioactive materials.Then, Russia didn’t issue any more explanations for a while, but Lassina Zerbo, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, tweeted on August 18 that two Russian monitoring stations close to the accident site were experiencing technical problems. The organization also published a hypothetical model of how fallout from the accident theoretically could have traveled. On August 20, Zerbo reported the monitoring stations were back online and “backfilling data.” Finally, Rosgidromet, the Russian weather monitoring service, put out a statement on Aug. 26, saying the radiation spike in Severodvinsk had been caused by four short-lived isotopes: Strontium-91, Barium-139 and -140 and Lantanum-140. To experts, this suggests that a reactor, not an RTG, was involved. The environmental organizations Greenpeace Russia and Bellona came out with statements pointing out that these particular radionuclides normally would be produced by a chain reaction. The Bellona statement quoted Nils Bohmer, head of research and development at the government agency Norwegian Decommissioning, who told the Barents Observer website that the presence of isotopes were “proof that it was a nuclear reaction that exploded.”The head scientist of Rosatom’s Sarov nuclear center had already hinted that a reactor could have been involved, mentioning the U.S. Kilopower project, which produced a small nuclear reactor, as an example of a Western program similar to the one involved in the accident.There are still plenty of unknowns about the blast. For example, even if Bohmer said he thought the reactor had “exploded,” that’s not certain. If, as U.S. President Donaldbershi Trump had tweeted, the weapon being tested had been a missile known as Burevestnik in Russia and Skyfall in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states, its reactor almost certainly would have left an isotope trail as it went up, accounting for the release of the radionuclides; if its engine then exploded, that would explain the casualties but leave it open whether the reactor was intact and whether it was subsequently recovered.According to leaks, Skyfall has a solid fuel engine, not a liquid fuel one. The likely combination of a liquid fuel engine and a reactor, as well as the use of a marine test site, point toward a different superweapon, mentioned, like Skyfall, in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2018 state of the nation address: The Poseidon underwater drone, or its rumored seabed-launched sibling, the Skif.Obviously, if any of the superweapons were involved, which appears likely, the Russian government’s immediate instinct would have been to cover its tracks. But the problem with such knee-jerk reactions is that truth about nuclear accidents is impossible to hide in the modern world. You can’t take monitoring stations offline without having to account for it; you can’t hide the results of measurements taken by an official agency like Rosgidromet, because international partners will demand answers even if you don’t care about your own population doing the same. The Russian Defense Ministry’s desire for maximum secrecy is untenable given the pressure to provide specific information to the rest of the world. So a multi-stage process resembling strip poker has ensued. The Russian government has cast off one garment after another, finally to uncover enough for observers to reconstruct a more or less coherent picture of what the garments hid. This is a game Russia also played after annexing Crimea: First, flat denials, then hints, then a straight admission.Perhaps a future Russian government will realize that coming out with the truth isn’t just a more honorable policy – it’s also a less embarrassing one. For now, we should expect more information on what actually happened to the reactor during the Aug. 8 test – but not because Russia wants us to know the full story.To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephanie Baker at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
August 27, 2019Read More
Britain’s opposition parties said on Tuesday they had agreed to work together to try and prevent a no-deal Brexit, including through passing legislation or holding a vote of no-confidence in the government. Parliament returns from its summer break nex…
August 27, 2019Read More
In a show of burgeoning security ties between Russia and Turkey, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended the opening of an annual Russian air show as a guest of President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and expressed interest in purchasing the latest…
August 27, 2019Read More
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