Russia Says Leak of Secret Nuclear Weapon Design Was an Accident

By ANDREW E. KRAMERNOV. 12, 2015 Continue reading the main story Share
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MOSCOW — The Kremlin’s chief spokesman has confirmed that a report
broadcast on Russian television this week revealed the design of a
secret nuclear weapon delivery system: a drone submarine that could
attack coastlines.

Russian officials said the revelation of the submarine, which has not yet
been produced, was accidental. But it came to light in the Russian news
media in a way that suggested that the Kremlin wanted the West to know.

Such a submarine design had been conceived decades ago, independent
Russian military commentators said, but it had not been revealed until
now. It would function as a long-range torpedo and would avoid missile
defenses by traveling under the ocean’s surface.

News of the design was reported on state and NTV television on Monday
as though merely in passing, during a meeting between President Vladimir
V. Putin and military industry officials and generals. The broadcast began
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At one point, the camera zoomed in on something one of the military
officers was reading: a binder opened to a page showing the weapon design.

“Maritime Multifunctional System Status-6,” a headline said, in block
Cyrillic letters, above an illustration showing the submarine and a text
in easily decipherable large letters explaining the weapon’s effects.

The submarine would “defeat important economic objects of an enemy
in coastal zones, bringing guaranteed and unacceptable losses on the
country’s territory by forming a wide area of radioactive contamination
incompatible with conducting military, economic or any other activities
there for a long period of time,” it said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told Russian
news agencies that the cameras had accidentally filmed a secret document.

“Indeed, some secret data fell into the field of view of these
cameras,” Mr. Peskov was quoted as saying by the news agency
Interfax. Because the document was a genuine secret, he said, the video
was subsequently removed from the channels’ websites. “We hope such
a thing will never be repeated,” he said.

Yet commentators on the Echo of Moscow radio station suggested Thursday
that the television broadcast was hardly an accident, given the tight
control over the state news media here. Rather, the commentators said,
the broadcast was the latest instance of nuclear saber-rattling from
Russia at a time of rising tensions with the West.

Instead of a formal announcement, in this interpretation, the revelation
of the submarine was couched as accidental to amplify its intimidating
effects — a military officer had been casually perusing the design
while in a meeting with Mr. Putin.

At the height of the crisis in Ukraine last year, a Kremlin-linked
commentator, Dmitri Kiselyov, spoke of Russia’s ability to reduce
the United States to “nuclear ash.” Later, a Russian ambassador to
Denmark warned the country faced nuclear destruction for having backed
the United States’ missile defense plans.

RBK, a Russian newspaper, cited an unidentified weapons expert as saying
that Soviet designers first conceived of the pilotless submarine in the
1960s as a vehicle for transporting a large nuclear device into shallow
coastal waters to create a radioactive tsunami.

The submarine, the newspaper said, had been called “Sakharov’s
Torpedo” after the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, but had never
been built.

Meduza, a Latvia-based news portal covering Russian affairs, cited
blogs of Russian military history enthusiasts asserting that the design
resurfaced in the 1980s, under the code name “Skif,” but that it
was again shelved.

Dusted off today, the design is apparently something Mr. Putin is
considering, based on the sequence of the leak and Mr. Peskov’s
confirmation.

Mr. Putin has sharply objected to the United States’ missile defense
plans that American officials say target states such as Iran. The Russians
say the plans could undermine Moscow’s second-strike capability,
disrupting the nuclear balance between Russia and the United States.
Correction: November 12, 2015

An earlier version of this article misidentified the country in which
the news portal Meduza is based. It is Latvia, not Lithuania.