Russia Calls Jolt ‘Ordinary Quake’
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MOSCOW — A top Russian nuclear official Friday dismissed U.S. suspicions that Moscow carried out an underground nuclear test, saying a tremor in the north was the result of “an ordinary earthquake.”
A tremor of magnitude 3.5 was recorded in the Arctic Kara Sea nearly two weeks ago, just east of the former Soviet nuclear test site on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, according to reports from Norway.
State Department and Pentagon officials said Thursday that initial indications suggested an underground explosion was touched off in the area.
But Russian Atomic Energy Minister Viktor N. Mikhailov, a veteran of the Soviet nuclear program, insisted there were no grounds for concern. “An ordinary earthquake took place in the Kara Sea,” Mikhailov told the Itar-Tass news agency. “This is a seismic area, and everybody knows it.”
Russia’s Earth Physics Institute and its Emergency Situations Ministry said they had no reports of an earthquake.
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