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By Paul B. Irwin, CNS Graduate Research Assistant
April 1998 On 16 August 1997, at or around the Russian nuclear test site on the island of Novaya Zemlya, a "seismic event" occurred. While the United States initially suspected that this was a nuclear test, further examination of the evidence surrounding the case now leads most to believe that the "seismic event" was what the Russians had claimed it was all along: an underwater earthquake, completely unrelated to the nuclear test site. The controversy started when seismic activity around the site was detected by seismic monitoring stations in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.[1] These stations are part of a prototype network that monitors seismic activity worldwide and is designed to support verification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) if the treaty eventually enters into force.[2] The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was alerted to the information collected by these stations, and on 18 August it issued a high-priority classified alert stating that Russia had probably conducted a nuclear test two days earlier on the island of Novaya Zemlya, in the Barents Sea.[1] As a result, US officials began to press their Russian counterparts for an explanation as to what had happened at Novaya Zemlya.[1] The Russians denied that any nuclear test had occurred; they claimed that the seismic activity was an underwater earthquake.[2] The United States, however, remained skeptical. The official US statement about the event, prepared by the National Security Council (NSC), said, "We do have information that a seismic event with explosive characteristics occurred in the vicinity of the Russian nuclear test range" on the island of Novaya Zemlya. [1] When asked what was meant by "explosive characteristics" at a Department of Defense news briefing, Captain Mike Doubleday said that the event "certainly had characteristics that at least would lead some to believe that there had been an explosion that caused the event".[3] The Washington Times reported that "according to Pentagon officials, initial data on the event produced 'high confidence' that the activity detected was a nuclear test equivalent to between 100 tons and 1000 tons of TNT."[2] Furthermore, a CIA analyst said that activities at the site on 14 August and 16 August, as recorded by satellite photos, were "a dead ringer" for those preceding past nuclear tests. Even the fact that the "seismic event" had occurred at around 5 a.m., a time that coincided with past nuclear explosions in Russia, led CIA analysts to believe that it was a nuclear test.[1] Furthermore, The Washington Times reported that "analysts suspected the seismic activity was a nuclear test based on comparisons with seismic signatures detected during nuclear tests carried out by the Russians in 1990."[2] The Times article also quoted a Pentagon official who said that the "very sharp" waves on the detection equipment denoted the occurrence of an event with explosive characteristics. Waves that denote an earthquake "do not appear quite so suddenly."[2] All of these statements led many US officials to strongly suspect the Russians of breaking their self-imposed ban on nuclear weapons testing.[2] From the beginning of the controversy the Russians insisted that the "seismic event" was nothing more than an earthquake that had occurred miles away from the island. In an interview on 29 August, Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Viktor Mikhailov stated that the seismic event was an earthquake that took place in the sea 100 kilometers away from Novaya Zemlya and that the shockwaves recorded reflected as much.[4] Mikhailov went on to say that the nuclear testing site at Novaya Zemlya was closed down and activity there was due to laboratory hydrodynamic studies.[4] (Presumably, this meant that nonnuclear tests were being carried out at the test site during the period in question.) Also, Interfax reported that officials in Moscow believed they had given appropriate explanations for the event when first questioned by the United States and had assumed that their explanations had satisfied US officials. They were therefore surprised at the uproar in the Western media that began on 28 August.[5] By 2 September 1997, the statements of scientists and experts in the field of seismology began to appear in the press. Almost all of them agreed that the "seismic event" was in fact an earthquake. In Russia, on 2 September the directors of both the Institute of Geophysics and the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics told ITAR-TASS that after Russian scientists carefully analyzed the recorded shockwaves, they concluded that it had probably been a small earthquake, and "there was definitely no nuclear weapons test." According to the director of the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics, an earthquake in this region would not be abnormal; over 30 small earthquakes take place in this area every year. [8] Russian scientists also argued that a telling sign that a nuclear explosion did not occur was the absence of heightened radiation levels in the atmosphere. According to experts, there is always an increase in radiation levels during a nuclear test. [9] As more seismologists examined the data the view that the seismic event was an earthquake, and not a nuclear test, gained strength. The 12 October 1997 issue of the journal Nature carried an article affirming that the event was in fact an earthquake and not a nuclear test. In that article Greg van der Vink of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a collaboration of 90 universities stated, "I don't know of any seismologist who doesn't think that this was an earthquake." Yale University professor Jeffrey Park agreed saying, "If you were looking for a potential nuclear explosion, this just wouldn't ring any bells." At a Washington seminar, Professor Lynn Sykes of Columbia University, an expert on using seismological methods to verify nuclear tests, said "the data very strongly showed that the 'event' was a small earthquake in the ocean and not a nuclear explosion." Furthermore, he stated that the evidence suggested that the "event" occurred 80 miles from Novaya Zemlya under the Kara Sea.[11] (For the full text of Sykes' analysis please see http://www.fas.org/faspir/pir1197.htm.) In early September, the CIA-chaired nuclear intelligence committee issued a new classified report. This report declared that the activities around the site that had been witnessed by the CIA were not related to the seismic event of 16 August 1997. Furthermore, the report affirmed that the "event" happened miles out to sea. [1] Professor Eugene Herrin of Southern Methodist University has chaired the military's principal seismological advisory panel for the past 15 years. He summarizes the issue most succinctly when he says, "somebody jumped the gun. Based on what I know [from both classified and open sources], it was not an ambiguous event...It's an earthquake."[1] Finally on 4 November 1997, the CIA issued a statement that summarized the conclusions of an independent panel convened to review the event. According to this panel, the seismic event "was almost certainly not associated with the activities at Novaya Zemlya and was not nuclear."[12] Sources:
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