Just when it seemed to Vladimir Putin that things couldn’t possibly get any worse, they suddenly did. Word leaked out that the sunken flagship Moskva was probably carrying nukes when it went down in shallow waters of the Black Sea on Thursday.
Looking for loose nukes
Analysts issued an alert on Friday, April 15, that Russia’s high profile flagship, the Moskva, “may have been carrying nuclear warheads.” Not only were there nukes aboard when the vessel went down, it might have been full of Russian sailors, too.
Despite prior reports that everyone was evacuated, they haven’t been accounted for. One Russian politician is concerned that “400 sailors could have gone down with the ship.”
Here in America, every John Travolta fan knows that the Pentagon calls lost nukes “broken arrows.” The secret code isn’t so secret. The Kremlin is dealing with one of those now, no matter what they call it. The Moskva was originally designed in the Soviet-era as a guided missile cruiser and served well, until Ukrainian resistance forces blasted it with a pair of Neptune class cruise missiles.
It appears that one scored a direct hit on the ammunition stash and blew it all to Vladivostok. You can bet that today there are a whole bunch of covert crews working under water in the Black Sea on recovery efforts. Not all of them wear Russian uniforms.
Mykhailo Samus, director of a Lviv-based military think-tank was first to bring up the possibility of loose nukes. Then, Andriy Klymenko, editor of Black Sea News said the same thing and Ukrainian newspaper Defence Express echoed it.
As DailyMail reports, “all warned that the Moskva could have been carrying two nuclear warheads designed to be fitted to its P-1000 ‘carrier killer‘ missiles.” According to Samus, “On board the Moskva could be nuclear warheads. Two units.”
Where are they now?
The experts say “other Black Sea nations” like Turkey, Romania, Georgia and Bulgaria need to “insist on an explanation.” Inquiring minds want to know where the nukes were when the ammo exploded. In retaliation, “Russia bombed a factory in Kyiv overnight which it claims made the missiles that sunk the Moskva.”
That was confirmed by reports of heavy explosions overnight which “destroyed the ‘Vizar‘ plant which manufactures anti-ship missiles and other Ukrainian rockets.”
Nukes aren’t the only things missing. Ilya Ponomarev, a politician exiled from Russia for opposing Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea learned that only “58 of the 510-strong crew have since been accounted for.”
What that means is that 452 men probably went down with the ship. That, he says, “would be a bitter loss for Vladimir Putin’s already beleaguered army.”
The official story from Moscow is that “all the Moskva’s sailors were ‘successfully evacuated‘” There’s a little problem with that. Video “taken in Sevastopol overnight shows dozens of cars purportedly belonging to the sailors still parked in the port.”
Nobody knows why they didn’t return to collect them. Hopefully the missing nukes can be recovered by someone responsible soon. If they aren’t produced in front of TV cameras, everyone will be wondering if China or North Korea’s frogmen got their first.
