According to international watchdog CTBTO, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, two of Russia’s nuclear monitoring stations went dark two days after a mysterious missile test explosion on August 8 that was originally portrayed as a non-nuclear incident.

Adding to the uneasy parallels with the infamous Chernobyl incident, doctors at a Russian hospital complained on Sunday they were not informed that casualties from the explosion had been exposed to radiation. CTBTO chief Lassina Zerbo told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday that two days after the missile explosion, nuclear monitoring stations in Kirov and Dubna allegedly suffered “communication and network issues” that prevented them from transmitting any data [and later it was found that two more stations stopped transmitting data on August 13–the Bilibino and Zalesovo stations.]

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Zerbo said CTBTO is awaiting “further reports on when the stations or the communication system will be restored to full functionality.”

Four doctors and a medical worker at a hospital in Severodvinsk, the city nearest to the missile test site, told the Moscow Times on Friday that they were not informed patients injured in the explosion were radioactive.

“The hospital workers had their suspicions, but nobody told them to protect themselves,” a surgeon complained.

The Moscow Times reported staffers at the Arkhangelsk Regional Clinical Hospital were “shocked and angered” by the way the incident was handled. Some of them have spoken with local news outlets or told their stories using the secure messaging service Telegram. All of them seemed acutely aware the same thing happened to the misinformed doctors who treated the first Chernobyl victims without proper protective gear. . . .

Newsweek quoted people living in the Severodvinsk area who are deeply concerned they have not been told the full story of the explosion by their government or given accurate information about the risks they face.

“What’s offensive is that clearly there was some sort of explosion, there was radioactive fallout. Why didn’t they raise the alarm, let people know what’s happened? We remember Chernobyl. We know what happened,” one local resident said.

(Excerpted from Breitbart, article by John Hayward.)