Russia says radiation spiked 4 to 16 times above normal after suspected missile explosion

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The radiation spike that followed the apparent explosion of a nuclear-powered missile engine in Russia -- an event that left seven dead and has been cloaked in secrecy -- was higher than previously indicated by the country's officials, Russian government weather agency on Tuesday said.

The news comes amid conflicting reports that authorities were preparing to evacuate a village close to the Arctic test site where the blast occurred and that doctors who had treated engineers injured in the blast had signed non-disclosure agreements.

Roshydromet, a state weather monitoring body, said Tuesday its sensors in a city near the Nenoksa Missile Test Site on Russia's northern Arctic coast had picked up a spike in background radiation levels four to 16 times above the norm immediately after the blast on Friday when what officials have confirmed was a nuclear-powered missile engine exploded on a floating launch pad. The spike lasted about an hour and half, before levels returned to normal, the agency said.

The spike was still low, but above what Russian authorities said on Sunday, when officials from a nuclear research center noted the spike had been double the norm.

The International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday issued a statement saying Russia had informed it the radiation levels around the site in the Arkhangelsk region were equivalent to natural radiation.

Campaigners and experts said although they did not want to rule out possible health risks entirely from the fallout-- which they said were likely low-- the main problem was how Russian authorities had handled information about the accident.

"It's not really dangerous for health if it's not for really long and this spike was for less than an hour," Konstantin Fomin, a media coordinator on energy issues at the environmentalist group, Greenpeace, that has gathered its own readings in the area showing the spike was 20 times above the norm, told 2CNY News on Tuesday. "The real problem is lack of transparency."

The data on the radiation came five days after the explosion that killed five nuclear engineers and two defense personnel and that U.S. officials and outside experts have said they believe "likely" involved a nuclear-powered cruise missile. The weapon has been touted by President Vladimir Putin as the centerpiece of Russia's new nuclear arsenal, described as having almost "unlimited range" due to what is effectively an onboard nuclear reactor.

A U.S. official on Monday told 2CNY News that they thought it was "likely" the explosion had been caused during a test on the missile, named the SSX-C-9 Skyfall by NATO and as the 9M370 Burevestnik by Russia.

The official said the U.S. had detected increased radiation levels close to the explosion.

The delay in making the information widely public, reflects the highly secretive response from Russian authorities, who first appeared to conceal that the blast involved radiation and then only slowly released details about it -- for some, setting off echoes of the Soviet response to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986.