OH SHIT, Y'ALL. "Chernobyl" is one of the best TV things to happen this whole entire year, and now there's been some sort of nuclear reactor explosion on the northern coast of Russia. Are they doing a live re-enactment of the Chernobyl disaster just to prove that they still have the capability to fuck some shit up with a combination of incompetence, hubris, and overall bad decision making? Because if so, we already knew that.

Wonkette is joking and being mean, and we shouldn't be doing that, because "at least" seven people died. But it sounds like whatever happened, it happened yet again during a test -- this time probably most likely of a nuclear missile Vladimir Putin is totally borscht-ing his pants about.

American intelligence officials are racing to understand a mysterious explosion that released radiation off the coast of northern Russia last week, apparently during the test of a new type of nuclear-propelled cruise missile hailed by President Vladimir V. Putin as the centerpiece of Moscow's arms race with the United States. [...]

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Quickly the connection was made between this Fall Down Go Boom incident and these damn missiles Putin has been flapping his yap about, that can supposedly reach anywhere on the entire planet earth. Uh oh, did the missile fuck up, Vladimir? Because apparently that's a thing that's been happening with these tests.

Beyond the human toll, American intelligence officials are questioning whether Mr. Putin's grand dream of a revived arsenal evaporated in that mysterious explosion, or whether it was just an embarrassing setback in Moscow's effort to build a new class of long-range and undersea weapons that the United States cannot intercept.

Anyway, the Times reports that folks in the surrounding areas all went to whatever they call the Walgreens in Russia to get iodine meds, which supposedly help counter the effects of radiation, so much so that all the Russian Walgreens ran out of iodine meds. (Fun fact, because we Googled: One of the main pharmacy chains in Russia is called Pharmacy Chain 36.6 -- creative! -- or Apteka 36.6, and it is actually partially owned by the Walgreens Boots Alliance. So what do you know! They DO have fuckin' Walgreens in Russia. Sort of.)

Meanwhile, the Times cites a Russian news source called Baza, which reported that injured people were taken all the way to the hospital in Moscow, and that the "vehicle doors [of the ambulances] were sealed with plastic sheeting, apparently to prevent the release of contamination from the patient's bodies, and the drivers wore white protective suits." So that sounds fine! Also the area in question -- Dvina Bay in the White Sea -- is now closed to shipping for a month, and a "specialized ship used for collecting and storing liquid nuclear waste from the country's nuclear-powered icebreaker program" was seen heading that-a-way on Friday.

Is this a good time to mention that the Trump administration very stupidly pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty like 10 days ago, because Russia was violating the terms of it, which is actually not a good reason to chuck the thing in the garbage, because of how you can't punish a rogue nation for violating a nuclear treaty if there's a not fucking treaty to begin with? Yeah, that happened.