Nearly as soon as an explosion ripped through the Nenoksa Missile Test Site in northern Russia on Thursday , briefly raising radiation levels in the region, the Kremlin went into crisis mode. That, to anyone familiar with the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, means clamping down on information, insisting that nothing really bad happened, that it happens everywhere and that the government is in full control.

This time, thank Heaven, the radiation leak appears not to have threatened residents in the region, and no increases were registered in neighboring Finland or Norway. But the pathetic, inchoate evasiveness of Russian authorities proved once again that the Kremlin is far more concerned with covering its behind than telling its people or the world what happened and how great the risk it carried.

When city authorities in nearby Severodvinsk reported the brief spike in radiation levels soon after the explosion, sending panicked people in search of iodine, which protects the thyroid gland against absorbing radiation, Moscow’s reaction was to take the information off the city’s website. Initial reports were only of a “liquid fueled rocket engine” blowing up, with assurances that such accidents were a normal risk in the important research that was underway and that such mishaps had occurred also in the United States and Japan. The five scientists who perished, Russians were proudly informed, were great heroes who would receive major decorations and their families many rubles.

Oh, and yes, officials noted two days later , the scientists h ad been “involved in servicing isotope power sources on a liquid fuel engine.” That was followed by a lot of scientific jargon (the research involved “the creation of sources of thermal or electric energy using radioactive materials, including fissile materials and radioisotope materials”) but no concrete information about what the poor scientists — who according to some reports were flung into the White Sea by the blast — had been working on.