THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Russian media "accidentally" revealed a top secret weapons delivery system designed but not yet produced by the Russian military. I used quotation marks around accidentally because, as always, there is a question about whether or not it was an official accidental leak.

Russian officials said the revelation of the submarine, which has not yet been produced, was accidental. But it came to light in the Russian news media in a way that suggested that the Kremlin wanted the West to know.

Such a submarine design had been conceived decades ago, independent Russian military commentators said, but it had not been revealed until now. It would function as a long-range torpedo and would avoid missile defenses by traveling under the ocean’s surface.

News of the design was reported on state and NTV television on Monday as though merely in passing, during a meeting between President Vladimir V. Putin and military industry officials and generals. The broadcast began with a public portion.

At one point, the camera zoomed in on something one of the military officers was reading: a binder opened to a page showing the weapon design.

“Maritime Multifunctional System Status-6,” a headline said, in block Cyrillic letters, above an illustration showing the submarine and a text in easily decipherable large letters explaining the weapon’s effects.

The submarine would “defeat important economic objects of an enemy in coastal zones, bringing guaranteed and unacceptable losses on the country’s territory by forming a wide area of radioactive contamination incompatible with conducting military, economic or any other activities there for a long period of time,” it said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told Russian news agencies that the cameras had accidentally filmed a secret document.

“Indeed, some secret data fell into the field of view of these cameras,” Mr. Peskov was quoted as saying by the news agency Interfax. Because the document was a genuine secret, he said, the video was subsequently removed from the channels’ websites. “We hope such a thing will never be repeated,” he said.

Yet commentators on the Echo of Moscow radio station suggested Thursday that the television broadcast was hardly an accident, given the tight control over the state news media here. Rather, the commentators said, the broadcast was the latest instance of nuclear saber-rattling from Russia at a time of rising tensions with the West.

Instead of a formal announcement, in this interpretation, the revelation of the submarine was couched as accidental to amplify its intimidating effects — a military officer had been casually perusing the design on a piece of paper while in a meeting with Mr. Putin.

If nobody has been fired or shot yet, it was no accident.