The U.S. has no strategic interest in blowing up Nord Stream. We are sending a comparative handful of 2nd hand weapons to Ukrainian forces and they are kicking the Russians ass with them, all without risking a single American soldier.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Biden gave Germany the go ahead for Nord Stream 2. The European countries were already going to take a huge hit this winter with the shortage of energy. If there is any indication that the US blew up those pipelines then the damage to the alliance that supports Ukraine against Russia would be severely fractured, maybe permanently. Those and other downsides completely outweigh any potential upside.
Russia, on the other hand, has another motive that you missed. Russia is contractually obligated to provide gas through the pipeline, and as much as they would like to use the pipeline to continue to use energy to attempt to blackmail the west, they face too much financial risk. To quote Ariel Cohen in Forbes:
"If Nord Stream is shut down suddenly through “force majeure,” a sudden uncontrollable stop that is the fault of neither party, then Russia can void its obligations toward European stakeholders without legally breaking contracts, thus dodging the many penalties in doing so."
So Russia gets to kill multiple birds with one stone:
1. Cut off energy to the west, punishing the countries standing up to his invasion of Ukraine and avoid any financial penalties;
2. Use the Cortez "burn the ships" model to attempt to cut off more possible Russian "defections" to Putin's strategy;
3. Use his "useful idiots" in the West to push the "U.S. blew up the pipelines" story to throw blame on his enemies and sow confusion.
4. Put new fears and paranoia into Western counties. After all, if he is willing to blow up his own pipelines, what's to stop him from blowing up someone else's pipelines, or communication lines?
Russia really has everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing it. We have nothing to gain and everything to lose.
1) "comparative handful of 2nd hand weapons" is not remotely correct. We are supplying Ukraine with an ever living shit ton of weapons, as the article enumerates.
2) Russia has an easy out to shut off Nord if they wanted to, purely because they can't maintain Nord during sanctions. And if they wanted to sabotage it to shut it down they could have done so with some frogmen or a small charge glued to the front of an inspection pig so their asset would be repairable, instead of completely erased as is the current case.
The dramatic and irreparable way it was done eliminates Russia cutting off Europe as a motive. They were already mostly cut off, as supply through Nord had dropped, and they could have used reduced supply as a way to bring the Germans onto their side of the table during any sort of negotiation. Nord being completely destroyed end to end, as is the current case, does not further Russia's interests as a unified bloc. It may however further Putin's interests if he's got a Revolt Of Elites on his hands.
Oct 5, 2022·edited Oct 5, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
1. Comparatively speaking, we have not given them very much at all. Here is an article from The Hill outlining just about everything we have given them.
It is a safe rule of thumb to assume that any weapons system we give or sell to other countries is at least one or two generations behind what we keep for ourselves. While $13 Billion sounds like a lot of money it is a comparative drop in the bucket in what we spend on defense every year.
So if you think about it, we are essentially selling our 2nd hand weapons to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian military is using them to kick around Russia's armed forces. The Russian supply of arms, materiel, and now even personnel is being decimated by tiny ol' Ukraine (to the point of Russian moving dangerously close to 2nd world status) and the whole world is watching. What Russian and China and North Korea also have to be thinking at this point is, "if Ukraine can do that to Russia with America's hand-me-down weapons, what could the Americans do to US with their top of the line weapons systems??"
Why would we mess that up by blowing up Nord Stream and running the risk that anyone finds out?
2. European countries had already made it clear that they were going to reduce their dependence on Russian energy. You can't blackmail Western Europe by cutting off their natural gas and then pretend they aren't going to make moves to remove that option in the future. Simply shutting the pipeline down or only causing minor damage that is easily fixed is not really an option to avoid the financial penalties associate with defaulting on their contracts either.
No, you have to go big to cover the bases. You make some very good points about a number of other things. The anger from some Russian oligarchs is real. So much so that, as you said, they are throwing themselves off buildings or shooting themselves multiple times in the head at alarming numbers.
If the war were going well energy blackmail would be a viable option, but as it stands right now Putin's biggest worry is dissension at home. The oligarchs are getting hurt financially, his state run media is pissed, and his male population is literally fleeing the country to avoid getting thrown into the meat grinder. It's also a safe bet to assume that if Putin does try to use a nuke, he might be the one throwing himself off the balcony of his presidential dacha.
Blowing up Nord Stream is the desperate act of a desperate man, and right now that is not Joe Biden. It is Vladimir Putin.
I don't disagree with a lot of what you say, and my read is definitely that if Putin did do it he probably strapped a bomb to some inspection pigs and took Gazprom's toy away to get them into line. But the presence of multiple US military assets in the location tips it for me.
"Are those contracts worth anything beyond the paper they’re printed on? At this stage?" Yes, especially since EU countries did not include energy purchases in the sanctions they would apply to Russia. Germany halted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline but that was about it on energy imports. Most sanctions were financial in nature.
Russia responded by demanding European countries pay for their energy in Rubles which they refused to do. so Russia cut back on the energy flow as a way to squeeze the European countries.
The war will not last forever, and Russia will still have to do business on the world stage when it ends. You may think breaking this contract is no big deal, but it is.
The below is off by a factor of 10. Per your own link, "It was estimated that the explosion had a yield equivalent to approximately 1.8 Mg (4,000 lb) of TNT" 1.8 Mg = 1800kg
"Timothy McVeigh’s truck bomb that destroyed the Murrah Building in 1995 had a blast yield of around 181 kg of TNT, a little over one third the yield of these explosions. If we presume that a non-state actor probably doesn’t have the ability to deliver two devices triple the size of McVeigh’s truck in an underwater enclosure, we can scratch non-state actors off the list."
I'm trying to fit this theory with Biden killing the Israeli pipeline, which would have provided natural gas from a purported ally to Europe, seemingly only because the damn Turks complained. If it is about importing natural gas to Europe by boat, that doesn't quite square with the current administration simultaneously trying to kill the US nat gas industry with a death of a thousand regulatory cuts. If we wanted that cash, we should be expanding production to sell all we can, not enabling Green lawfare against the domestic industry.
An LHD would be about the last ship you would want to do this because it has no ability to deploy anything below the waterline. If anyone happened to be watching it from space or from the air when it scooted a bunch of big-ass bombs off the well deck at regular intervals, Russia would have the proof it needed to break NATO and permanently discredit the United States. To get down to the bottom of the Baltic to reach the pipeline and place the explosives would be next to impossible, so you'd just have to drop it and hope you hit the right spot - considering the multiple detonations, that'd be a really weird way to do that and the likelihood of screwing up is high.
If you were American and you wanted to do this, you would want a submarine with facilities for an SDV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEAL_Delivery_Vehicle) that could haul and tow explosives along with some guys to put them in place. You'd deploy them silently, then leave. Again- if you're caught in that crowded water by anyone, we're screwed.
If you have them, you could also use an underwater drone or two, but no publicly demonstrated tech could do this and it's not clear why you would bother developing it if you didn't have it.
The same would obtain for the Russians, except they have access to one end of the pipeline. Robots controlled by Gazprom and Russia routinely traverse the inside of the pipeline for inspection and maintenance purposes. I don't know how big they are or how much they can haul, but I suspect you could cause a fairly large explosion with the natural gas in the pipeline without necessarily introducing a big bomb. You could also do it on command, at the same time, without worrying about any incriminating evidence if there's a malfunction.
If someone at Gazprom found out about this and either wanted it to stop or threatened to tell the world, they might get thrown out a window.
As for motive...by my understanding, Russia is obliged by contract to provide the natural gas it's currently withholding. In any post-war settlement negotiations, some sort of compensation for that would at least be a bargaining chip. By destroying the pipeline, Russia might theoretically reduce that liability - and the cost isn't that high if you conclude that Europe is making long term investments to eliminate dependency, as they appear to be doing presently.
The case you make that America did it is...pretty rank speculation.
I am very skeptical that you can't deploy something below the waterline from a boat that can flood itself low enough to float smaller boats within its hold. Do you have a reference on that?
Russia could absolutely strap an explosive charge to a pipeline inspection pig, but if they were going to do so as a way to get out of contractual obligations they could strap something much smaller, only do localized damage, and blame lack of maintenance due to sanctions. They could also stagger the events for plausible deniability.
Oct 5, 2022·edited Oct 5, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
I lived on one for a while and I've been on the decks when they're flooded quite a few times.
Deploying below the waterline means you exit and reenter the boat such that nobody observing can see you. You can get a boat off the well deck when it floods, but anyone watching is going to see you. Same thing with divers. There is no way - and I mean no way - to get an SDV deployed off the back, and without that you're talking about individual swimmers trying to swim tons of explosive into place. And they're going to have to relocate each time and repeat the process, which would take a hell of a lot of time - and if anyone noted that the giant aircraft carrier just so happened to stop above all the detonation points, we're screwed.
You can cobble together a scenario where an LHD doing this is physically possible, but doing it with a submarine at some place on the pipeline that was not right next to the LHD would be an infinitely superior plan - and it's not one of those "it's genius because you'd never expect it" kind of things. Doing it from an LHD would pose huge operational security risks and logistical challenges that all go away if you just do it with a submarine somewhere else. If we were going to do it, that's how we would do it.
If we're going to say the Russians probably didn't do X because they could have done it a different way and had plausible deniability...I mean, we could have done this somewhere else. We could've moved the boat and hit the red button two weeks later. The placement and timing actually look pretty convenient for Russia if they wanted to blame America.
Russia could have done something even demolition pros do all the time: miscalculate charge size. They may have failed to account for the gas in the pipeline - my personal suspicion is they intended to use it to supplement the charge and got the math wrong. Given their recent performance, screwing up would be par for the course. That, or this was intentional, Putin believes Europe is a permanent loss and the pipeline is mostly worthless.
One reason I think Russia is a more realistic culprit is it seems overdetermined even if I can't isolate exactly why they did it to the exclusion of other factors.
They noticed it stopping in the area, not repeatedly stopping and starting.
And if you were going to do this, you would purposefully leave your AIS on because turning it off is like setting off a flare telling every military vessel otherwise tracking you to pay attention.
It would seem to me that there may be some military procedure in some manual somewhere that says "turn AIS off during all military operations" and some ensign followed the manual. I can think of no other possible reason they'd turn it off, especially plopped right over top of Nord. Military folks sure do love procedure and manuals.
Turning off a transponder is a command decision intentionally made. If it's not, it's probably a malfunction or an accident. You closely control when you turn it off because you also want to closely control when you turn it on; the Navy in particular cares about all forms of EM emissions and tightly controls them.
If we were doing some shady black op, discipline would be that much tighter and everyone would be more deliberate. Turning off the AIS wouldn't make sense and wouldn't be ordered.
Do you have any idea why they would use an LHD instead of a submarine?
The well deck only floods so deep, like 10 feet or so, and I'm not sure you want to do that when underway. The ship doing it is noticeable if anyone is watching, and the Russkies are always watching in the Baltic. A submersible to plant a bomb is going to still be pretty big, and you have to have the entire ship stay quiet about it. In today's Navy.
If I were Putin and wanted to blow up a gas pipeline, I would just park some Grads right across the border around Sudzha border crossing and wait until they are destroyed by counter-battery fire together with the local U-P-U pipeline compressor station. Hell, the smaller Soyuz pipeline passes through very recently retaken Borova, and no one managed to harm the local compressor station during all the fighting
The theory that requires the least gymnastics is probably that poor maintenance (Something Russia is well known for) caused an Unintended Catastrophic Failure Condition and the timing was just really poor.
Unintended catastrophic failure equating 500kg of explosives at two different locations on two different pipelines, one of which was brand new, at the same time. That requires a tremendous amount of gymnastics to me.
Not at the same time: 17h went by between the first and the second explosion. I have no way of verifying whether the possibility put forth in this https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/09/nordstream.html is completely cooky or possible, but if you imagine that both explosions were the consequence of a similar process of attempted clearing of the pipelines, both started at the same time, the near-simultaneity no longer poses a problem. Common causality and temporality, just not sabotage.
The "brand new pipeline" also does not pose an issue for this hypothesis (see link above).
As to the yield, I have no way of knowing if it is too high to be accounted for by a an explosive failure from the pipeline or not.
All in all, it seems to me that the space of possibilities should include "the Russians did poor maintenance on these pipelines, checked to confirm they would be ready to be switched back on for Europe's winter as a bargaining chip and, when discovering frozen methane blocages due to pressurised gas left there for a year, attempted to solve it only on their end, and bungled it so bad, they blew them up." Or, more generally : "The Russians attempted a maintenance operation to upsell the Europeans in winter while hiding the fact it was needed, and caused catastrophic failures on both pipelines ".
Even better put: "it was the Russians, but just through incompetence, not malice"
There has never been an explosive failure of a natural gas pipeline that registered on earthquake seismographs, whether on land or at sea where there's no oxygen for the gas to react with. Then we had two in the same day, both owned by the same company in the same place, during a war. Step back and take a breath.
My main contention is that the space of possible causes to this event should include "catastrophic failure", however small the probability assigned to it is.
I do agree that quite a lot of evidence seems to raise the probability assigned to the broad possibility "intentional destruction". These bits of evidence do include the timing (during a war), the close timing of multiple explosions (though not simultaneous, which is why I objected to "at the same time"), and the size of the explosion, though I don't have any specialized knowledge telling me how I should interpret this particular data (given how many "experts" always arise immediately after such an event, looking into it right now on the internet seems to me a waste of time, but if you do have specialized knowledge into this that predates your research immediately after the fact, i am interested in it).
All in all, even if the possibility space looks like 95% probability of intentional destruction and 5% catastrophe or incompetence (or even 99.5% and 0.5%), I'm not going to rule it out right off the bat.
Thanks for the substack, BTW. I don't comment much, so I'll take the occasion to say it, though I find the "take breath" end of your reply slightly rude (might be simply a bad translation of intent from speech to text)
Too conspiracy-y for me. You'd think the American military could sabotage a pipeline without setting off huge, totally conspicuous bombs.
Those with the most straightforward motivation would be Ukraine. Also, accident is not an unreasonable explanation. I will be curious to see if the seismology gets revised down in the near future.
While I think the US definitely benefits from the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines, there is a strong case to be made that the pipelines failed because of poor maintenance:
Which could easily be explained by the Russian incompetents trying to redirect pressure or something to prevent another detonation, and causing it instead.
While I don't discount the possibility the Biden junta or Putin did it, I see another possibility - the EU did it. The motivation would be preserving European unity. Top EU leadership seem unanimous in their desire to starve their own people and collapse their remaining industrial base - in order to appease the wrathful gods of DUH CLIMATE. For reasons that escape me, they also seem to think a new world war would be just swell.
The German people are doubtless quite a bit less enthused about starving to death. Perhaps EU leadership felt there was a chance the German government might defect from the plan. They might choose to import gas to power their industry and heat their homes this winter. Which in turn might inspire similar rebellions in other EU member states. I can't say I know anything about German domestic politics that would confirm or deny this possibility.
By destroying Nordstream, the EU leadership eliminated the possibility that Germany might unilaterally opt out of the current suicide pact.
So... None of the consequences predicted in the Kherson region by the "in the process of losing" link came to pass. Turns out that General Zaluzhnyi wasn't such a genius, and he just got a bunch of his men killed for no reason.
All very interesting speculation. But here's why primarily, I think, no.
If US was involved then it's indicative of a plan going forward, having gamed various scenarios and expecting certain responses.
Nothing about this administration's previous actions gives me confidence they ever do anything with the kind of nuanced, scripted, carefully considered thinking that kind of bold decision would require.
So kinda indifferent to the particulars here anyway, because the likeliest thing to happen after, if Putin nukes something, will be a totally un planned, un discussed un thinking reactionary US response that will lead us into a completely un known future because apparently none of the un elected man children who actually hold senior jobs in the administration have a substantive framework about foreign policy to guide them. Except their two guiding principles; we must not be energy independent and must have an Iran deal. And if meanwhile, the eastern seaboard disolves into nuclear dust, none of them will accept responsibilty, much less resign.
The idea that an LHD bombed Nordstream is ludicrous. I can't believe you're serious.
Are you trying to say they rolled a bomb off an LHD's tailgate? And hoped it sank to the right spot?
Was there some mysterious bomb-delivery vehicle on Kearsarge? How did it get onboard? And what did they do with all the USMC gear that was jam-packed into the well deck when Kearsarge left Norfolk?
There are 2,000 Marines and sailors aboard that ship and half are under 21. And they all have email. Good luck keeping a secret about your mystery bomb. Just hang out in a bar in the next port Kearsarge goes for liberty and you'll hear it all.
Warships normally don't transmit AIS except when coming into port or are in busy shipping lanes. They are warships after all.
Possibly. BALTOPS concluded in June. The boats I had tagged for delivery were in early August. The Hersh article doesn't state when the explosives were set, but does indicate that they missed the original BALTOPS deployment schedule because of Biden.
I've read about the "U.S. military activity" in the area before, and none of these mentions addresses some crucial questions:
- How unusual is it for these vessels to be in that area? Sure they were around there not too long before, but is that unusual for them? Have they been around there before? Were they just passing by because that area is high traffic? Do they have similar patterns in other areas?
- If Joe Smoe can track a major military operation by looking at easily available data, and whether identifying information was turned off, what hope is there for the US navy to have any war time activity? If the U.S wanted to bomb this area why wouldn't they do what they'd do in war and make it very difficult / impossible to track these ships? Is naval warfare dead because even civilians can figure out where our ships are? This seems highly unlikely and suspicious to me.
The U.S. has no strategic interest in blowing up Nord Stream. We are sending a comparative handful of 2nd hand weapons to Ukrainian forces and they are kicking the Russians ass with them, all without risking a single American soldier.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Biden gave Germany the go ahead for Nord Stream 2. The European countries were already going to take a huge hit this winter with the shortage of energy. If there is any indication that the US blew up those pipelines then the damage to the alliance that supports Ukraine against Russia would be severely fractured, maybe permanently. Those and other downsides completely outweigh any potential upside.
Russia, on the other hand, has another motive that you missed. Russia is contractually obligated to provide gas through the pipeline, and as much as they would like to use the pipeline to continue to use energy to attempt to blackmail the west, they face too much financial risk. To quote Ariel Cohen in Forbes:
"If Nord Stream is shut down suddenly through “force majeure,” a sudden uncontrollable stop that is the fault of neither party, then Russia can void its obligations toward European stakeholders without legally breaking contracts, thus dodging the many penalties in doing so."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2022/09/29/russian-sabotage-of-the-nord-stream-pipeline-mark-a-point-of-no-return/?sh=3a0147bc5dba
So Russia gets to kill multiple birds with one stone:
1. Cut off energy to the west, punishing the countries standing up to his invasion of Ukraine and avoid any financial penalties;
2. Use the Cortez "burn the ships" model to attempt to cut off more possible Russian "defections" to Putin's strategy;
3. Use his "useful idiots" in the West to push the "U.S. blew up the pipelines" story to throw blame on his enemies and sow confusion.
4. Put new fears and paranoia into Western counties. After all, if he is willing to blow up his own pipelines, what's to stop him from blowing up someone else's pipelines, or communication lines?
Russia really has everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing it. We have nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Qualms:
1) "comparative handful of 2nd hand weapons" is not remotely correct. We are supplying Ukraine with an ever living shit ton of weapons, as the article enumerates.
2) Russia has an easy out to shut off Nord if they wanted to, purely because they can't maintain Nord during sanctions. And if they wanted to sabotage it to shut it down they could have done so with some frogmen or a small charge glued to the front of an inspection pig so their asset would be repairable, instead of completely erased as is the current case.
The dramatic and irreparable way it was done eliminates Russia cutting off Europe as a motive. They were already mostly cut off, as supply through Nord had dropped, and they could have used reduced supply as a way to bring the Germans onto their side of the table during any sort of negotiation. Nord being completely destroyed end to end, as is the current case, does not further Russia's interests as a unified bloc. It may however further Putin's interests if he's got a Revolt Of Elites on his hands.
1. Comparatively speaking, we have not given them very much at all. Here is an article from The Hill outlining just about everything we have given them.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3597492-heres-every-weapon-us-has-supplied-to-ukraine-with-13-billion/
It is a safe rule of thumb to assume that any weapons system we give or sell to other countries is at least one or two generations behind what we keep for ourselves. While $13 Billion sounds like a lot of money it is a comparative drop in the bucket in what we spend on defense every year.
So if you think about it, we are essentially selling our 2nd hand weapons to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian military is using them to kick around Russia's armed forces. The Russian supply of arms, materiel, and now even personnel is being decimated by tiny ol' Ukraine (to the point of Russian moving dangerously close to 2nd world status) and the whole world is watching. What Russian and China and North Korea also have to be thinking at this point is, "if Ukraine can do that to Russia with America's hand-me-down weapons, what could the Americans do to US with their top of the line weapons systems??"
Why would we mess that up by blowing up Nord Stream and running the risk that anyone finds out?
2. European countries had already made it clear that they were going to reduce their dependence on Russian energy. You can't blackmail Western Europe by cutting off their natural gas and then pretend they aren't going to make moves to remove that option in the future. Simply shutting the pipeline down or only causing minor damage that is easily fixed is not really an option to avoid the financial penalties associate with defaulting on their contracts either.
No, you have to go big to cover the bases. You make some very good points about a number of other things. The anger from some Russian oligarchs is real. So much so that, as you said, they are throwing themselves off buildings or shooting themselves multiple times in the head at alarming numbers.
If the war were going well energy blackmail would be a viable option, but as it stands right now Putin's biggest worry is dissension at home. The oligarchs are getting hurt financially, his state run media is pissed, and his male population is literally fleeing the country to avoid getting thrown into the meat grinder. It's also a safe bet to assume that if Putin does try to use a nuke, he might be the one throwing himself off the balcony of his presidential dacha.
Blowing up Nord Stream is the desperate act of a desperate man, and right now that is not Joe Biden. It is Vladimir Putin.
I don't disagree with a lot of what you say, and my read is definitely that if Putin did do it he probably strapped a bomb to some inspection pigs and took Gazprom's toy away to get them into line. But the presence of multiple US military assets in the location tips it for me.
Is desperation possible with Biden’s level of dementia?
Are those contracts worth anything beyond the paper they’re printed on? At this stage?
What on earth stops Russia from saying, “Fuck the contract”?
"Are those contracts worth anything beyond the paper they’re printed on? At this stage?" Yes, especially since EU countries did not include energy purchases in the sanctions they would apply to Russia. Germany halted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline but that was about it on energy imports. Most sanctions were financial in nature.
Russia responded by demanding European countries pay for their energy in Rubles which they refused to do. so Russia cut back on the energy flow as a way to squeeze the European countries.
The war will not last forever, and Russia will still have to do business on the world stage when it ends. You may think breaking this contract is no big deal, but it is.
I feel like the contract might have something to say about blowing up the pipeline.
Especially if the case against Russia is so slam dunk.
Sorry, your point just doesn’t seem that strong.
Then why was Biden all over TV a few months ago saying Nordstream 1 and 2 were going down "one way or the other"?
The below is off by a factor of 10. Per your own link, "It was estimated that the explosion had a yield equivalent to approximately 1.8 Mg (4,000 lb) of TNT" 1.8 Mg = 1800kg
"Timothy McVeigh’s truck bomb that destroyed the Murrah Building in 1995 had a blast yield of around 181 kg of TNT, a little over one third the yield of these explosions. If we presume that a non-state actor probably doesn’t have the ability to deliver two devices triple the size of McVeigh’s truck in an underwater enclosure, we can scratch non-state actors off the list."
Noted and thanks. Jimmy below also caught the same error. Fixed in the revised article, and I appreciate your comment.
looking good!
I'm trying to fit this theory with Biden killing the Israeli pipeline, which would have provided natural gas from a purported ally to Europe, seemingly only because the damn Turks complained. If it is about importing natural gas to Europe by boat, that doesn't quite square with the current administration simultaneously trying to kill the US nat gas industry with a death of a thousand regulatory cuts. If we wanted that cash, we should be expanding production to sell all we can, not enabling Green lawfare against the domestic industry.
An LHD would be about the last ship you would want to do this because it has no ability to deploy anything below the waterline. If anyone happened to be watching it from space or from the air when it scooted a bunch of big-ass bombs off the well deck at regular intervals, Russia would have the proof it needed to break NATO and permanently discredit the United States. To get down to the bottom of the Baltic to reach the pipeline and place the explosives would be next to impossible, so you'd just have to drop it and hope you hit the right spot - considering the multiple detonations, that'd be a really weird way to do that and the likelihood of screwing up is high.
If you were American and you wanted to do this, you would want a submarine with facilities for an SDV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEAL_Delivery_Vehicle) that could haul and tow explosives along with some guys to put them in place. You'd deploy them silently, then leave. Again- if you're caught in that crowded water by anyone, we're screwed.
If you have them, you could also use an underwater drone or two, but no publicly demonstrated tech could do this and it's not clear why you would bother developing it if you didn't have it.
The same would obtain for the Russians, except they have access to one end of the pipeline. Robots controlled by Gazprom and Russia routinely traverse the inside of the pipeline for inspection and maintenance purposes. I don't know how big they are or how much they can haul, but I suspect you could cause a fairly large explosion with the natural gas in the pipeline without necessarily introducing a big bomb. You could also do it on command, at the same time, without worrying about any incriminating evidence if there's a malfunction.
If someone at Gazprom found out about this and either wanted it to stop or threatened to tell the world, they might get thrown out a window.
As for motive...by my understanding, Russia is obliged by contract to provide the natural gas it's currently withholding. In any post-war settlement negotiations, some sort of compensation for that would at least be a bargaining chip. By destroying the pipeline, Russia might theoretically reduce that liability - and the cost isn't that high if you conclude that Europe is making long term investments to eliminate dependency, as they appear to be doing presently.
The case you make that America did it is...pretty rank speculation.
I am very skeptical that you can't deploy something below the waterline from a boat that can flood itself low enough to float smaller boats within its hold. Do you have a reference on that?
Russia could absolutely strap an explosive charge to a pipeline inspection pig, but if they were going to do so as a way to get out of contractual obligations they could strap something much smaller, only do localized damage, and blame lack of maintenance due to sanctions. They could also stagger the events for plausible deniability.
I lived on one for a while and I've been on the decks when they're flooded quite a few times.
Deploying below the waterline means you exit and reenter the boat such that nobody observing can see you. You can get a boat off the well deck when it floods, but anyone watching is going to see you. Same thing with divers. There is no way - and I mean no way - to get an SDV deployed off the back, and without that you're talking about individual swimmers trying to swim tons of explosive into place. And they're going to have to relocate each time and repeat the process, which would take a hell of a lot of time - and if anyone noted that the giant aircraft carrier just so happened to stop above all the detonation points, we're screwed.
You can cobble together a scenario where an LHD doing this is physically possible, but doing it with a submarine at some place on the pipeline that was not right next to the LHD would be an infinitely superior plan - and it's not one of those "it's genius because you'd never expect it" kind of things. Doing it from an LHD would pose huge operational security risks and logistical challenges that all go away if you just do it with a submarine somewhere else. If we were going to do it, that's how we would do it.
If we're going to say the Russians probably didn't do X because they could have done it a different way and had plausible deniability...I mean, we could have done this somewhere else. We could've moved the boat and hit the red button two weeks later. The placement and timing actually look pretty convenient for Russia if they wanted to blame America.
Russia could have done something even demolition pros do all the time: miscalculate charge size. They may have failed to account for the gas in the pipeline - my personal suspicion is they intended to use it to supplement the charge and got the math wrong. Given their recent performance, screwing up would be par for the course. That, or this was intentional, Putin believes Europe is a permanent loss and the pipeline is mostly worthless.
One reason I think Russia is a more realistic culprit is it seems overdetermined even if I can't isolate exactly why they did it to the exclusion of other factors.
"and if anyone noted that the giant aircraft carrier just so happened to stop above all the detonation points, we're screwed."
German media noticed this exact thing, and also noticed the boat turning off their AIS.
They noticed it stopping in the area, not repeatedly stopping and starting.
And if you were going to do this, you would purposefully leave your AIS on because turning it off is like setting off a flare telling every military vessel otherwise tracking you to pay attention.
Why would they turn it off?
It would seem to me that there may be some military procedure in some manual somewhere that says "turn AIS off during all military operations" and some ensign followed the manual. I can think of no other possible reason they'd turn it off, especially plopped right over top of Nord. Military folks sure do love procedure and manuals.
I'm open to other ideas.
Turning off a transponder is a command decision intentionally made. If it's not, it's probably a malfunction or an accident. You closely control when you turn it off because you also want to closely control when you turn it on; the Navy in particular cares about all forms of EM emissions and tightly controls them.
If we were doing some shady black op, discipline would be that much tighter and everyone would be more deliberate. Turning off the AIS wouldn't make sense and wouldn't be ordered.
Do you have any idea why they would use an LHD instead of a submarine?
The well deck only floods so deep, like 10 feet or so, and I'm not sure you want to do that when underway. The ship doing it is noticeable if anyone is watching, and the Russkies are always watching in the Baltic. A submersible to plant a bomb is going to still be pretty big, and you have to have the entire ship stay quiet about it. In today's Navy.
Ten feet's enough. I bet they can get down to ten feet pretty quickly too, given the boat's operational parameters.
If I were Putin and wanted to blow up a gas pipeline, I would just park some Grads right across the border around Sudzha border crossing and wait until they are destroyed by counter-battery fire together with the local U-P-U pipeline compressor station. Hell, the smaller Soyuz pipeline passes through very recently retaken Borova, and no one managed to harm the local compressor station during all the fighting
re Wayback Machine “job failed”: that shit happens very regularly, on totally innocuous pages.
The theory that requires the least gymnastics is probably that poor maintenance (Something Russia is well known for) caused an Unintended Catastrophic Failure Condition and the timing was just really poor.
Unintended catastrophic failure equating 500kg of explosives at two different locations on two different pipelines, one of which was brand new, at the same time. That requires a tremendous amount of gymnastics to me.
Not at the same time: 17h went by between the first and the second explosion. I have no way of verifying whether the possibility put forth in this https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/09/nordstream.html is completely cooky or possible, but if you imagine that both explosions were the consequence of a similar process of attempted clearing of the pipelines, both started at the same time, the near-simultaneity no longer poses a problem. Common causality and temporality, just not sabotage.
The "brand new pipeline" also does not pose an issue for this hypothesis (see link above).
As to the yield, I have no way of knowing if it is too high to be accounted for by a an explosive failure from the pipeline or not.
All in all, it seems to me that the space of possibilities should include "the Russians did poor maintenance on these pipelines, checked to confirm they would be ready to be switched back on for Europe's winter as a bargaining chip and, when discovering frozen methane blocages due to pressurised gas left there for a year, attempted to solve it only on their end, and bungled it so bad, they blew them up." Or, more generally : "The Russians attempted a maintenance operation to upsell the Europeans in winter while hiding the fact it was needed, and caused catastrophic failures on both pipelines ".
Even better put: "it was the Russians, but just through incompetence, not malice"
There has never been an explosive failure of a natural gas pipeline that registered on earthquake seismographs, whether on land or at sea where there's no oxygen for the gas to react with. Then we had two in the same day, both owned by the same company in the same place, during a war. Step back and take a breath.
My main contention is that the space of possible causes to this event should include "catastrophic failure", however small the probability assigned to it is.
I do agree that quite a lot of evidence seems to raise the probability assigned to the broad possibility "intentional destruction". These bits of evidence do include the timing (during a war), the close timing of multiple explosions (though not simultaneous, which is why I objected to "at the same time"), and the size of the explosion, though I don't have any specialized knowledge telling me how I should interpret this particular data (given how many "experts" always arise immediately after such an event, looking into it right now on the internet seems to me a waste of time, but if you do have specialized knowledge into this that predates your research immediately after the fact, i am interested in it).
All in all, even if the possibility space looks like 95% probability of intentional destruction and 5% catastrophe or incompetence (or even 99.5% and 0.5%), I'm not going to rule it out right off the bat.
Thanks for the substack, BTW. I don't comment much, so I'll take the occasion to say it, though I find the "take breath" end of your reply slightly rude (might be simply a bad translation of intent from speech to text)
Turns out events, including the recent report from Sweden, indeed lower the probability of an incident to "insignificant to nill".
You were right.
:)
Too conspiracy-y for me. You'd think the American military could sabotage a pipeline without setting off huge, totally conspicuous bombs.
Those with the most straightforward motivation would be Ukraine. Also, accident is not an unreasonable explanation. I will be curious to see if the seismology gets revised down in the near future.
While I think the US definitely benefits from the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines, there is a strong case to be made that the pipelines failed because of poor maintenance:
https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/09/nordstream.html
https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/10/nordstream-ii-electric-instapundit.html
Simultaneously? Zero chance.
Except that there was a 17 hour delay between explosions.
That’s still really fucking close timing.
Which could easily be explained by the Russian incompetents trying to redirect pressure or something to prevent another detonation, and causing it instead.
While I don't discount the possibility the Biden junta or Putin did it, I see another possibility - the EU did it. The motivation would be preserving European unity. Top EU leadership seem unanimous in their desire to starve their own people and collapse their remaining industrial base - in order to appease the wrathful gods of DUH CLIMATE. For reasons that escape me, they also seem to think a new world war would be just swell.
The German people are doubtless quite a bit less enthused about starving to death. Perhaps EU leadership felt there was a chance the German government might defect from the plan. They might choose to import gas to power their industry and heat their homes this winter. Which in turn might inspire similar rebellions in other EU member states. I can't say I know anything about German domestic politics that would confirm or deny this possibility.
By destroying Nordstream, the EU leadership eliminated the possibility that Germany might unilaterally opt out of the current suicide pact.
Also Britain not mentioned. I wonder why they were not considered as suspects
You missed a zero on your McVeigh’s truck bomb number. 181kg is 400lb, but according to your link the blast equivalent was 4000lb.
Thanks for the correction.
So... None of the consequences predicted in the Kherson region by the "in the process of losing" link came to pass. Turns out that General Zaluzhnyi wasn't such a genius, and he just got a bunch of his men killed for no reason.
All very interesting speculation. But here's why primarily, I think, no.
If US was involved then it's indicative of a plan going forward, having gamed various scenarios and expecting certain responses.
Nothing about this administration's previous actions gives me confidence they ever do anything with the kind of nuanced, scripted, carefully considered thinking that kind of bold decision would require.
So kinda indifferent to the particulars here anyway, because the likeliest thing to happen after, if Putin nukes something, will be a totally un planned, un discussed un thinking reactionary US response that will lead us into a completely un known future because apparently none of the un elected man children who actually hold senior jobs in the administration have a substantive framework about foreign policy to guide them. Except their two guiding principles; we must not be energy independent and must have an Iran deal. And if meanwhile, the eastern seaboard disolves into nuclear dust, none of them will accept responsibilty, much less resign.
On the other hand Biden did kill the XL pipeline...
But why the either or presentation, doesn't China have equal or better ratio of reward v. risk?
The idea that an LHD bombed Nordstream is ludicrous. I can't believe you're serious.
Are you trying to say they rolled a bomb off an LHD's tailgate? And hoped it sank to the right spot?
Was there some mysterious bomb-delivery vehicle on Kearsarge? How did it get onboard? And what did they do with all the USMC gear that was jam-packed into the well deck when Kearsarge left Norfolk?
There are 2,000 Marines and sailors aboard that ship and half are under 21. And they all have email. Good luck keeping a secret about your mystery bomb. Just hang out in a bar in the next port Kearsarge goes for liberty and you'll hear it all.
Warships normally don't transmit AIS except when coming into port or are in busy shipping lanes. They are warships after all.
This article aged well. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
Possibly. BALTOPS concluded in June. The boats I had tagged for delivery were in early August. The Hersh article doesn't state when the explosives were set, but does indicate that they missed the original BALTOPS deployment schedule because of Biden.
So I might have gotten it right.
I've read about the "U.S. military activity" in the area before, and none of these mentions addresses some crucial questions:
- How unusual is it for these vessels to be in that area? Sure they were around there not too long before, but is that unusual for them? Have they been around there before? Were they just passing by because that area is high traffic? Do they have similar patterns in other areas?
- If Joe Smoe can track a major military operation by looking at easily available data, and whether identifying information was turned off, what hope is there for the US navy to have any war time activity? If the U.S wanted to bomb this area why wouldn't they do what they'd do in war and make it very difficult / impossible to track these ships? Is naval warfare dead because even civilians can figure out where our ships are? This seems highly unlikely and suspicious to me.