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Notes -
Did the US blow up the Nord Stream Pipeline?
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
That was linked to me and it appeals to my sense of - conspiracy? warmongering? ... But I also don't really understand if it could be true.
What's the consensus here about the pipeline?
(I don't really even care if we discuss the article, it's long and I don't know who the person is - just interested in all kinds of thoughts)
While the pipeline was (is?) reachable by divers, I still favor a blockage/poor maintenance as the most likely theory, followed by sabotage from within NordStream's operation.
Thing is that the two pipelines blew something like 18 hours apart that strikes me as a long time for a group of divers and their support vessel to sit around waiting to be caught. If one were planning to destroy the pipes by planting bombs on the exterior, I would expect those bombs to be on a timer to allow the divers to already be long gone when shit goes down, and I would expect timers would be set to detonate simultaneously so as to minimize the risk of a bomb being discovered before it had gone off.
How could poor maintenance destroy two separate pipelines nearly simultaneously, while producing shockwaves that everyone agrees look like they come from high explosives? And why would they blow up right next to the Swedish and Danish undersea border, if not to complicate an investigation by blurring jurisdiction?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Nord_Stream_pipeline_sabotage#/media/File:Nord_Stream_gas_leaks_2022.svg
This has to be sabotage. And since it is sabotage, the most obvious conclusion is that it's anti-Russian sabotage. It's a Russian pipeline, something that Russia paid for, something that Russia hoped to use to lessen trans-Atlantic unity and bring Germany closer to them. It's absence means higher profits for American energy exports, higher reliance of Europe on America, stronger influence of Ukraine and Baltics on Russia-Europe energy exports and poorer Euro-Russian relations.
The US has the world's most powerful navy, a navy with a considerable presence in the Baltic. The US leads NATO and has enormous global influence. The investigation is being conducted by a NATO country and a NATO hopeful, excluding Russia, the aggrieved party. Surely the most likely conclusion is that it's a NATO operation, probably formulated and executed by the US! People have raised the idea of Russia playing 4D chess to demonstrate that they were committed to cutting ties with Europe, that it was a false-flag operation to worsen NATO unity...
But this is a pretty contrived argument. If the Norway-Poland gas pipeline that recently opened blew up, would they say it was clearly a NATO sabotage attack? No, the party that would gain in that scenario is obviously Russia and so Russia would be the primary suspect.
Pretty easily actually. Especially if the issue was "helped along" by somebody working for NordStream. The pipes were pressurized but product hadn't been flowing for months which means plenty of time for water to seep in and start forming methane hydrate. IE the liquid natural gas turns into a solid. You let that go on long enough and it becomes rather hard not blow to the pipe up entirely by accident. The Water hammer effect is bad enough when dealing with a fluid that is relatively inert, never mind one that's actually volatile.
That says "water hammer", not "natural gas hammer". It has nothing to do with "volatility" and everything to do with incompressibility which gasses lack. The increase in pressure caused by instantaneously stopping the average flow of the pipeline is well under one percent.
Look up the compressibility of methane hydrate.
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