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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.
You should read it -- it's detailed and seems plausible. (IANANS)
The source claims that a timed explosion was the original plan, but concerns were raised that having stuff blowing up 2 days after a mine-sweeping exercise would ruin plausible deniablity -- so a remote trigger set off by a specific signature generated by a sono-buoy that the Norwegians could drop whenever they wanted during the course of normal operations was deployed.
I don't think the blockage theory can explain N.S. II blowing up -- wasn't it non-operational at the time? (not to mention that simultaneous events in two pipelines which have not exploded in the past seems a bit unlikely)
The hydrate plug theory is basically that leaving a pipe non-operational for a long time and then trying to unilaterally unplug it was rolling the dice on spectacular failure.
But was NS II ever operational? I guess there was some gas in it (probably to prevent contamination/corrosion) but AFAIK no production pumping had ever been done on it. (and nobody was trying to make it otherwise at the time, so it's not clear why they'd be unplugging it at that moment either)
The pipe was pressurised with gas (which was almost certainly very slushy in parts). If the Russians wanted to make sure that the pipe was in a ready-to-supply state (or if some gazprom official had been making representations this had been the case), plugs are cleared through careful depressurisation and slowly melting them. Depressuring unilaterally too quickly could create a pressure gradient over any hydrate plugs and accelerate them off down the pipe.
Why would it be slushy? It's dried methane, already processed for consumption I think -- and here's the P-T curve for hydrate formation, which seems to indicate that you can keep gas in the pipe indefinitely with no issues so long as you don't ramp up to higher pressures. Which I'm not sure why you would do if you were forbidden from pumping gas at the time.
A lot of theories around this war seem to require every Russian to be a moron -- which is almost certainly wrong, and in any case a canonical example of underestimating your enemy.
Per my other comment, I'd expect the pipes on the seafloor to be at >10,000 kPa at <5C, sufficient for hydrate formation.
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