Disorganized Thoughts on Nordstream II

Much ink has been shed over the blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines with fingers being pointed at Americans, Russians, and Ukrainians as the saboteurs. At this writing, a Ukrainian supposedly  involved has been arrested. How the media will spin this I don’t know. There exist many politically motivated who would like to decide who did it, regardless of who actually did it.

The press coverage with the predictability of corruption and adultery will be slanted to the verge of verticality. I have seen stories suggesting that a boat of some sort passed over the gasoducts, a diver jumped overboard, and voila, nothing to it. No, gang, it didn’t happen that way. The crucial question to be asked is who could have done it, and only then who did do it.  Who could have done it is a question of training and access to equipment and explosives.

Let’s look at the technical demands of the sabotage. (For what it’s worth, I hold a NAUI Master Diver ticket and nitrox cert. These are for sport diving, in principle not below 130 feet, but the problems are largely the same–deco, nitrogen narcosis, currents, and so on, but greatly less severe.)

To begin, the sabotage diving was dangerous, requiring a high level of training and experience.  The pipelines are at about 250 feet. To dive at this depth, you need extensive experience, competent supporting crew, good equipment–or be stark crazy.  Does the Ukraine have such divers? I don’t know though, since the country fronts on the Black Sea, maybe it does. This would be worth checking.

Almost the only sources of such divers are navies, commercial salvage companies, and a few small specialty outfits that take civilian tourist divers to deep wrecks like the Andrea Dorea.  A reader wanting to know more about the nature of deep technical diving might read Shadow Divers, available on Amazon, about diving on a sunken German U-boat at depth. It is both technically correct and good adventure lit.

But let’s look at what is involved.

You cannot use compressed air at that depth. Oxygen, about twenty percent of normal air, becomes toxic when inhaled under many atmospheres of pressure. You have to use Trimix, a mixture of oxygen, helium, and nitrogen. this is specialized stuff that you cannot get at the corner grocery.

Water gets cold at depth, and the Baltic is not sunny Florida. The divers would need dry suits, which require training and are not sold at the local scuba store. People who what have them and know how to use them would be associated with governments or professional salvage outfits and probably traceable.

To blow up a pipeline you first have to find it. This is not as easy as it sounds.  The ocean gets dark at depth. Even at 120 feet on a Caribbean  wall all color is filtered out and there is only dim bluenesst. By some accounts the Ukrainians or the Navy dove at night to avoid attention.  Visibility of more than fifty feet  even in  daytime even with flashlights would be unlikely or, at night zero. I will guess that navies might find a pipeline by sonar or by having Gps coordinates, both implying governmental participation.

Diving at eighty meters is very much in the decompression realm. At that depth you absorb a lot of nitrogen  and, to avoid getting bent, which can be fatal, you need long deco stops on the way up. These require a line from the dive boat down to the bottom with air tanks at intervals to let the diver out-gas during long hang, which can run to hours depending on bottom time and gas mixture.

For the thanatoprurient reader, an interesting way to die is for your drysuit to suddenly inflate, shooting you to the surface and turning your blood to froth as nitrogen bubbles out. This happens.

Currents are another danger. They are said to be strong around the pipelines, though I don’t know. With drysuit and maybe triple tanks, you can’t swim against much of a current. I know of one diver, diving on a WWII wreck, who was swept off the ship and, not being clipped in, could not get back. Neither could he surface because without deco stops, which he did not have enough air for, his blood would have boiled. as i recall, he was not found.

Finally, the explosives. These, obviously, were designed to be left at depth for long periods and triggered remotely.  They have about them a strong whiff of governments and navies, though perhaps an underwater engineering firm might have something of the sort for blowing up obstacles. Using them would require training, which almost nobody has outside the military.

That freelance Ukrainians could have managed all of these things without heavy government support is extremely unlikely, though this story is being peddled in the Western media.  Sources of Trimix have to be few. Ukrainians with the requisite training and access to equipment have to be very few, either commercial divers or military, and easily traceable, though perhaps not in wartime.

In the above video, President Biden virtually promises to destroy the pipelines if russia invaded the Ukraine, which it did. This, it seems to me, is conclusive in establishing American involvement, though  it might have taken the form of training and equipping the sometimes-claimed Ukrainians or of working with other countries, also sometimes claimed.

An idea promulgated by the American media with the enthusiasm of an Amway salesman late on his car payment is that Russia blew up the pipeline. This makes as much sense as lugnuts on a birthday cake. That Russia would blow up its own ten-billion dollar pipeline is so silly that I would expect to find the idea  in the Wall Street Journal, which is where I did find it. But here some politics. (Look, I told you this was going to be disorganized.)

For many years a nightmare in Washington was that with the end of the Cold War, Germany and Russia might become heavy trading partners, with Russia providing Germany with cheap energy and  raw materials and Germany providing Russia with things like machinery and technology. As after the fall of the USSR Russia did nothing scary, it was hard for America to use the old reliable of “Eeeek, the Russians are coming. The danger was that someone might say, “What is NATO for?” NATO was, and is, Washington’s primary means of keeping Europe as a collection of vassals.

So for many years before the Ukraine war, Washington fought furiously to keep Nordstream II from being completed and going live. During the war, the cutting off of Russian gas badly hurt German industry, and Putin kept pointing out that, should Germany make peace with Russia, he could restore the vital cheap energy with the push of a button. When Washington blew up the pipeline, if it did, it removed Russia’s leverage over Germany. It also reduced Germany’s industrial competitiveness and made it dependent on American  natural gas. Such a deal.

Regardless of who did it, Germany presumably doesn’t want to blame Washington because the sabotage was an act of war and Berlin would have to do something about it or else make its subjugation  to America more obvious than it would like. Washington has had much to gain by doing it but nothing by admitting it,  Kiev probably doesn’t want to admit that it blew up a major ally’s main source of energy, so blaming freelancers amounts to saying that nobody is to blame. Perfection

Note that Washington has not shown any eagerness to investigate. For example, As many will remember, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a piece saying that divers from the Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center in Florida did the deed. This is possible. They have the training and equipment. Congress could have subpoenaed them and questioned them under oath as to their part, if any, in the explosions. If they were not involved, this would have refuted Hersh’s claim that they were and largely exonerated the US in public opinion. Congress did not do this. Why not?

OK, them’s my thoughts. I’ll Wire transfers accepted.send you a bill tomorrow.