Well maybe we need mythbusters to tell us how they would do it. Maybe they have, but I haven’t seen any experts stepping up to say.
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Except for the fact this was underwater, I don’t think it would take much more expertise one way or the other, but as it is, I don’t know. From what little I do know, what Hersh wrote makes it sound to me like he and his source don’t know what they’re talking about (not that I’d expect that for all the details). Like maybe he meant that C4 was used as a booster? It’s kind of interesting to guess at stuff but I have very little confidence in what people are saying.
I’m also thinking from the perspective, forget about whether the US or someone else did it and just assume US did it.
In this hypothetical, if I was in charge of US government and wanted to destroy NordStream, but also wanted to avoid escalation with Russia or conflict with German allies, the best way to do it would be to give Ukrainians the know how and materials to do it, but otherwise be completely distanced. I wouldn’t bring in the Norwegians or use NATO exercises as cover. That just makes too many people with too many conflicting interests who are in on the secret. Maybe with more explosives there was less risk of the Ukrainians failing to destroy the target due to missing it
Maybe but in that case why did the US start to warn about this very scenario months before it happened?
Maybe Biden thought there was still a chance to deter Putin
I meant the US informed their allies Nord Stream might be attacked in just this way in the Summer of last year, well after the start of the war but a few months before it actually happened. Maybe that can be spun as part of a US cover story, but that seems silly to me. I’ll look for the article a little later.
Edit: I thought it was more specific but this is all I can find rn.
The warnings were based on US intelligence assessments, but they were vague, the people said – it was not clear from the warnings who might be responsible for any attacks on the pipelines or when they might occur.
Like maybe the US gave Ukraine the capability early on when they made the warnings and basically told them they cannot proceed until some sort of pre-agreed condition was met. Maybe even some German intelligence or politician knew what the deal was but couldn’t be seen knowing about it and there were conditions like the sabotage would only happen under certain conditions and NATO couldn’t be directly involved.
Sure. Either way the explosives had to be very close to the pipeline. It’s a very strong structure.
Stuff like this can be used to endlessly nitpick any version of what happened. Why would they use C4 and not some other explosive compound? Well they had to use some explosive formulation. A hundred others might have worked. But only one was used. Saying it makes more sense that another method might have been used doesn’t debunk anything. They only used a single method out of innumerable other options.
It just strikes me as an odd detail. What does “C4 shaped charges” mean? Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think shaped charges would be manufactured using C4. It’s moldable but I think you’d prefer a powder that can be pressed or a solid that can be machined. Maybe there are similar but generic RDX mixtures that would work and people just refer to them as C4, or maybe the C4 was part of an explosive train apart from the main charge, IDK, whatever. But if he didn’t want to be nitpicked maybe he should have been less specific, or more, if he actually knew what he was talking about.
Unclear if this means anything.
FWIW, I looked and found some examples of improvised shaped charges using plastic explosives, so C4 could be used this way. But I don’t know why you would resort to this method if you have the resources of a state. And assuming this is what the saboteurs did, it doesn’t explain the amounts of explosives supposedly used.
Shaped charge doesn’t imply anything high tech or sophisticated. Tim McVeigh made a shaped charge by arranging barrels of ANFO in an appropriate pattern. Why would you use plastic explosive in a shaped charge? Because its easily shaped! Just because you work for a state doesn’t mean you’re going to want to make things complex by like machining solid explosives with machine tools or whatever.
Tim McVeigh also very likely had help making that bomb
Not necessarily, no. But they have to be carefully designed, made, and placed to work optimally. They might seem simple but they took decades to develop.
On my desk is a conical piece of lead with a stainless steel cube embedded in it. It was made for a device that was supposed to “throw” a projectile using the jet of a shaped charge. It didn’t work. It was a long time ago, but it could have been because the charges we made had voids, or the angles weren’t quite right. Maybe it would have worked if we’d had the charges custom-made for us by experts but we didn’t have that kind of budget.
Do I think an improvised shaped charge could work to blow up a pipeline? Sure. But let’s not forget that it’s Hersh that insists that lol 6 yahoos on a yacht couldn’t have done this, it had to be a state! Why would people with the resources of a state bother cutting up blocks of C4 and sandwiching them between lengths of angled metal like the Taliban when they could pull highly reliable commercial devices out of an explosives storage bunker somewhere?
Maybe they’re experts at doing this for demolition and knew voids or imprecise angles wouldn’t matter for this job. And maybe they got some comparable pipe and practiced beforehand to make sure. But if they’re so good at it, why did they need hundreds of pounds of explosives? Hell, one estimate I saw was 2000 lbs!
Without some real information, this is like arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
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That’s kind of my point. We’re only getting a fraction of the story, none of the context, and even if Sy is correct in everything important he’s still probably going to get technical details wrong. I’m sure you’ve run into the phenomenon of reading a news story about a technical subject that you are very knowledgeable about and saying holy shit this person has no idea what he’s talking about. The Igon Value Problem, which I mentioned when the story first came out.
Hersh is an investigative journalist. A world-renowned investigative journalist. A world-renowned investigative journalist taking a baseball bat to a hornet’s nest. He should be sure of the details if he’s going to be so dismissive of criticism.
But let’s face it, only one detail matters here, and that’s who did it. Trouble is, that might never be clear. So we can count on Hersh cackling about how stupid everyone is whenever it comes up.
If you’re Sy and you know the US did it, and then see the New York Times publish a story saying that the CIA suspects that a pro-Ukrainian group of partisan freedom fighters blew up the pipeline? Well, that would be pretty funny. I don’t know who did it and I thought it was pretty funny. But I guess if he laughed in the wrong fashion, well, that’s the important thing. Maybe we could forgive a chuckle, but a belly laugh? A cackle? Too much.
Let’s see what he’s got for us next week. Who knows, maybe it will be actual evidence.
I think this guy is the anti-Mearsheimer.
