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Was the Nord Stream 2 Rupture an Accidental Catalyst?
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- brutusborn 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ggm 4y agoIf you posit poor weld quality lead to one event but then argue this catelyzed an active attack as the second event, why do you not actively discuss weld quality as the root cause of both events? I see no need for there to have BEEN a second attack, if you posit weld quality caused one failure, its actually more plausible weld quality is an issue overall, than something was done. The ships could have been doing remote sensing to try and test weld quality, as much as laying munitions. It feels like partial application of Occams razor or something. Admitting they did a shit job of laying critical infrastructure is probably hard, for a highly distorted economy. The risk of achieving a window-ejection event, is high.
- htag 4y agoThis is stated in the article. The theory is that explosives on NS1 were detonated because the failure of NS2 would have triggered an inspection of NS1 that would have revealed the previously planted explosives.
- ianburrell 4y agoNot mentioned in article, it also explains why the NS1 was blown up 17 hours later than NS2. Would expect coordinated attack to occur simultaneously. Also, it explains why NS2 leak was distance from NS1. If coordinated attack, would expect one ship to lay explosives on both pipelines close together.
- jacknews 4y agoHow do you trigger these kinds of things? I don't think radio works at depth. So you need to actually get close enough for a sonar ping or whatever? Hmmm, 80km in 17hrs...
- sgc 4y agoWell, because as he said, they so far confirm to have found explosive residue at one site, and not the other. And, as stated, there was suspicious activity of a ship directly over the site for a week prior to the attack, where explosive residues have been confirmed, and not over the other site.
- brutusborn 4y agoBecause the theory is straw-clutching to discredit Hersh. These kind of pipelines have extremely rigorous testing regimes. The probability that a weld defect caused failure in a non-operational pipeline is tiny.
- orwin 4y agoOne of my dad's close friends when he was a companion (compagnons du devoir, idk if it exists in the US) worked on submarine welds. He would agree with you (he just retired because army have early pension) A second welded for EDF on thermic generators, including nuclear. He would have agreed with you, even when he was detached to China. Until 2010. Now he rants about quality control not doing their jobs, 28 years old managers who never welded once in their life who can't bother showing up on the site, and the resp ignoring his warnings for years. I'd say the probability is at least small, definitely not tiny.
- blindriver 4y ago[flagged]
- Arainach 4y agoIt's one thing to say it's incredibly unlikely, which is fair. Please don't use terms such as "zero percent chance" - there is absolutely both chance and precedent for pipelines to have catastrophic failure, regardless of timing. The chance is never zero.
- armatav 4y agoYeah it’s zero. Like the chance of rolling a 6 on a coin.
- ianburrell 4y agoOne question is did the operator do anything after Germany suspended the certification on September 22. Like decreasing pressure or increasing pressure. Those seem unlikely to cause leak but would explain the timing. We also don’t know anything about the leaks. It should be obvious to investigators if Nord Stream 2 was not an explosion.
- kilgnad 4y agoThe chance is never zero, but it can be effectively zero. And the way we communicate this fact is through inexact language. It's never zero in the same way that you ever having a chance to live on the moon in your lifetime is never zero. The way you're characterizing is wrong because although it's non zero... this much is true: You have to be pretty damn stupid to NOT think biden is behind the whole thing.
- Daz1 4y agoNo need to be a pedant. The phrase '0%' chance means 'for the purpose of the conversation, an infinitesimally low likelihood of occurring.
- kilgnad 4y agoYou're voted down, but you're not wrong. The government does use agents that spread misinformation. I mean it's a freemarket... perfectly legal for the media too bullshit and perfectly legal for the government to bullshit too. There is nothing precluding this blog from being written by such an agent.
- cheekibreeki2 4y agoAll of these people acting like the the EU hasn't officially labeled this event as sabotage. One only needs to ask who would benefit. Perhaps ask Victoria 'fuck the eu' Nuland.
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- jcranmer 4y agoWhile this is an interesting theory, it definitely has shades of https://xkcd.com/690/ https://xkcd.com/690/ in it. I never thought I'd see an actual article where I could make that reference. :-)
- postsantum 4y agoI usually argue that only the second and the fifth moon landings were real, the rest were staged
- crummy 4y agoThe first one they had to do for real to know how to build the staging for the later fakes.
- mikeyouse 4y agoThat Minerva Julie track is certainly interesting.. a week after Russia cuts the gas through NS1, a Russiann-linked oil freighter (that had just been added to Ukraine's war sponsor registry (https://nazk.gov.ua/en/news/companies-from-the-nacp-list-of-international-sponsors-of-war-are-now-in-the-world-check-database-used-worldwide-for-reviewing-counterparties/ https://nazk.gov.ua/en/news/companies-from-the-nacp-list-of-...)) spends nearly a week loitering directly over the site of the explosions that would come 10 days later. Far more open source evidence for this theory than Hersh's, though that's not saying a ton.
- londons_explore 4y agoBut if they knew they were laying explosives, would they really do so with their AIS transponder on?
- brutusborn 4y agoYeah the comments arguing about missing ship data make no sense, of course the perpetrators would have tried to cover their tracks.
- lostlogin 4y agoWhat have you seen in previous Russian operations would make you think they wouldn’t? Competence has not been a hallmark for a long time.
- mikeyouse 4y agoIt was a commercial ship that had just left port in the Netherlands -- it feels like it'd be twice as suspicious if it spent a week adjacent to a shipping lane, in full view of other ships with its transponder off.
- koreanguy 4y ago[dead]
- kilgnad 4y ago[flagged]
- gumby 4y ago> Biden: eyes twinkle "I promise you, we will be able to do it" There is nothing grammatically wrong with this phrase, but it is highly unusual in US English where a different turn of phrase is used. However this phrase is common in certain other languages.
- Semaphor 4y agoI read an interesting comment on reddit a while ago, paraphrasing from memory: Assuming there was definitive proof who did it (and for simplification reason, let’s say it was either the USA or Russia), there is no way they will not classify and bury that. It can’t be the USA for obvious reasons, but Russia would make it too direct an attack on a NATO state, which no one wants either. So the current state of "we have no idea" is the best for everyone involved.
- jemmyw 4y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EeP_ZZbBIl4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EeP_ZZbBIl4 I like this analysis, where it was probably Russia, although we may never know, but it's actually more harmful to Russia if we have these conspiracy theories going around the perpetrator/cause. They want people to be panicked by their hybrid warfare and instead the West is largely ignoring it.
- flangola7 4y agoWouldn't that count as an act of war against NATO? If that's actually what happened, nobody would admit because the endgame is catastrophically bad.
- Semaphor 4y agoYeah, exactly, that’s what my paraphrased comment was about.
- jemmyw 4y agoWhen you consider the other things that have been going on it would be but Russia is going to make sure they have a chain of deniability. Would the West go to war over something that doesn't cause mass public outage and they can't pin on Russia with a high degree of certainty? I doubt it. Actually whoever did it it seems like the best course of action for Europe is to not talk about it. Russia, USA, Ukrainian terrorists it doesn't really matter.
- ianburrell 4y ago
- thepasswordis 4y agoIt's absolutely incredible to me that there is even a question about this. The Biden administration walked back the Trump policy of sanctioning anybody who did work on the NS2 pipeline. Russia was able to use this as an implied bargaining chip against German support for Ukraine. Who benefits from blowing up a Russian pipeline in The Baltic Sea? Russia? The country that was planning on using this as leverage? Who could have just as easily simply turned the supply off? The idea that anybody ever bought that is embarrassing. Now Germany is also signaling that they aren't on board with the idea of economic sanctions against China: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-02-18/China-to-expand-mutually-beneficial-cooperation-with-Germany-Wang-Yi-1hvX8NlMmLm/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-02-18/China-to-expand-mutual... Germany is trying to avoid WW3 here, which I think is signaled by their initial reaction to the war, and now signaled again with their response to the idea of economic sanctions against China. In pursuit of that, they didn't want to support the war in Ukraine, for what I think should now be obvious reasons. The US was worried that they wouldn't be willing to risk their population freezing to death this winter, so we blew up the gas pipeline and took the option away from them.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoHave to wonder whether the Russia investigation looked in the right places. Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, 1980s wanting its foreign policy back, secretly promising "flexibility" to Putin. Makes you wonder what Putin paid for that kind of flexibility.
- jemmyw 4y agoBy the time it blew up Russia had lost their leverage. It was clear by then that Europe was going to absorb the gas situation. That doesn't rule out the US. This is a reasonable take on it that doesn't conclude anything but looks at the reactions https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EeP_ZZbBIl4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EeP_ZZbBIl4
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- Lazare 4y agoIt's a plausible theory, and it does at least go some way to explaining some of the oddities. For example, why such a large distance between the breaks in the NS1 and NS2 pipelines? The detail about the Minerva Julie are suggestive. How true is it? Or perhaps better, how likely is it that it's true? That I couldn't say. I'd tentatively say it's more likely than Hersh's story, but that's a low bar.
- brutusborn 4y agoWhat makes you doubt Hersh's story?
- jcranmer 4y agoRelying very heavily on a single anonymous source is a massive red flag.
- Lazare 4y agoIt doesn't make a lot of sense (ie, if you accept the premise is true, would you expect the plot to play out as Hersh claims?), it includes several details that are clearly incorrect, it isn't particulary supported by open source intel, and it relies, by it's own admission, on a single anonymous source. So the situation is essentially "Hersh claims that someone told him a story that we know is at least slightly untrue." Is it possible that the rest of it is true? Absolutely! ...but there's nothing I've seen to suggest that it's likely the rest of it is true. It's just another theory, of which there are many.
- brutusborn 4y agoWhat details are clearly incorrect? Also he only quotes a single anonymous source. He has stated before that he verifies info from multiple sources, and goes to great lengths to protect sources, so it is very likely that there are more but that he cannot give details without endangering them. https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1626289757020880896?s=20&t=WmBlXo3rqaIqltrWjX-EPQ https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/162628975702088089...
- ChickenNugger 4y ago[flagged]
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- neovialogistics 4y agoWithout appealing to semifamous names who have stated their theories, I'd like to just list the entities with both means and motive that are known to exist, some of which are unlikely candidates. * Denmark * Estonia * Finland * France * Gazprom as an independent actor * Latvia * Lithuania * NATO as an independent actor * Norway * Poland * Russia * Sweden * Transneft as an independent actor and competitor to Gazprom * United Kingdom * United States Can any of these be conclusively ruled out?
- nl 4y ago> Can any of these be conclusively ruled out? Of course not. It's a fallacy to think it is possible. Even in the case where someone claims to have been the party that did it and produced documentary evidence showing it the political environment dictates that other parties will claim it is fake or a false flag.
- bagels 4y agoMight as well also consider the possibility that they weren't damaged at all then too.
- NalNezumi 4y agoI don't think any can be conclusively ruled out, but if we start to weight each candidate by things such as * motive(am I gaining/losing leverage by this?), * ability (can I actually do/help/enable this action?) * consequence (can I get away with it? Can I muddle it and make people get along with it?) * context (a war is going on, but so is internal politics; does my context push me for this action?) I think probably more than half could be reasonably ruled out, depending on how each of those were weighted. And we could probably reason about the accomplices too
- jcranmer 4y agoThe issue here is that the state with the most motive (Ukraine) is one that most are agreed did not have the opportunity to actually conduct the attack. Nobody else has a strong motive. The US had already achieved what it could have hoped to achieve months before the pipeline explosion. Russia's plausible motive assumes a certain amount of strategic insanity mixed with thuggery. Everybody else's motive more or less rests on making a political statement that they haven't been making in public.
- jacknews 4y agoIt just makes no sense, Russia didn't need to blow up the pipelines, they could just turn off the supply. In fact, they lost a substatial negotiating ability (being able to turn the gas back on) with the explosions. As always, follow the money. USA are now the fracking gas suppliers to Europe, and have cut European 'dependence' on Russia (aka a modicum of independence from USA) which they'd been bleating about for a long time.
- athammer 4y agoI personally don’t think it’s Russia(I think it’s Poland). However the theory Russia did it or rather a sect of the Russia’s power structure did it is definitely plausible. Many hardliners in the government saw the pipeline as a tool to negotiate with the West and a way out of the full scale war many hardliners are calling for. Blowing the pipeline has backed Putin into a corner. The moderates on the other hand see the same thing as well. This forces Putin into a corner and weakens him considerably if the war goes badly (it was/is). The only person who didn’t want the pipeline blown up was Putin himself. His power structure all had something to gain if the pipes were blown. Many people say “well Russia wouldn’t do that” and they’re already wrong. Russia’s motives are not singular they are plural. There are competing groups within the Kremlin that are held together by Putin, not a singular will of Russia.
- jacknews 4y agoOften Occams razor applies to these potentially murky situations. The Minerva tracks are from September, and to me look like they are scanning for something, rather than laying anything in a specific location. Possibly the Russians had a tip-off or spies informing that the pipes were mined. The story might actually be partly true, except it was the US who feared a pipe inspection, and so detonated the evidence.
- mikeyouse 4y ago> The Minerva tracks are from September The Minerva tracks are from two weeks before the explosion (it left the area on Sep 13th and the explosions came on the 26th) . That timing seems to implicate rather than exonerate.. > Possibly the Russians had a tip-off or spies informing that the pipes were mined. The Minerva is a Greek tanker that often transports Russia oil, it's not a Russian ship.. if they had a tip about the pipelines being mined, surely Russia would investigate it themselves or with a ship that's equipped to examine the sea floor instead of a random tanker with no such capabilities?
- ChickenNugger 4y agoNo
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- marsven_422 4y ago[dead]
- jscipione 4y agoHappy President’s Day everybody.