Divers with a vendetta, and two weeks to train

Here’s the craziest part of The Nord Stream Conspiracy. In great detail, we are told how a group of regular men and women—expert at diving, but nothing else—are taught to blow up underwater infrastructure.

Initially, it was thought, they would need dive to the bottom of the Baltic Sea with prohibitively large explosive charges. Nord Stream was, after all, a powerfully built pipeline. This was a mistake in thinking; it was a mistake made by many experts after the explosions had taken place. The insanely devastating effect the blasts had on the pipelines was not caused by large explosives, but rather, tiny ones. Let’s call them bottle rockets. An old, wizened, explosives engineer, a Ukrainian in a wheelchair (a great character for a TV show) was hired to advise these divers on the operation. He noted the pipelines were highly pressurized. Punching even a tiny hole in a pressurized pipeline at the bottom of the sea would unleash a reaction that would rip the pipes wide open, not unlike piercing a balloon. “Make a small incision in the shell, and the pressure will do all the work,” he told them.

The plan was so simple, they didn’t believe him at first. He advised them to fill a diver’s bottle with octogen and hexagon, stable and easily handled explosives. He told them to attach the bottle to the joints in the pipeline, where the structure is weakest. Use a small piece of reinforced metal to direct the blast. He added, if a silicon cushion is inserted between pipeline surface and bottle, the impact will be bigger. The bottle should wear a timer. It should be detonated remotely. The goal, to direct the energy of the blast narrowly, enough to crack the pipe, can be accomplished with a bottle weighing just over 60 pounds. This was so unbelievable, they needed to test it.

Because the Baltic Sea is the most heavily-surveilled ocean in the world (who knew) they took their device to a granite quarry outside Kieve, Ukraine. The old engineer promised them, depth makes no difference for explosive effect. They could test their bottle rocket near the surface of the water. After several attempts, they got it right. They were able to achieve nice, big geysers. The tricker part of the operation, they knew, was submerging to 330 feet and placing the mines in the correct location. This would require practice, and practicing in the right conditions. They needed a body of water that mimicked the Baltic; low salinity, low visibility, and freezing near the bottom. They found another quarry to do the testing. For two weeks, that’s all they did. They tied a buoy to an anchor, and attached a string between the two. The male and female divers used the shot line to guide their descent, carrying 60-pound steel bottles filled with explosives to the bottom, placing them, and returning to the surface. They practiced in pairs, and often made the training more difficult by choosing spots where compasses didn’t work, or removing the heating device from their diving suits. At night, they got drunk. In the morning, they’d practice again. This went on until the group was ready to do the incredible. What can be learned from an explosives engineer in a wheelchair, what can be learned by people with a thirst for destruction… well, it’s more than incredible. They caused a 2.3 Richter scale tremor. The power of the blast equaled the thermal output of a major nuclear reactor. In Germany, where gas is more expensive than America, the leaked gas was worth $2 billion. The amount lost could power two million German households for a whole year. All this, from a group of divers with a vendetta. And two weeks to train. 

The Mystery of the Nord Stream Pipeline Explosion

Life is short and it’s a sin to waste your time. That’s a direct rip from the notebooks of Albert Camus (1913-1960) which I’ve been reading, and heeding, this first week of July. I’m working on a TV project about pipelines—oil and gas pipelines—and my research has brought me to a book called The Nord Stream Conspiracy by Wall Street Journal reporter Bojan Pancevski. It’s an interesting book. It’s not particularly well-written, but it is packed with information on Ukrainian spies who have until this moment not appeared (not really) in the Western press’s coverage of this war. Why that is is anyone’s guess. If you don’t know what the Nord Stream explosion is, you’d be forgiven for not knowing. It’s been called a “conspiracy” from the beginning, despite the fact, there’s nothing conspiratorial about the outcome; in September 2022, seismologists detected an undersea earthquake near the Danish island of Bornholm, which turned out to be a series of detonations along a $20 billion pipeline transporting Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Within a minute, Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline ruptured and when Danish fighter jets were sent to survey the scene, pilots saw geysers three thousand feet in diameter, spewing methane into the ocean. They guessed, immediately, the underwater blasts were an act of sabotage. But who had done it? They didn’t know. In the days following the explosion, five hundred thousand metric tons of methane—the largest ever human-caused gas release—spread over the Baltic and killed more marine life than anyone can measure. When you read this book, the mystery isn’t “who did this” but rather, “who didn’t stop them?” It is abundantly clear the Russians did not blow up their own pipeline. Any 3rd grade child would guess the Ukrainians or the Americans (probably both) worked to achieve this outcome, and this is all to say, have we not learned this lesson? War is absurd. War is inflationary. To destroy things that were already built, to need to rebuild them is—if nothing else—an inflationary event. Vonnegut taught us this in Slaughterhouse Five, Camus’ entire philosophy is built on this idea. War is absurd. Stop doing it. If your ally or enemy is about to do something absurd, something inflationary, tell them to take a hike. Literally. Go into the mountains and take a twenty or thirty or forty-mile hike alone. At some point during that walk, they will exhaust themselves of stupid notions. Then we can return to some better, earlier, version of how to live with each other. On this earth.