The rumors reached me three weeks ago that there were six explosions, not just five as have been reported so far. I was intrigued by a sentence in Bojan Pancevski’s article in the Wall Street Journal from August this year. He wrote that the Ukrainian sailboat crew, after making a stop in Kolberg, Poland, placed the rest of the mines. It was plural, so I figured it had to be more than one bomb, and that these bombs most likely were in the southern area based on all other information that has been published about the sailboat mission.
I took a second look at the sonar side scan footage from my May 2023 expedition, and there it was! Captain Patrik Juhlin had towed the side scan sonar transponder over the southern cut of the Nord Stream 2 A pipeline, and at the end of the same scan it captured a perfect image of the bomb damage on the B-line.
Unlike all other bombs, this one was NOT placed on a so called welded field joint. According to Der Spiegel, the divers who placed the bombs went down along a guiding line and then swam to the nearest field joint. They knew that the joints were weak points since they were covered by soft polyurethane foam instead of the reinforced concrete between the joints. But for some strange reason, bomb six was placed on the concrete, almost in the middle between two joints. The mistake is strange because the joints are very easy to see, and the saboteurs had successfully located them several times before misplacing bomb six. Spiegel further writes that the bombs were modified dive bottles filled with explosives, and their understanding is that the dive bottles were put standing in the mud next to the pipeline, leaning towards the pipeline with a “silicone pillow” in between. I had previously assumed that the bombs were put on top of the pipeline and some of them had slided off to the side. I still think so based on the geometry of the deformations we have been able to examine, but there is no great confidence in this. I’m thinking that the purpose of the silicone pillow was perhaps to prevent a longitudinally placed dive bottle to roll off the pipeline, but I might be wrong here. The sabotage divers are now allegedly heroes in Ukraine, and I’m sure they will reveal to us the remaining details of how they pulled this off.
The explosion on the concrete did not deform the actual steel pipeline, which supports my previous assertion that the bombs were precisely calculated in order to create an opening at a joint, and let the internal pressure do the rest of the damage. This has been confirmed to me by two very different sources familiar with two different photometric surveys of the damage.
I would say that the observations in the field so far are consistent with the stories published in WSJ and Der Spiegel, although I can’t completely exclude the possibility that the Ukrainian story tellers have been briefed on the investigative results and made up a story consistent with the observations.
An American chartered offshore Norwegian offshore vessel, Normand Frontier, sent divers to all explosion sites between November 20 and November 20 2022. The Americans went straight to all the interesting spots, including the Dent and bomb 6. They never surveyed the area, and an American coast guard ship, USGS Hamilton chased away other ships. A Greenpeace activist on their ship Beluga has told the story.
It is unlikely the Americans knew about the disclosed bombs because they communicated with the national investigations. Sources tell me that there was no communication at the police level between the U.S. and the national investigations. Maybe the Americans did their own secret sonar survey with their AIS off, or they learned about the exact positions directly from the perpetrators. The Ukrainians on the sailboat allegedly brought their own high precision GPS and also a sonar, so they would have known where they had placed their bombs. Rumors has it that the Germans in the investigation were upset with the Americans who knew all along who did it, but did not provide their information to the investigation.
Why Six?
Both the Dent and bomb six were placed adjacent to a successful bomb, only 75-95 meters away on the sister pipeline. The targeting of both pipelines at two of the four sites, and the information from WSJ that one bomb was dropped, suggests that the sailboat crew had materials for seven bombs on the boat. Seven is a very odd number to plan for, but it would make total sense to bring eight bombs and plan for two on each line to make sure of a success. I’ve thought a lot about this since Seymour Hersh mentioned eight bombs in conversation with journalist Fabian Scheidler. Hersh claimed that the Americans had picked up the bombs that didn’t explode. I dismissed this idea for a while, but now that one bomb seems to be missing, we must again ask what happened to it. According to WSJ and Spiegel, a bomb was dropped by the female diver who missed to snap a carabiner supposed to secure the bomb to the guiding line down to the pipeline. This bomb, I call it bomb 7, probably exploded since the timers and detonators would have been set before she got in the water to commence the dive. The military hydrophones would have detected the positions of all explosions and if Der Spiegel is right about dive bottle pipe bombs, there would be debris to collect and verify the story. It is also possible that the whole reason for the saboteurs to dock in Poland on September 19, after placing 4 bombs and dropping one, was to pick up more bombs.
Why did one southern bomb explode 17 hours before the bombs in the north?
We know exactly when the successful bombs exploded, both form seismic analysis and pressure drops in the pipelines. But for the bombs not rupturing the pipelines we still don’t know exactly. Since the perpetrators knew about the internal gas pressure, and depended on it for good effect, they hardly planned for a 17 hour delay. We now know that they had two bombs on at least two pipelines, so why set the timers so that one of those bombs would be ineffective? This question remains. If it was a mistake made on the boat, it’s weird if the same mistake was made twice, so it’s interesting to find out exactly when bomb 6 exploded. I have previously speculated that the bombs were triggered by sonar signals like in the plan published by Seymour Hersh, and that this signal was, at first, only picked up in the southern area. This theory would be falsified if bomb six exploded simultaneously with most of the bombs and NS2AD was the sole mistake. Another speculation could be that the two final bombs picked up in Kolberg were somehow different, so they only managed to set the timers to midnight UTC. These are very vague speculations, but what happened in Kolberg on the 19:th remains very relevant to the story.
How can we know that the three successful bombs were also small?
Some people have pointed out to me that although the failed bombs were provably small there is no conclusive evidence that the bombs causing seismic events and dispersing pipe segments over a distance of up to 280 meters, were actually big. Up to now I have had no good counter argument to this assertion since we haven’t found any direct bomb damage proving that the bombs at the big destruction sites were also small. But I’m sure that evidence will som be published in full.
I have had private communication with professor Eric Dunham of Stanford University who recently held a seminar on the topic. I missed the seminar, but Dunham was kind enough to tell me the highlights of his findings. Eric Dunham has previously done work on so-called “air-guns”, which the oil industry is using to create their own seismic waves. They then record reflections of these waves on different layers of sediments kilometers deep in the ground, in hope of finding new petroleum reserves. A breaking pipeline with pressurized methane gas works like a giant air-gun which initially fooled some seismologists into thinking the bombs must have been very big. But what professor Dunham has done is to modify his air-gun model to the conditions of the breaking pipeline, and combine it with a model of the explosion. By solving a so-called “seismic wave propagation problem” he could create synthetic seismograms and compare those with the actual data. Seismic airguns are well understood, and Dunhams models have been validated by practical experiments. The same is true for underwater explosions and Swedish seismologists have fine tuned their models on seismograms of explosions with known yield on the Baltic seafloor. The news with Dunham’s work is that it explains the physics of the combined effect of the bomb and the following gas-gun. Dunham writes (private communication with me):
“The blast accelerates the water, so that when the gas is discharged, the explosion bubble is already moving outward, quite rapidly. This increases the seismic radiation, which is related to the expansion rate of the bubble. In other words, bubble expansion from gas discharge alone contends with more water inertia, which limits the expansion rate.
Our best fitting models for the first, southeast event have yields 10-30 kg, probably closer to the smaller end of this, though there is uncertainty from the seismic wave propagation modeling. The second, northeast events are more complicated but again yields in that general range seem to match reasonably well”
Dunham’s work is solid first principles modeling. It’s about working out the fundamental physics, mainly conservation of mass, momentum and energy in the seconds following an underwater explosion followed by gas discharge. These are things which can be modeled, so the idea of 500kg bombs is dead. All bombs were small, and could very well have been dive bottle pipe bombs placed by divers from a sailboat.
Top-notch analysis, combining on-site investigation, investigative journalism, logical reasoning, and experimental studies. Really impressive work.