The item below will appear in the forthcoming European EIR Strategic Alert. Special note: The article referenced is under copyright, held by the author Lt. Col. Ralph Bosshard (ret.), and cannot be republished without his permission (in any language). EIR and the Schiller Institute have been given exclusive permission to publish it, which they are doing in their current postings, in English and the original German.
Lt. Col. Ralph Bosshard (ret.) of the Swiss Army has submitted exclusively to EIR an article entitled “Sabotage of the Nord Stream Gas Pipelines: For Once, the Question ‘Cui Bono?’ Is Not Sufficient,” which from a professional technical and military standpoint cuts through all the baseless speculation on who sabotaged the Nord Stream gas line, and comes to the conclusion that it could not plausibly be the Russians.
First he discusses the robust nature of these pipelines, the fact that they are constructed of very special steel to withstand high pressures for decades. They are encased in a concrete jacket and are buried under the surface of the seabed and covered with a layer of rubble. To blow them up would require a highly complex operation requiring uncovering the pipes, penetrating the cement and then the pipe itself would require anywhere between some tens of kilos of explosive or even hundreds. Given the depth of the water, 70-90 meters, it would be beyond the scope of “recreational divers” and would require highly professional divers and special equipment, such as decompression chambers for the divers. While such equipment is available to submarines, the relative shallow depth would tend to rule that out, thus requiring surface ships which would have to loiter in the area for many hours if not days.
Given the close proximity of the pipelines to Danish and Swedish territorial waters and the fact that this area is heavily monitored by NATO anti-submarine reconnaissance ships and aircraft, Bosshard concludes: “This raises a completely different question than the question of who is to benefit: Who finds it easier to carry out such an act of sabotage? If it was the Russian Navy that carried out an extensive sabotage operation in the middle of a sea area surrounded by NATO countries or candidate countries, 300 km from the nearest Russian naval base, then the Russians would have made NATO look ridiculous. That would have been an impressive demonstration of Russian seabed warfare capabilities. The Russians could have accomplished the mere destruction of Nord Stream 1 and 2—without any demonstration effect—much more easily on their doorstep in the Gulf of Finland.
