The amount of explosive needed for the destruction of Nord Stream

A response to a comment

Left: USS Kearsarge (LHD-3; 257 meters) was training mine warfare east of Bornholm together with 40 other ships from various NATO-countries during the BALTOPS-22 exercise (5-15 June 2022). It is able to carry some six attack or fighter aircraft and some 20-25 helicopters. It used a UUV (Unmanned Underwater Vehicle), and it was also capable of carrying a small midget submarine that could have been used by the divers. Kearsarge returned to the Baltic Sea on 2 August, passed over the northern site for the upcoming explosions on 21 September and left the Baltic Sea on 22 September, four days before the explosions. Right: a US P-8A Poseidon dropping sonar buoys with parachutes for a “soft landing”.

[In February-March 2024, I corrected some figures below and added one point in the end, but this has no significance for the arguments in this article]

I wrote in my Substack article “The attack on Nord Stream: a short introduction” (29 September 2023): “Swedish authorities claim that the magnitude of the ‘earthquake’ of the second explosion was 2.3. Norway’s Seismological station NORSAR, with long experience of underwater explosions states that a magnitude of 2.1-2.3 corresponds to 650-900 kg TNT, which would mean close to 900 kg TNT for 2.3.” I also wrote: “Each pipeline section (made of steel with a cover of concrete) is 12 meters long and has a weight of 24 tons (Nord Stream official report). About 250 meters of the pipeline of Nord Stream 1 string A and B had been blown away.” It seems to have been an enormous explosion. About a thousand tons of pipeline appears to have disappeared in one explosion (or in several simultaneous explosions). Der Spiegel wrote already in October 2022: “security officials believe massive explosive devices with the force of 500 kilograms of TNT were detonated. According to the magazine, the conclusion was reached using seismic data. The strength of the explosives used also suggests that a state is behind the attack, and not some terrorist organization.” 

It is obvious that such amount of explosive would not be possible to bring on a 15 meters’ sailing boat like Andromeda that has been proposed by U.S. and German media as the probable suspect. A mine warfare expert of the Swedish Coastal Defense Forces told me that the explosion seemed to have been much bigger than you would have had from a 600 kg mine. The latter was recorded at the seismological institute in Uppsala 130 km further north, while the explosion at Bornholm was recorded almost 1300 km further north (ten times the distance of the mine explosion). You would need a crane on the boat to deploy such a bomb at the exact right position, because the divers cannot move around heavy equipment on the seafloor. Anyway, as I wrote in my September article: “There was an enormous force destroying the pipelines. This was a professional operation and not something you do from a small sailing boat. It was a huge blast run by a state agency.”

Now, Jan Arvid Goetesson has made a comment on my article. He points out that the Swedish daily Expressen has an interview with Professor Björn Lund at the Swedish National Seismic Network (SNSN), Uppsala University. Lund argues in an upcoming article together with the seismological institutes in Denmark, Norway, the U.S. and Germany that one would only need 50 kg explosives or less for the very large explosion. Expressen writes that Lund “commented early on and made comments on the explosions, which he then calculated would have corresponded to up to 400 kg of TNT for the largest of the explosions. Since then, new calculations have been made in an international cooperation between Uppsala university, Danish GEUS, Norwegian NORSAR, Stanford and German BGR. The study will be presented in December at an international conference in San Francisco, but Expressen is able to reveal some of the conclusions in advance.”

Expressen writes: “We are not ready yet [with our analysis], but what we see here is that less than 50 kg of explosives are needed to cause what we see [Björn Lund is referring to the damage done to Nord Stream]. And it could be the case that even less is needed, perhaps. Maybe 25 kg is enough.” Expressen also says: “According to Lund the new calculations show that the pressurized gas in the pipelines caused the larger part of the energy that was measured in connection with the explosion.”

The release of pressurized gas from a ruptured pipeline would definitely release a lot of energy, but would this release of energy be directed downward to such an extent that it would initiate an “earthquake” registered 1300 km further north in the very north of Sweden? And how do we translate amplitude on the Richter scale to the amount of energy used?

It is not obvious that the energy from a gas release will be directed primarily downwards into the earth’s crust. This has to be explained more in detail and has to be tested. The first reaction would be that the Scandinavian seismological institutes have let their factual information suit the dominating media narrative claiming that culprits had been a handful of people in a sailing boat.

However, the factual information also raises more questions. There are a large number of seismic stations around the Baltic Sea that are able to register even small earthquakes. Sweden itself has more than 60 such stations belonging to the Swedish National Seismic Network (SNSN). Information from most of these stations is to my knowledge, not available to the public. SNSN at the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, concluded that the “earthquake” at 17.04 UTC (or 19.04 CEST or Central European Summer Time) on 26 September 2022, the large explosion, had a magnitude of 2.3 on the Richter scale, but the relatively nearby Delary station supposedly registered a magnitude of 3.2. In an article in Seismica (28 October 2022), Stähler et.al. concludes after having received data from the nearby stations in Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Poland (Bornholm, Peenemünde, Delary and Gorka Klasztorna) that this “earthquake” had a magnitude of 3.1 on the Richter scale. Also, the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ in Potsdam concluded with a magnitude of 3.1. True, the calculation of the magnitude can be done in several different ways with partly different results, as stated by the Swedish SNSN, but for some reason the Swedish authorities have chosen a lower figure: 2.3.

Because of the logarithmic scale, the energy released from an earthquake of 3.1 is much higher than for an earthquake of 2.3. If we accept the estimate made by NORSAR, saying that a magnitude of 2.3 corresponds to 900 kg TNT or 0.9-ton TNT, a magnitude of 3.1 would then correspond to close to 6 tons of TNT. However, if we look at a couple of other examples, NORSAR’s figure appears rather to be a cautious estimate. The 2013 explosion in the West fertilizer plant in Texas was recorded by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) as a 2.1 magnitude earthquake with the equivalent of 7.5-10 tons TNT, and even more striking, the Beirut harbor explosion in 2020 was registered by USGS with a magnitude of 3.3, and the USGS writes: “The explosion was caused by 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate which is roughly equivalent to 1,100 tons of TNT”. One can, of course, imagine that a certain amount of this ammonium nitrate had been “stolen” for the al-Qaeda/al-Nusra attacks in the neighboring Syria, but it still seems that the figure provided by NORSAR is a rather low estimate. If we assume that half of the ammonium nitrate had been stolen and if we accept the figures from USGS, a 3.1 magnitude earthquake would rather be equivalent to an explosion of 100-350 tons of TNT. One might argue that much of the ammonium nitrate in Beirut was not stored at the ground level and the explosive gases from the explosion would not primarily be directed downwards into the earth’s crust. However, if we accept 10-40 tons TNT for a 2.3 magnitude earthquake and 70-250 tons TNT for a 3.1 magnitude earthquake, it is still 10-20 times higher than the NORSAR figure, and the difference between 250 tons and 25 kg is quite remarkable. I register that the Swedish authorities seem to play down the seriousness of the event both when it comes to the magnitude of the explosion and when it comes to the amount of explosive needed to create this kind of earthquake.

The above examples indicate that the energy released from the Nord Stream 1 explosion was enormous, and if this energy had originated from the explosives alone, these might not have been conventional explosives or at least not regular TNT, because it would have been difficult to bring down such a large amount of explosives unnoticed. However, if one had used unconventional explosives, we would most likely have found partly molten steel pipes on the sea floor. The video films from Erik Andersson’s expedition to the site do not indicate anything like that. Also the metal wires of the reinforced concrete are clearly visible in the video and not molten. On the other hand, much of the crime scene was cleaned up already during the first months after the explosions, and according to the Nord Stream AG’s “claim to the insurance company”, one end of the steel pipe “appeared smooth and to have been cut”. This is also visible in Andersson’s video. The cleanup of the crime scene including the cut of the pipe would have been the responsibility of the Swedish Navy.

However, if almost all of the energy at the site of the explosion originated from the release of pressurized gas, the amount of explosives used to destroy the pipelines would be much smaller, and this has made several media outlets claim that the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline could have been done by amateurs or did at least not need any bulky equipment. It is possible for a trained diver to go down to a depth of 75-80 meters, and if the diver didn’t need to bring down hundreds of kilos of explosives, this operation would have been physically possible to organize from a 15-metes’ sailing boat, they argue. To attach some explosives to the pipeline would not demand too much time, and you would accordingly after that be able to ascend slowly to the surface without use of a decompression chamber. We know that divers from the oil industry or military divers working on the seafloor would use a decompression chamber when surfacing, because in these cases one would not leave anything to chance, but one might argue that a few individuals could have done it from a small sailing boat if they didn’t necessarily have to succeed. However, there are several arguments that contradict this hypothesis and there are strong indications that this was a professional military operation.

Firstly, the release of energy from the explosives was at the very moment of the explosion significant enough to compress the pressurized gas in the pipeline. The instruments of the Nord Stream company registered the reduced pressure in the pipeline shortly after the explosion. Erik Andersson shows on his Substack a curve of a pressure drop that the Russian side has made available and one of Andersson’s Nord Stream sources has told him that “the curves for the German side exist in a much higher resolution. I heard you can even see a spike in pressure leading the drop”, Andersson writes. There is a “spike” or a “bulge in the curve” of increased pressure just before the pressure in the pipeline drops on the German side, which would indicate that the pressure and the energy released from the bomb was at that very moment stronger than the pressure from the pressurized gas. The energy released from the bomb was strong enough to increase the pressure in the pipeline at the receiving end in Germany at a distance of 230 km. The energy released from the explosives were accordingly not insignificant. The perpetrators would not just have used steel-cutting charges to cut off the pipeline but more forceful explosives in order to be on the safe side. This was a professional operation that would not leave anything to chance, although the energy released from these explosives might have been much smaller than the total energy released from the pressurized gas. If the German-Swiss side of Nord Stream AG would have been willing to release this high-resolution curve, one could possibly calculate the energy released from the bomb, because we already know the energy that could be and was released from the pressurized gas.

Secondly, the deployment was made in the deep area of the Bornholm Basin, not in the large and relatively shallow areas (30-40 meters deep) before and after this deep sea basin. These shallow areas closer to Germany and also on the other side of the Bornholm Basin would be more easily available and the obvious choice for non-professional divers. You would need professional deep-sea divers with special equipment to work at 75-80 meters. To work on the seafloor for a longer period of time at such a depth would in all professional operations be facilitated by the use of a decompressions chamber, which you could not bring onboard on a small sailing boat. It is not credible to claim that a couple of divers in a small sailing boat had deployed these explosives at the depth of 75-80 meters when they easily could have done it at a depth of 30-40 meters. When Seymour Hersh’s sources claim that the U.S. had used deep-sea Navy divers from Panama City Florida during the BALTOPS exercise in June 2022 to deploy the explosives at the pipelines, and when a source from the BALTOPS exercise already shortly after the explosions confirmed this information, this seems to be a much more likely hypothesis. The U.S. Navy had, according to this source, a “coordinator” for the divers, brought in divers with deep-sea diving equipment from Panama City Florida during the exercise, and these divers had had nothing to do with the exercise, which only used mine divers for shallow waters. It seems to me that this is a very credible explanation.

Thirdly, in a professional operation, it is natural to differentiate between the deployment of the explosives and the triggering of them (or rather the triggering of the timers for the explosives). Despite that you have to use a cover, like the BALTOPS exercise, for the deployment of the explosives, you cannot let the explosions happen immediately afterwards, because everyone would then understand that the deployment had been done during the exercise. You will have to differentiate between deployment and the triggering of the explosives, and one could easily trigger these explosives whenever suitable with a coded signal from a sonar buoy dropped from a Poseidon aircraft. This makes it interesting to look at which aircraft operated in the area these days (or nights). In the three nights before the 26 September 2022, there was only one military aircraft operating in the Baltic Sea region, a U.S. Poseidon aircraft. In addition, there was one U.S. Seahawk helicopter patrolling the area outside the main Russian Naval Base Baltiysk. The Poseidon aircraft flew up from Sigonella (U.S. Naval Air Station Sicily) to Nordholz Naval Air Base (northern Germany) on 21 September and then for the three nights (22-25 September) that preceded the explosions, it flew over the Baltic Sea, back and forth over Bornholm. This was a very special operation. The U.S. Navy Poseidon aircraft at Sigonella never left the Mediterranean unless they were replaced by other Poseidon aircraft from the U.S. They operated during the night only in connection with very special operations.

Fourthly, we know that a U.S. Poseidon aircraft left U.S. Naval Air Station Keflavik for the Baltic Sea two hours before the first explosion took place at 02.03 CEST (Central European Summer Time) on 26 September 2022, and we know that this aircraft was scheduled to cover the area east of Bornholm for several hours in the night and early morning on 26 September already before the first explosion happened. We know that because a U.S. tanker aircraft was sent up from Germany to refuel the Poseidon over Poland already the same minute as Nord Stream 2 was destroyed, which presupposed that the Poseidon was going to be used for an extended period of time. The whole operation was planned in beforehand. This does not just indicate foreknowledge of the explosion, but foreknowledge of the exact time for the first explosion. You do not send a Poseidon aircraft from Iceland to the Baltic Sea in the middle of the night and then to be refueled for an extended operation in order to do nothing. Military aircraft do not move around at night if it is not connected to a special military operation. In this case, the aircraft was related to the most serious destruction of infrastructure in Europe in modern times, and this Poseidon operation covering the area east of Bornholm for several hours was decided already before the destruction of the pipeline took place. This is a huge U.S. covert operation or perhaps rather a huge and very arrogant, high-tech, and not so covert “cover operation”. The two Ukraine divers on Andromeda may have had a role in this but rather as a cover for the real operation.