Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented today a clear and concise summary of recent strategic events, and the Schiller Institute’s conferences to bring together elected and other leading officials to counter the war drive coming from London and its NATO war hawks. The Press Availability on Nov. 5, “A Nuclear War Cannot be Won, and Must Not Be Fought” intersected growing awareness, she said, of the nuclear war danger coming from those reeling from the collapse of their Unipolar financial system.
“Outspoken, known personalities” have joined us to speak out, as demonstrations against the war are growing throughout Europe. In the U.S., courageous young activists from the Schiller Institute have been confronting the war hawks, demonstrating that there is political opposition in the U.S., that “there is not monolithic support” for the provocations which, if not opposed, will lead to World War III.
She added that the short visit of German Chancellor Scholz represents a similar process. German industrialists have begun speaking out against decoupling from China, while Green Party ideologues in his coalition are supporting decoupling, along with deindustrialization and full backing for the war against Russia in Ukraine. Scholz at least seems to recognize that the German economy cannot survive decoupling with Russia, which is already occurring, with a decoupling from China.
She urged viewers to watch the video of the press availability, and to join the citizen’s nonviolent movement to end forever the danger of nuclear weapons and geopolitics.
On November 2, the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation published a very clear statement reiterating its commitment to the tenet that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It continues, “We fully reaffirm our commitment to the joint statement of the leaders of the five nuclear-weapon states on preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races of January 3, 2022. We are strongly convinced that in the current complicated and turbulent situation, caused by irresponsible and impudent actions aimed at undermining our national security, the most immediate task is to avoid any military clash of nuclear powers.”
The silence from the United States, the UK, and France is ominous. Rather than the recently issued vaguely worded nuclear doctrine, aptly described by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter as “nuclear blackmail,” American policymakers should consider the words of Adlai Stevenson, United Nations Ambassador during the October Cuban Missile Crisis, exactly 60 years ago: “Blackmail and Intimidation, Never; Negotiation and Sanity, Always.” The Russians have asserted that the UK was directly involved “supervising” the recently repelled drone attack on the Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol, and have demanded an explanation for the “It is done” text message that seems to have been carelessly sent by the already-former British Prime Minister Liz Truss, to U.S Secretary of State Tony Blinken moments after the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. What is next?
Can this mean that one false move, either from Ukraine or from British, U.S., or NATO “renegade” military, military-intelligence, or “continuity of government” forces, could take us all over the thermonuclear cliff? American and European military analysts, as well as institutional figures, are convening this dialogue to alert men and women of good will around the world that an alternative course must come into being immediately. This dialogue is intended to provoke a discussion, and action, among millions, now, before it is too late.
Speakers include: Diane Sare, LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. Senate, NY Ray McGovern, former Senior Analyst, U.S. Central intelligence Agency (CIA) Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector, USMC intelligence officer, and military analyst Col. (ret.) Richard Black, former head of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon, former Virginia State Senator Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder Schiller Institute And others
HOSTS Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder, Schiller Institute Benjamín Robles Montoya (Mexico), Congressman María de los Ángeles Huerta (Mexico), Former Congresswoman
THE VIEW FROM LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN Donald Ramotar (Guyana), Former President Jorge Robledo (Colombia), Former Senator Rodolfo Ondarza (Mexico), Former Mexico City representative Elpidio Tovar de la Cruz, (Mexico), Former Congressman
THE VIEW FROM EUROPE Dominique Delawarde (France), Retired general Zivan Jovanovic (Serbia), President, Belgrade Forum World of Equals Karl Kroekel (German), Craftsmen for Peace Video of demonstrations in eastern Germany Sergio Tancredi (Italy), Former state Parliamentarian, Sicily Antonio Ingroia (Italy), Former anti-mafia judge
THE VIEW FROM THE UNITED STATES Richard Black (U.S.), Former state Senator, Virginia Diane Sare (U.S.), Candidate for Senate, NY George Koo (U.S.), International business advisor, retired
Former and currently serving elected officials from all over the world will convene in the Congress of Mexico in Mexico City and via Zoom videoconference this coming Thursday, October 27 from 10:00 am to 1:00 p.m. EDT, to build on the live gathering this past October 7 with legislators from across the Americas, and the later October 15 Schiller conference of youth leaders who all gathered to bring the world back from the brink of nuclear war.
A partial list of international speakers is provided immediately below in this message.
With new threats emerging daily, including Russia’s warnings that Ukraine (with backing from the United Kingdom) is preparing an “October surprise” involving the use of a nuclear “dirty bomb,” the Oct. 27 seminar has taken on heightened urgency.
As Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche emphasized in an Oct. 22 interview with EIR magazine:
Well, if you look around the world and ask normal people, like normal parliamentarians, elected officials, trade unionists, industrialists, farmers, fishermen, and so forth, nobody wants World War III! It’s a very small apparatus which is pushing this geopolitical confrontation which threatens the annihilation of the human species…
So the fact that what is at stake is the possible destruction of mankind, that makes, automatically, every citizen on the planet, to be a world citizen who has the right to speak out for the interest of humanity as a whole. And given the fact that the Schiller Institute is named after the poet Friedrich Schiller, who argued that there is no contradiction between a patriot and a world citizen—or that there doesn’t have to be—basically, we are now appealing to world citizens from all over the world to stand up against this war, and make sure that people understand that we have to make a jump in the thinking, to think in terms of a new paradigm, where everybody learns to think as a world citizen; which doesn’t mean you’re not a patriot, it just means you have to make one more step, you have to take the interest of humanity as a whole into account, and make sure that your understanding of your national interest is not in contradiction to that larger interest of humanity as a whole…
We have to find a new model of international relations as the precondition to get out of this crisis… I think the system of the City of London, and by implication the entire trans-Atlantic financial system, is teetering on the verge of dissolution. So, the need to put a New Bretton Woods system, a new credit system, on the international agenda may erupt more quickly than people think.”
3) Jason Ross (U.S.); Executive Director, The LaRouche Organization
4) Princy Mthombeni (South Africa); Founder, Africa4Nuclear
5) Billy Estimé (Haiti); President of ARCS-Haiti and Editor-in-Chief at Café-Diplo Haiti
6) Shexiu Huang (China); Postgraduate, Guangdong Institute for International Strategies, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies”
7) Sébastien Lantrade and Chérine Sultan (France); Solidarité & Progrès
8) Dana Anex (U.S.); Classical Music Educator
9) Nicolas Holman (U.S.); LaRouche Movement
10) Ashley Tran (U.S.); LaRouche Movement
Question and Answer Session
Panel 2
2:10 – 5:00pm EDT
Moderator: Daniel Burke, The Schiller Institute
1) Diane Sare (U.S.); LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. Senator from New York
2) Haz Al-Din (U.S.); Infrared Collective
3) Megan Dobrodt (U.S.); President, Schiller Institute USA
4) Dr. Will Happer (U.S.); Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Princeton University
5) Fox Green (U.S.); Space Commune
6) Sameera Khan (U.S.); Journalist
7) Fouad Al-Ghafarri (Yemen); Advisor of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet for BRICS Countries Affairs, President; President of ALBRICS Youth Parliament
8) Jonathan Thron, Nikolai Mrosek, Jakub Sederstroem; Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität; Fabian Peter, Deutsche Kommunistische Partei; Hermann Gaizenreider (Germany)
9) Jose Vega (U.S.); LaRouche Movement
10) Liam Murphy (U.S.); LaRouche Movement
Question and Answer Session
Invitation:
The end of the genocidal neoliberal system has come, accompanied by catastrophic hyperinflation and the white-hot danger of thermonuclear war.
In response, the members of the BRICS Plus, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, and associated nations worldwide are moving toward a new, just international economic order, one capable of expanding China’s Belt and Road Initiative into a global mission to eradicate hunger and poverty. Realizing this potential demands international cooperation to halt the US-NATO march toward Armageddon war and put an orderly end to the City of London and Wall Street’s global speculative bubble. It demands mankind finally bury the rotten doctrine of Thomas Malthus, still today the leading apologia for colonialism. It demands new, principled leadership—an international youth movement for peace through economic development.
Argentina’s annual inflation rate in August was 71%, Haiti’s 25%; Goldman Sachs has predicted 23% for the UK by early 2023. Seventy-one million people worldwide fell into extreme poverty in the period of April through June of 2022. The World Bank has reported that up to 80 nations require immediate debt relief, or they will soon find themselves incapable of importing the food and fuel needed for their populations to survive.
An average of 25,000 people are dying unnecessarily of hunger each day, and already in 2021, 2.3 billion people were living in moderate or extreme food insecurity. 45 million children under the age of five suffer from “wasting,” the most extreme form of malnutrition, which increases a child’s risk of death by twelve times. Death of hunger is described as the most torturous way of dying, because your body essentially feeds on itself before finally giving up. That such injustice exists is proof of the continuation of colonialism in new cloth, because it would be so easy to produce enough food for all human beings living on this planet.
What is the cause? Look to the decisions made at the September 2019 meeting of the Federal Reserve, with other Western central banks and financial behemoths like BlackRock in attendance. There, former head of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, announced measures to enforce global obedience to the elimination of fossil fuels (“Net Zero”) and the creation of high inflation through the printing of money directed toward keeping the more than $1 quadrillion global debt bubble afloat. In 2020-21 alone, at least $14 trillion was created by the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury, and European Central Bank, with effectively none of it going to the improvement of the physical economy. Trillions have flowed into a new Green finance bubble and its unreliable, low energy-density solar and wind projects. Meanwhile, reliable energy supplies are sanctioned and the food supply is destroyed by the imposition of Malthusian limits on land, fertilizer, pesticides, and energy.
In 1971, the late American economist and statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. uniquely identified Nixon’s action to “pull the plug” on the Bretton Woods international monetary system as the turning point toward a modern Malthusian policy orientation that would lead inexorably to famine, pandemics, fascism, and war, should it be allowed to continue. The catastrophe we are living through today is the consequence of that policy orientation–a paradigm built on the evil belief of the Anglo-American oligarchy, as expressed by representatives like Lord Bertrand Russell, that mankind is a cancer on the planet, a beast whose population need be culled, starting with the “non-white” peoples of the world.
To defeat this menace to civilization, the modern-day British Empire, LaRouche built an international movement devoted to the total physical economic development of the formerly colonized areas of the world, and of every nation. Today, that vision is known internationally as the World Land-Bridge, a global network of development corridors connecting all nations with water, power, transportation, and agroindustrial systems. LaRouche insisted that mankind is not an animal—that we are the only creative species known in the universe. Each human child has within it the potential to become a genius, to make discoveries of universal principle that contribute something necessary in science or culture to the species as a whole. By the development of creative genius, we increase the potential relative population density of mankind–the ability of mankind to do good.
To emerge from the present, all-encompassing strategic crisis with a new, just world economic order demands new genius. The genius to conceive of the necessary development of humanity itself—from a juvenile period of geopolitics and war, to a mature devotion to the common scientific, moral aims of mankind. This genius was on display at the SCO’s recent meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where nations representing over half of the world’s population gathered in devotion to the principles of international law and the UN Charter. The West, meanwhile, is dominated by cynicism and barbarity. But we know these are the artificial effects of top-down cultural warfare, and we reject them. We demand that the goodness within our societies be brought forward, and we demand that the clouds of fear be dispelled. In organizing this October 15, 2022 international Schiller Institute conference, we reach out to young people across the world and invite them to collaborate with us in this solemn mission to end colonialism in all its forms and eradicate poverty and hunger from this world.
Second Seminar of Current and Former Elected Officials of the World
Date: Thursday October 27, 2022
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. (EDT)
Place: Conference Room E, Chamber of Deputies, Mexico City; and via Zoom (with English-Spanish simultaneous interpretation)
Eight months into the war between Russia and Ukraine, with the active role of the United States and NATO, there are many dead and wounded, great destruction of all sorts of property, and very damaging economic and social consequences in Europe and the whole world, creating shocks which are worsening the very profound problems of the world economy, with consequences of a worsening crisis and greater unemployment, poverty and hunger.
It is known that this war can have far more serious consequences than what we are already suffering, including massive destruction and a crisis of global proportions never before seen, because it can lead to a confrontation with nuclear weapons between Russia and the United States and NATO.
Among the growing voices calling for a sensible approach, we highlight that of Pope Francis, calling for a negotiated, peaceful solution.
The undersigned political and social leaders, current and former legislators, and other elected officials from various countries, urge Russia, Ukraine, the United States and NATO to reach an agreement which, first of all, rejects the growing loose talk about the possible use of nuclear weapons and reaffirms the fundamental commitment of the Reagan-Gorbachev Formula of 1985, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” To be lasting, such an agreement must also establish a new international security architecture that recognizes and respects the legitimate security interests of all the planet’s nations.
We recognize and emphasize that Russia, like the United States, NATO, Ukraine and all countries, has legitimate security concerns which must be taken into account and become one of the cornerstones of the new security architecture. A return to the successful principles of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia – respect for sovereignty, commitment to the good of the other, and forgiveness of debts that make true economic development impossible – is the kind of architecture we seek today.
The common good of the One Humanity is the obligatory premise for the good of each and every nation. In that way, among all the nations of the world we will be able to help build an organization of citizens in collective global action, and establish ourselves that way as a force to influence the international policy debate.
We call on people of good will around the world – notwithstanding our diverse and natural differences – to participate in this process of deliberation and search for peaceful solutions, including a thorough examination of the alternative economic policies to replace speculation, which has generated so much poverty and suffering, with a system of production and progress to meet the needs of a growing world population.
We reject all attempts to limit, intimidate, or prohibit such a deliberative process. And we call on the United States, NATO, Ukraine and Russia to advance in the direction that we present in this respectful call.
SIGNATURES:
Donald Ramotar (Guyana); former President (2011-2015), former member of parliament (1992-2011, PPP)
2. Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany); founder, Schiller Institute
3. Jorge Robledo (Colombia); former Senator (2002-2022, Partido Dignidad)
4. María de los Ángeles Huerta (Mexico); former Congresswoman (2018-2021, MORENA)
5. Dr. Kirk Meighoo (Trinidad & Tobago); former independent Senator (2004, United National Congress)
6. Dr. Rodolfo Ondarza (Mexico); former Representative, Mexico City Legislative Assembly (2015-2018, PT)
7. Diane Sare (U.S.); candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York (2022, independent/LaRouche)
Oct. 12, 2022 (EIRNS)–Russian President Vladimir Putin did not beat around the bush. Addressing the annual Russia Energy Week today, he opened: “Such direct and transparent communication is essential now, when the global economy in general, the fuel and energy sector are in the middle of, let me be direct, an acute crisis due to unstable price dynamics of energy resources, an imbalance in supply and demand, and the overtly subversive actions of individual market participants, who are guided solely by their own geopolitical ambitions, resort to outright discrimination in the market, and if that does not work, they simply destroy the infrastructure of their competitors.
“In this case, I am of course talking about the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines. There is no doubt that this is an act of international terrorism, the purpose of which is to undermine the energy security of the entire continent. The logic is cynical: to destroy and block cheap energy sources, hence depriving millions of people, industrial consumers of gas, heat, electricity and other resources and forcing them to buy all this at much higher prices.
“The attack on the Nord Streams has set an extremely dangerous precedent, which shows that any critical piece of transport, energy or communications infrastructure is under threat, regardless of its location, management or whether it lies on the seabed or on land.”
CNN‘s failed to cover most of Putin’s opening, but they did note his energy offer to Europe: “Russia is ready to start such supplies. The ball is in the court of the EU. If they want, they can just open the tap… if, together with our European colleagues, we take the decision to supply gas through the remaining one link of Nord Stream 2. Apparently it still remains operational; unfortunately we are not allowed to test it.” [Putin’s speech can be found here.]
Oct. 9 (EIRNS) – Ahead of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China which convenes Oct. `16, Global Times has published an extensive interview with Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, “the second piece of a series of GT‘s interviews with influential scholars” on China’s economy and the BRI.
In answer to one of many question in the interview, Zepp-LaRouche warned, “The neoliberal financial system may disintegrate, either in a hyperinflationary disintegration – it would not happen in only one country – or if the central banks try to curb inflation through a ‘Paul Volcker style’ high interest rate policy, there could be a sudden chain reaction of bankruptcies of both emerging markets and over-indebted firms. While this will obviously affect China, its economic blueprint approach of caring for each segment of the economy with appropriate incentives will be invaluable.”
And to another, on Germany’s predicament, she answered: “Top executives are already ringing the alarm bells, warning that Germany is about to crash into a wall and that its identity as an industrial nation is at stake. The straw that is about to break the camel’s back is the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. The destruction of these pipelines means they cannot be re-opened as a fallback source, which means the energy crisis in Germany will get extremely serious in the short term with a great deal of social upheaval. The only way to solve the situation would be for all European nations to put an end to the sanctions against Russia, and throw all their weight into insisting on a negotiated solution for the Ukraine situation. This situation has moved beyond an energy crisis. A comprehensive approach is needed, which is why the Schiller Institute has called for a completely new international security and development architecture, which takes into account the interest of every single country on the planet.” [The entire interview is available here.]
Oct. 9 (EIRNS) — A large crowd, certainly many thousands judging from video of the event on Twitter, demonstrated in Paris today with the slogan “Let’s Get Out of NATO,” many waving the Tricolor. One person passing on the tweet said, “Tens of thousands in Paris say France must leave NATO.” [The Twitter video is here.]
In Italy, the popular governor of the Region Campania, Vincenzo De Luca, who is among the leaders of the Democratic Party, made a statement Oct. 7 against NATO. Taking distance from the war policy of his own party and of the Draghi government, De Luca made a strong demand that Italy stop being the passive appendage of NATO and take initiatives for peace, because, he emphasized, the alternative is a nuclear war.
“Since February 24 we have had an increasingly dramatic evolution of the war in Ukraine, we have been speaking out clearly about Russia’s responsibilities, we have been supporting Ukraine to defend itself. And in the last few days we have seen an unimaginable evolution and dramatization.” So said Vincenzo De Luca in his usual Friday Facebook live underlining that today “the hypothesis of the use of nuclear weapons has begun to circulate in a worrying way.” Therefore, according to De Luca this “obliges us to take mass initiatives in support of peace.”
“Italy and governments can no longer be a passive appendage of NATO, De Luca said. “We have the duty to reintroduce in the language of politics the word peace that has disappeared. And we have the duty, governments and parties, to tell the Italian people what is the goal we are pursuing because we are coming by force of inertia toward a dramatic social crisis and one step away from nuclear war…. The government and parties must say we are at war if the goal is Ukraine’s military victory; we cannot live in a war economy without saying so explicitly.”
In Berlin on Saturday, Oct. 8, a crowd which Deutsche Welle called “supporters of the far-right Alternativ fuer Deutschland (AfD) party” [quite a lot of them, from DW’s photo] demonstrated in front of the Reichstag building against rising inflation. A party leader, Tino Chrupalla, accused the German government of declaring economic war on Russia and waging war on its own people. He said, “the gas price will become normal again when we buy cheap gas from Russia.” Demonstrators chanted “Away with Habeck,” meaning Energy and Environment Minister Robert Habeck, a Green. Some 2,000 police were deployed around the rally, whose views were not expressed but would be interesting to know.
Seminar of Current and Former Legislators of Latin America and the Caribbean
The true cause of the danger of a nuclear world war and of the escalation of the Russia/Ukraine conflict lies in the fact that the neoliberal trans-Atlantic financial system is heading towards a systemic hyperinflationary breakdown crisis. The survival of its speculative bubble requires the imposition of a unipolar world, where neither alternatives to their system nor national sovereignty itself are tolerated. The U.S. and NATO must stop their expansion to the East and their provocations which are taking us to a point of no return globally.
The Schiller Institute has convened a seminar of current and former legislators from Latin America and the Caribbean to evaluate this dangerous global situation, and deliberate on the policy solutions. The Schiller Institute has addressed an “Open Letter to the United Nations: UNGA Must Remove the Causes for the War Danger!” which calls for the creation of a just New International Economic Order.
Please sign the Open Letter to the UN, and participate in the seminar.
For further information: info@schillerinstitute.org
DATE: Friday, October 7 TIME: from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., EDT (Washington, D.C.) PLACE: via Zoom (with English-Spanish simultaneous interpretation)
Or One tap mobile: US: +13126266799,,87898478453# or +16468769923,,87898478453#
Partial list of speakers:
1) Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany); founder Schiller Institute 2) Jorge Robledo (Colombia); former senator (2002-2022, Partido Dignidad) 3) Dr. Kirk Meighoo (Trinidad & Tobago); former independent senator (2004, United National Congress) 4) María de los Ángeles Huerta (Mexico); former congresswoman (2018-2021, Morena) 5) Diane Sare (U.S.); candidate for U.S. Senate from New York (2022, LaRouche Independent) 6) Dr. Rodolfo Ondarza (Mexico); former representative Mexico City Legislative Assembly (2015-2018, PT)
Ralph Bosshard, a retired Swiss lieutenant colonel, served in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission (OSCE SMM) in 2014, where he was a senior planning officer. His duties took him to Kiev, Mariupol, and Dnepropetrovsk, among other places. Until 2017, he served as a special military advisor to the Swiss Permanent Representative to the OSCE and the Swiss Ambassador in Kyiv. From 2017 to 2020, he served as an operations officer in the OSCE High-Level Planning Group, which planned a military peacekeeping operation in the South Caucasus. He kindly provided EIR with his assessment on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. In doing so, he points to the physical realities of conducting such an operation, and then points out the resulting, devastating paradox: When NATO countries blame Russia for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, they are telling the world that Russia has seabed warfare capabilities far superior to those of NATO! Still he considers that “a Western authorship is much more plausible than a Russian”.
The copyright is held by the author and the full article cannot be published without his permission.
Examination of the feasibility of an act of sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines off Bornholm confirms that a Western authorship is considerably more plausible than Russian. Nevertheless, stories about a Russian false-flag operation continue to circulate in Western media. This does not seem credible. However, if the Russians were in fact responsible for the destruction of Nord Stream 1 and 2, that should give rise to the greatest concern in Western capitals.
It has been bandied about, among other things, that the Russians had already mined the gas pipelines during the construction phase, to be able to then destroy them at any time. Apart from the lack of logic of such an event, there are some technical arguments against it.
A first counterargument is that explosives age chemically. This aging process causes explosives to decompose over the years to such an extent that an explosion is no longer guaranteedi. But the opposite can also occur: stockpiled explosives can explode years later due to the slightest environmental changes. In planning the destruction of underwater pipelines that have a life span of 50 years, this may well be a problem. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe OSCE, in its so-called stockpile management projects, has accumulated much experience with stockpiled ammunition, which can explode at the slightest incident and is accordingly dangerous to handle. In armed forces that are experienced in dealing with permanent blast sites, such as the German Armed Forces, the Austrian Armed Forces and the Swiss Armed Forces, the maintenance of such blast sites was ensured by professional formations, such as the Wallmeister organization or the Fortress Guard Corps. An explosive charge attached to a pipeline already under construction would require regular maintenance, including replacement of the explosive if necessary. This can be complex.
Control and maintenance of pipelines underground is handled by so-called “pigs”ii. These are autonomous devices that travel back and forth inside the pipes and monitor the condition of the pipe with various measuring devices. However, the deployment of a so-called pig several hundred kilometers away from where it was inserted is a technical challenge that should not be underestimated. But if such a maintenance pig inserted an explosive charge in the Nord Stream pipelines from the inside, the damage pattern would reveal that immediately. However, whether a truly independent investigation of the sabotage act will ever take place is very much up in the air.
Another technical challenge involves the detonation of an explosive charge in a place so difficult to access as underwater pipelines, because the detonators (blasting caps) also undergo aging processes, so that they no longer function reliably years after they were produced. An electrical ignition cable several hundred kilometers long would also require regular inspection and maintenance. The idea that a pipeline could be destroyed decades after it was built, from a blast site several hundred kilometers away, by hitting a button so to speak, is naïve.
On the Ground Saboteurs
It would be significantly safer to produce the electricity required to detonate an electric detonator at a safe distance from the blasting site with a blasting machine, for example by means of a hand crank. For this, an electric detonator would have to be put into the explosive at a prepared location beforehand and connected to the blasting machine with a cable. This also requires the physical presence of the saboteurs on site.
The variant of remote detonation by a radio transmitter or a cell phone would, of course, also have to be considered. However, in the cold water at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, the required accumulators and batteries discharge quickly. And electromagnetic waves do not penetrate deep enough into the waters. Submariners are aware of reachability problems of submerged submarines, and even the long waves used for submarine communications do not penetrate to depths of 70m and more. For this variant, a relay would have had to be set up near the scene of the crime before the sabotage operation, to ensure the connection between the trigger and the detonation site.
All these considerations suggest that the acts of sabotage at the two gas pipelines Nord Stream 1 and 2 were carried out on site. Given the distance between the crime scenes, the same group of persons could conceivably be responsible for both acts of sabotage. However, the shortest connection between the two locations crosses a Danish Navy maritime training area. The physical presence of a ship, a submarine or a submarine drone is much easier to ensure from NATO territory than from the Russian Navy bases in Kaliningrad oblast, 300 km away. If, however, the Russian Navy did manage to overcome all these technical and tactical obstacles and to approach the scene of the crime undetected, then carry out extensive preparatory work there, trigger the detonation and depart again undetected, this would be quite an accomplishment, which should set off alarm bells in Western capitals.
Deployment of submarines and submarine drones
All these problems can be avoided if one simply places a large explosive charge weighing a few hundred kilograms on the pipeline from a submarine or a submarine drone. Transporting such a charge undetected through 300 km of NATO-controlled waters, however, is not that easy. If the Russians had succeeded to do that, then virtually every underwater infrastructure of NATO countries would be jeopardized, including the gas pipeline “Baltic Pipe”iii that just opened a few days ago, as well as all underwater communication cables, as well as numerous electricity lines.
Map: Sumarine Cables around Europe Source: submarine cable map, https://www.submarinecablemap.com/.
This would also drastically change the image of the allegedly incompetent Russian armed forces, which Western sources have amply spread in recent months, and at the same time cast a negative light on the naval forces of the NATO countries and candidate countries involved. It is possible that Seabed Warfare has now arrived in Europe, and the question arises as to whether we are on the eve of an unprecedented wave of sabotage targeting the undersea infrastructure on Europe’s periphery, that cuts the continent off from gas and telecommunications. If that occurs, in the West’s war against Russia, events on the front lines in eastern Ukraine will suddenly be irrelevant.
Bottom line
Anyone who objectively examines the feasibility of an act of sabotage against the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines off Bornholm must come to acknowledge that Western authorship is considerably more plausible than Russian authorship. If, however, the USA, Denmark, Poland and perhaps other NATO allies were responsible, Germany in particular would have to draw the consequences.
One may now ask what the purpose is of the speculation and conspiracy theories circulating in Western media in recent days around the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines. The aim may simply be to surround in fog the obvious and most plausible version of a U.S. authorship. In the future, one would do well to consider Western communications with a certain degree of skepticism.
iThe author experienced this himself in destroying unexploded ordnances.
