Explosive Laden Drone Found Near Nord Stream Pipeline (2015)
pipeline-journal.netFor anyone who's missed the big news of the day, discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32994922
Sensational? This was found to be a lost Swedish military training drone. https://www-forsvarsmakten-se.translate.goog/sv/aktuellt/201...
The automated translation of that article turned out a little bizarre. This is the automatically translated version:
> The analysis shows that it is a Swedish remote-controlled craft (Seafox) that the Norwegian Armed Forces use to detect, for example, minors.
Not only does this translation fumble the translation of the word "naval mines", which amusingly becomes "minors", but it also somewhat surprisingly changes the nationality of the military power involved.
The correct translation should be:
> The analysis shows that it is a Swedish remote-controlled craft (Seafox) that the Swedish Armed Forces use to detect, for example, naval mines.
The url says that the from language was Norwegian which is wrong but does explain it getting the country name wrong.
"Ruling out sabotage"
How is that just dropped in there without any explanation of an innocuous purpose of an explosive laden drone?
News and reports are always making sure to frame it in certain ways. They can't say "perhaps sabotage" because then fingers will start pointing and everything gets on edge.
News is full of "it's just a coincidence, look away" -- speculating is fun, but don't be a conspiracy theorist. Always listen to approved, fact-checked news sources. They'll tell you what to think.
And in this case you need to look at this as anything but sabotage.
"News and reports are always"
Sometimes you need to hear the other party’s newsfeed. Tucker Carlson breaks it down: https://twitter.com/columbiabugle/status/1574921923624058887... Excerpt 6min: “One way or another Nordstream 2 will not proceed”
Even the flipping Germans were saying NordStream 2 is dead. This was Scholz in August: “we ended the approval process for good reason.”
Tucker is pretending this is a smoking gun when the reality is, the US and Germany had a political agreement wherein the US agreed to lift sanctions on NordStream 2 in 2021 so long as Germany agreed that further Russian aggression would prompt re-evaluation. This was reported months and months ago.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/01/biden-eur...
"Before Scholz, the German chancellor, visited Biden at the White House on Feb. 7, for instance, the two leaders had come to a general agreement that Nord Stream 2 would be taken off the table should Russia invade Ukraine, the administration officials said.
At the time, in a joint news conference after their meeting, Biden was unequivocal about what would happen to the pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine. “There will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” Biden said. “We will bring an end to it.”
But Scholz, while generally acknowledging that Germany was prepared to “act together jointly” with the United States and other allies, pointedly did not mention the pipeline by name, raising questions about Germany’s commitment.
Administration officials added that while they had no doubt about Germany’s commitment, they conveyed to Germany that, if and when the time came, Germany could announce the halting of Nord Stream 2 — the ideal outcome for everyone, the Biden administration argued — or the United States could impose sanctions effectively ending it.
Ultimately, however, when the time came, Germany did not waver. After a three-way phone call between Biden, Scholz and Macron to discuss a joint response to Putin’s initial aggression, Germany surprised the group by swiftly announcing it was halting the certification of Nord Stream 2.
No arm-twisting was required, said one French official familiar with the dynamic. And shortly thereafter, the Biden administration announced its own Nord Stream 2 sanctions."
There is no mystery about what Biden was talking about at the time.
>Even the flipping Germans were saying NordStream 2 is dead. This was Scholz in August: “we ended the approval process for good reason.”
The same Germans who said they were shuttering all their nuclear plants until reality changed and they weren't. Tucker Carlson and partisan politics completely aside, only a fool believes anything any politician ever says. Politicians speak out of the desire to gain votes, the desire to gain donations, the desire to gain legal bribes from lobbyists, the desire to gain support (and avoid opposition) from intelligence agencies (primarily the CIA), the desire to gain favor among other perceived powerful interests and the desire to gain positive coverage from the most powerful media outlets (especially those dominant among their respective political constituency). The realities on the ground dictate what happens, and the reality now is that someone blew up the pipeline.
Newsflash: the Germans are still shuttering their nuclear plants! They merely extended 2 of the 3 still operating plants for a few more months (until mid April 2023), I guess because that's how long they can operate with the existing fuel rods - Either at continuously diminishing output, or they reduce output now so the power can be used should it be necessary during the winter months. For anything more, they would need to source new fuel rods from somewhere, and there the dominating player is, wait for it, also Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosatom). So: don't trust what politicians say, but also take what journalists (all journalists, not just the likes of Tucker Carlson) say/write with a big grain of salt...
>So: don't trust what politicians say, but also take what journalists (all journalists, not just the likes of Tucker Carlson) say/write with a big grain of salt...
You shouldn't trust what any public figure has to say. The fact is that Germany is about to go into a deep freeze, and all of their hollow rhetoric is going to rapidly go away when reality sets in. You don't need a politician or journalist to explain it. It is unfortunate that objective reality causes cognitive dissonance in so many, and prevents serious conversations about how to deal with reality-based problems.
> but also take what journalists write with a big grain of salt...
If he ever was, Tucker Carlson is not a journalist (reporter). He's a political narrator and host of a television show.
Trying to add more different kinds of propaganda to your "feed" in attempt to find truth is like adding an additional incompetent PM to a project that's behind schedule in hopes that it will help move things along.
You mean "entertainment" feed. There's no news there. Fox won a case by arguing that no one takes Tucker carlson seriously.
https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/fox-news-...
There are a lot of unexploded mines and other ordnance around in the Baltic, I think it's actually very common to use these sorts of drones for minesweeping.
That’s exactly what it was, https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/aktuellt/2015/11/analysen-a...
Fun fact: The best naval ordonance disposal teams are from the Baltic states. The difuse more live ordonance, from WW1 and WW2 in a week than the US counter parts see in training, non-live ordonance in a year (might also be in a month, they diffuse a ton so. Similar to all the civil ordonance disposal companies we have in Germany, albeith the Baltic divers work under much more dangerous conditions).
Lazy journalism but we know what it was. It is a Swedish mine clearing drone which was lost during an exercise in 2014.
https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/aktuellt/2015/11/analysen-a...
I concur, that struck me as quite odd.
Explosives are widely used in mining, but I don't know if anybody uses them for undersea mining. Drones seem like they would be a good way to do undersea mining: greatly reduce the death toll, avoid all the decompression sickness, and maybe use less energy?
"Undersea mining" is mostly scooping up mineralized stuff ("Manganese Nodules") using a dredge-like apparatus. To my knowledge, nobody uses explosives for that style of mining, and undersea mining is relatively rare anyway. (I used to work at the research end of the Australian mining industry.)
I was under the strong impression that sea floor mining was mostly invented as cover by the CIA to operate the Glomar Explorer for the purpose of retrieving a crashed Soviet submarine with nuclear warheads on board. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
The US petitioned the UN to open up international sea floor mining rights as part of the lead up for this project. They made up a fake educational film for high schoolers about Glomar as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXUqUpfzgxQ
I think manganese nodules really are a potentially lucrative source of metals; the CIA didn't want to use a cover story that was transparently ridiculous, and there were many excellent Soviet geologists and mining bureaus.
Diamond mining off the Namibian coast is similar, it's just a giant underwater vacuum cleaner.
That's the explanation I thought of too, but it's strange that detail wasn't included if that is the reason.
It could be left over from when they were laying the pipe. Maybe it malfunctioned and they "lost it".
One possible explanation for the drone with explosives is these drones which are for clearing underwater mines. The US was performing military exercises with these in the area recently. https://twitter.com/bidetmarxman/status/1574788751796346881
This may be totally unrelated, just minimally educated guess