“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

It's a great story, but it's all unsourced and could be a decent Tom Clancy story at best. You could probably write a similar one with Russia or German agents as the key players and be just as convincing.

The only anchor in reality appears to be Biden suggesting that they knew how to take it out which seems like a pretty weak place to build a large story.

What I find particularly odd is that this entire thing appears to be based on a single, unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning".

> What I find particularly odd is that this entire thing appears to be based on a single, unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning".

Why is that weird? Assuming this is true, there would be rather many people with such knowledge. One of them may feel the need to talk. Would you expect such a source to be named?

Also, I find it a lot easier to imagine why the US would want to do this, than why Russia or Germany would want to do this.

> Why is that weird? Assuming this is true, there would be rather many people with such knowledge. One of them may feel the need to talk.

The level of detail about the operation is basically, some divers from the US Navy attached bombs to the pipeline during a military drill that were detonated with magical sonobouy signals according to some professor who said that might work.

Another red flag: The vast majority of the article was about a political narrative, which really is focused around hurting Russia, and not who is benefited by the destruction of the pipeline. The US government does not own our energy industry and is often at odds with the gas and oil industry here, and this article assumes a level of integration that does not exist in the US political system.

> and not who is benefited by the destruction of the pipeline.

Something that wasn't made clear in the article is that US energy companies have been massive beneficiaries of the Nordstream destruction. The US is now the world's leading exporter of liquid natural gas. That wouldn't have happened if the pipeline(s) were still operational.

NS1 and NS2 are not the only pipelines Russia could be using to export gas to Europe, but there are several land-based ones too. After shutting down NS1 (they claimed equipment issues) they only moved marginal flows (if any) onto those pipelines. Blowing up NS1/NS2 doesn't really change anything here..