“It’s an act of war.”

According to critically acclaimed senior journalist Seymour Hersh and his anonymous source, the United States has committed a direct act of war against Russia and carried out a covert operation to blow up the Nord Stream Pipelines.

The Russian pipelines were destroyed on Sept. 26, 2022 and were vital to Western Europe’s energy supply and the economy of the Russian Federation. Taking them out was a careful and strategic move by the US that took months of time. The attack on the pipelines was initially brushed off by most of the mainstream American media, and most sources claimed that Russia itself was likely behind the attacks without providing any logical reasoning as to why the country would blow up its own pipelines. However, Hersh dove into the theory that the US was behind the pipeline attacks and discovered that it had staged a multi-month long covert operation to take them out. 

In recent years, Germany, along with the rest of Western Europe, has begun to move towards an autonomous Europe and away from US reliance and influence. Part of that was expanding the Nord Stream Pipeline in 2021, allowing Europe to get closer to European energy autonomy through Russia. The additional Nord Stream Pipeline, Nord Stream 2, was going to double the amount of cheap gas available to Germany and allow the country to sell the excess gas to neighboring countries to boost its economy. 

German proponents of the pipeline saw its similarities to the Ostpolitik theory that circulated during the division of the country. The theory claimed that if Western Europe created closer economic ties with Eastern Europe, then Cold War tensions would begin to relieve themselves, and the reunification of Germany would follow afterward. This theory was applied to the modern European tensions by German politicians to get their constituents on board with Nord Stream 2. Nevertheless, the US viewed the pipeline as a catalyst for Russia to gain control over Europe and cripple Western dominance. 

The US even passed legislation and implemented sanctions attempting to block Nord Stream 2 from being created. However, as completion of the pipeline neared, Biden seemingly and abruptly changed his position and lifted Nord Stream sanctions, causing Senate Republicans to block every foreign policy nominee appointed by him and delay the annual defense bill. Despite the President changing his position on the pipeline sanctions, anti-Russian rhetoric remained throughout the US government and was highlighted in these Republican retaliatory moves. 

Throughout the entirety of Nord Stream 2’s creation, tensions throughout Russia and Ukraine were on the rise, and Russian troops were lined up on the borders of Crimea, Donbas and Belarus waiting to strike. This moment was pivotal to once again changing the Biden administration’s view on the Nord Stream Pipelines and transforming them into the forefront of the administration’s concern. They were worried that as long as Germany and the rest of Western Europe utilized Russian gas, they would be hesitant to give Ukraine the military supplies it needed if the inevitable invasion was to occur. 

On president Biden’s command, his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, began to conduct meetings between the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and the State Treasury Departments to plan on how to respond to Russia’s nearing invasion of Ukraine. According to Hersh’s source, it was made clear very early on that Sullivan, on behalf of Biden, wanted to make an irreversible move and destroy the Nord Stream Pipelines. The group then began to meet regularly, and their focus was no longer what to do about the impending invasion, but how to destroy the pipelines without getting caught and facing the consequences that would come with it. 

Many solutions would be proposed, but they eventually came to one conclusion. Utilizing specialized divers from the Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center in Panama City, Florida, the US planned to place C4 explosives on the pipelines and rig them to detonate on command. With this, came many challenges. They needed to find a perfect time, a perfect place and a perfect way to prevent the explosives from being detected by advanced Russian surveillance technology. 

To help with this, the US reached out to their Nordic NATO partner, and after some convincing and utilizing former Norwegian prime minister and current Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg’s influence, Norway agreed to help with the mission, and the US and Norway came up with the perfect plan over the course of many months. They staged the initial mission during the annual BALTOPS military exercise as a cover and had covert US and Norwegian divers leave the coast of Denmark’s Bornholm Island and plant the explosives on the pipelines. To negate the surveillance technology, they used a specialized camouflage that adapted to the exact salinity of the water and rigged the C4 explosives to detonate on a specific sound frequency que.

On Sept. 26, 2022, over three months after the BALTOPS exercise on June 5, 2022, a Norwegian pilot finished the mission by dropping a sonar buoy into the Baltic Sea emitting the sound frequency que that triggered both the explosives and caused the destruction of the Nord Stream Pipelines. 

This was a brilliant plan but a drastic mistake from both a strategic and moral standpoint. Not only does this back up the Russian’s claims of NATO aggression, but it gives them every right to stage a retaliation of similar severe consequences. This was a direct military attack on Russia, and as more information begins to unfold and the truth of this action becomes undeniable by the US, Russia could use this example of US and NATO aggression as a way to gain strong alliances with other countries that have suffered from the same thing and aid the country in its war with Ukraine. Not to mention, the destruction of the Nord Stream Pipelines is a complete immoral ovestep of power by the US and showcases its complete lack of respect for the sovereignty of, not only its enemies like Russia, but its allies like Germany. 

This will go down in history as the single biggest mistake of the Biden administration and will have irreversible consequences to the global political sphere. The US has notoriously involved itself in nearly every major global event since World War I, and this act directly highlights its imperialistic nature. The US seeks to create a world that is perfectly catered to its capitalist political system and suppresses anything that challenges its neoliberalist norms and harms the economic growth of its greedy system. Despite Russia having its obvious flaws, the US is, without a doubt, the villain in this situation, and that will forever be used against it and utilized by Russia and countries like it. 

The US has denied every claim made in the article and called it false and complete fiction. Despite this, the fact that Hersh wrote it should be bountiful evidence of it being a trustworthy story. Hersh is one of the most well respected investigative journalists in the US. He is responsible for uncovering countless stories such as the sickening Mỹ Lai massacre, which occurred during the Vietnam War when US soldiers carried out a mass brutalization and execution of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians. For this, he won the most renowned US journalism award, the Pulitzer Prize. Despite his source being anonymous, Hersh is a journalist that the people should trust. 

There is no way for the government to be properly checked if it is not for the people trusting journalists like Hersh. There is plenty of government influence in many large US publications that should cause valid concern. However, Hersh is an independent journalist, and it is people like him who relay the hard truth and hold the US government accountable for its appalling acts.