“Munin,” (SN 169586) the third out of five Boeing P-8 Poseidon (militarized 737-800) maritime patrol aircraft on order for the Royal Norwegian Air Force seen landing for the first time in its home country last May. The type is replacing elderly both P-3 Orion and DA-20 Falcon EW aircraft in Norwegian service. Note the “Saint” logo on its tail. All five have names from Norse mythos– Vingtor, Viking, Ulabrand, and Hugin– and will be operated by the RNoAF’s 333 Squadron out of Evenes Air Station. (RNoAF photo)
Just going to leave this here, without judgment or throwing any shade or rocks.
Old school journo Sy Hersh– formerly of the NYT and the guy who broke the story on Abu Ghraib and My Lai– is now over at substack because that’s just how the 2020s work.
Well, on Wednesday, he published a 5,500-word article based partially on unnamed confidential sources (which, of course, always take with a grain of salt) that Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC) personnel (aka “The Panama City Boys” in his piece) laid remotely triggered demo charges on the Nordstream pipeline where it rested on the seabed 260 feet down (well within a technical dive depth) a few miles off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm in conjunction with the Norwegian Navy. The emplacement, he contends, was done during the regular Spring BALTOPS exercise and triggered remotely long after.
From Hersh:
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves, and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low-frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
So anyway…