by Scott Ritter
Back in 2000, the television series “Andromeda” premiered, based upon unused material from Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series and franchise. The plot is premised on the notion of a spaceship, “Andromeda,” frozen in time, which is given the opportunity to reverse the clock and undo history.
The series ran five years.
Fast forward to the present.
History has dealt a tough hand to the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, who openly confessed his intent to “bring an end” to the Nord Stream pipeline system which delivered Russian natural gas to Europe through four pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, consisting of two pipelines each).
Since then, the Biden White House was compelled to deny the president’s stated intent after an explosive report by Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh detailed damning information which, if true (and there is no reason to suspect it’s not) casts the responsibility for a series of underwater explosions that took place on Sept. 26, 2022, on Biden himself.
Hersh’s report was ignored by the mainstream media in the United States, with neither The New York Times, for whom Seymour Hersh wrote on national security issues for many years, nor The Washington Post even hinting that the greatest living investigative journalist had broken a blockbuster story.
Enter the “Andromeda” — not the spaceship of the eponymous television series, but rather a Bavaria C50 15-meter (49-foot) yacht based out of the German Baltic port city of Rostock. On March 7 — nearly a month after Hersh self-published his article on Substack — a team of German reporters from the ARD capital studio, Kontraste, Südwestrundfunk (SWR) and Die Zeit collaboratively reported that they had uncovered the existence of “the boat that was allegedly used for the secret operation.”
The boat was “a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, apparently owned by two Ukrainians.” According to the story, “the secret operation at sea was carried out by a team of six people.”
The name of the yacht was “The Andromeda.”
According to the German reporting, the team — five men, consisting of a ship captain, two primary divers, two supporting divers and a female doctor — used the Andromeda to transport the team, along with the explosives used to destroy the pipelines, to the scene of the crime. The boat was returned to Rostock in “an uncleaned condition,” allowing German law enforcement officials, who carried out a search of the vessel between Jan. 8-11, to detect “traces of explosives” on a table in the ship’s cabin.
The same day the German reporting on the new Nord Stream attack narrative broke, The New York Times ran a front-page story entitled “Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, US Officials Say.”
For the first time, The New York Times referred to Hersh’s reporting, writing, “Last month, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on the newsletter platform Substack concluding that the United States carried out the operation at the direction of Mr. Biden,” before closing with “U.S. officials say Mr. Biden and his top aides did not authorize a mission to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, and they say there was no U.S. involvement.”
Map of the explosions caused at the Nord Stream pipelines on Sept. 26, 2022. (FactsWithoutBias1, CC-By-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
As if echoing the Biden White House denials, The New York Times led off with this:“New intelligence reporting amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Europe” (emphasis added.)
The New York Times, it seems, was more than happy about proceeding with its own anonymous intelligence sources, while dismissing Hersh’s.
The problem with both the German reporting and that of The New York Times (whose source was clearly referring to the same data reported by the German reporters) is that the Andromeda narrative doesn’t hold water.
Take, for instance, the Tom Clancy-like tale of derring-do that has four allegedly Ukraine-affiliated divers defy physiology by conducting dives that would require the use of a decompression chamber for them to survive an ascent of 240 feet (the depth of the Nord Stream pipelines that were destroyed). A rule of thumb is that decompression takes approximately one day per 100 feet of seawater plus a day.
This means that the team of divers would have required three days of decompression per dive. But to decompress, one needs a decompression chamber. For a dive involving two divers, the Andromeda would have to have been outfitted with either a two-person Class A decompression chamber, or two single-person Class B chambers, as well as the number of large oxygen bottles needed to operate these chambers over time. \
A simple examination of the interior cabin space of the Bavarian C50 yacht would quickly dispossess one of any notion that either option was viable.
Simply put — no decompression chamber, no dive, no story.
‘Traces’ of High Explosives
There is another aspect of the story to probe. According to the German reporting, law enforcement officials detected “traces” of high explosives on the tables in the cabin of the Andromeda.
According to the Swedish Prosecution Authority, in a statement released on Nov. 19, 2022, Swedish investigators discovered “traces of explosives on several of the foreign objects that were found” at the site of the explosions.
These explosives, according to a Nov. 22, 2022, report issued by Nord Stream AG, the Swiss-based parent company that owned the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, produced “technogenic [i.e., “of or pertaining to a process or substance created by human technology”] craters with a depth of 3 to 5 meters” separated “by a distance of about 248 meters.”
“The section of the pipe between the craters is destroyed, the radius of pipe fragments dispersion is at least 250 meters,” the report noted.
In a report to the United Nations, both Denmark and Sweden said that the damage done to the Nord Stream pipelines was caused by blasts equivalent to the power of “several hundred kilograms of explosive.”
It should be noted that underwater pipelines like those used in Nord Stream are designed to withstand proximal explosions from devices up to several hundred kilograms in size. Indeed, in locations such as the Baltic Sea, where unexploded military ordnance from multiple world wars abounds, the threat of a drifting device striking a pipeline and detonating is quite real.
Computer modeling shows that a 600-kilogram high explosive charge detonated approximately 5 meters from a 34mm-thick steel pipeline filled with gas would not compromise the structural integrity of the pipeline.
At the location of the explosions, the Nord Stream pipelines consisted of 26.8 mm steel pipes with an addition 33.2 mm of concrete coating, for a total thickness of 60 mm. The weight of a single pipe section was over 11 tons.
