Britannia doesn’t rule beneath the waves

Do you know how journalists count?  “One, two….trend!” It’s worth relating this as a guard against reading too much into a spate of “incidents” in which undersea cables have been severed and the question “Russia?” has been asked. But, on the other hand….

In late September, a series of explosions ripped open the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines between Russia and Germany. Two weeks ago, an undersea cable linking the Faroe Islands to the Shetland Islands was damaged, and last week another cable linking to mainland Scotland was cut leaving much of the islands without internet connection.

Fishing trawlers do damage subsea cables from time to time (although they tend not to blow them up) but the frequency of incidents has caused some alarm. This intensified this week after three undersea internet cables at a landing point near Aix-en-Provence were deliberately severed in the early hours of the morning. This disrupted connectivity between Marseille-Lyon, Marseilles-Milan, and Marseilles-Barcelona, with the knock-on effect of slowing some internet connectivity across the world. 

Co-incidence? Well, there was also the incident in the Norwegian Arctic last year when an undersea fibre optic cable connecting a satellite ground station on Svalbard to the Norwegian mainland was cut and the authorities suggested “human involvement”. Geir Pedersen of the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research told the EUobserver website “When we inspected one of the ends of the cable it was clearly cut with a power tool”. Norway’s state broadcaster NRK then revealed that a Russian trawler had been over the cable as the Institute received its last signal.  In January of this year another cable from Svalbard was damaged. NRK found that on this occasion a Russian trawler had passed over the cable 20 times in the days in the days before and after the incident.

Trend? It’s normal for Russian trawlers to be in the area, and impossible for them not to cross over the cables. Whether Russia’s SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) operates a fishing fleet is unknown but earlier this month Norway announced Russian fishing vessels can only dock in three of the dozens of ports along the Norwegian coast, and they must submit to security checks when they do so. We can assume any power tools found will be subject to scrutiny.

So, the incidents might be co-incidental, they might be a trend. Either way, Europe’s number one gas supplier is taking precautionary measures. However, underwater cables, which span the globe, remain vulnerable to attack.

There are hundreds of them linking individual countries and continents across thousands of kilometres. They carry huge amounts of data vital to the day to day running of the global economy. They are also useful for military communications and monitoring. For example, they can listen to passing vessels. To the educated ear, the sound a vessel makes indicates what it is. For example – this is the sound of a large tanker. The Svalbard cable can almost certainly be used to listen out for Russian submarines.

For most of their length the cables are in international waters, as such it is legal to approach them, and given the distance they span, very difficult to guard. There are also choke points such as the Strait of Gibraltar and the Strait of Malacca where numerous cables are funnelled through a relatively narrow gap.

The UK and Ireland are important parts of the global network as they connect cables coming from North America to the European mainland. The UK’s Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Tony Radakin, is alive to the threat. In the run up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he warned, “That is where predominantly all the world’s information and traffic travels. Russia has grown the capability to put at threat those undersea cables and potentially exploit those undersea cables.” An attack on them he said could be considered an “act of war”. There are a number of proposals to safeguard these undersea super info highways, for example “Cable Protection Zones” monitored by naval forces, and forcing commercial cable owners such as Google to install sensors on them. 

As things stand though they are a wide-open target. Coincidence or otherwise the recent incidents are a reminder of the threat, and that Britannia doesn’t rule beneath the waves.

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