Security

Why hi-tech undersea cables are the real threat to national security – Telegraph.co.uk


Such an abundance of cables might make Sunak’s concerns, compiled for the think tank Policy Exchange five years ago, when he was merely a humble MP, seem exaggerated. But while we might not have volcanoes, we too are an island. And that makes us vulnerable. Moreover, Britain is home to one of the world’s pre-eminent financial centres, reliant on instant data. Even more significantly, unlike Tonga, we have powerful enemies.

In a world in which warfare is increasingly conducted on the grey margins, where cyber attacks and sabotage are deniable, even while causing crippling damage, cables are a tempting target. For a start, they are magnificently unguarded, rolling up nondescript parts of our shoreline into unremarkable outbuildings, on beaches and in car parks. A report by the UK Centre for Protected Infrastructure described such cable landing stations as “poor in terms of physical security… an obvious risk”.

At sea their remoteness makes them impossible to monitor and guard. Not that Russia, or China, are always interested in severing our links. Sometimes, from their point of view, it is better to tap into them, to harvest the precious information they bear.

Nor is it just data cables on which our island nation depends. We rely, too, on a growing network of electricity ‘interconnectors’, which plug us into other countries’ national grids. There will soon be six, linking us to France, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark – enough to supply 25 per cent of our electricity requirements. Increasingly, our energy supply will also rely on subsea cables linking the mainland to offshore wind farms, where 2,297 turbines in 40 projects already generate 13 per cent of our total electricity.

Yet while these cables, sometimes as thick as tree trunks, are far sturdier than fibre-optic cables, they are not immune to faults. In 2015 the Basslink power cable from mainland Australia to Tasmania failed. It took six months to repair. Interconnectors also expose Britain to other risks. Only this week, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng refused planning permission for a new interconnector to France after former defence secretary, Penny Mordaunt said relying on the French – “who have already said they will turn off the power, [and] will use future energy supply as a bargaining chip” in disputes – presented a threat to national security. In all, it signals a reliance, for information and for power, on lonely spools of metal and glass winding across the seabed.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Britain and Tonga, however, is just how bad things could get were our cables to be cut. For a start, the financial system would probably collapse. The US Federal Reserve estimates that more than $10 trillion dollars are transmitted via undersea cables every day. The SWIFT system, which moves money between 11,000 financial institutions in millions of transactions each day, is dependent on cables. As Sunak puts it: “In such a highly interdependent world, the shockwaves resulting from a major cable disruption at a leading financial centre such as London… are potentially catastrophic. If an adversary were to succeed in executing a successful attack against Britain’s undersea cable infrastructure the result would be financial disaster on an unprecedented scale.”

The shockwaves would not merely be economic. Earlier this month, the incoming head of the UK’s armed forces, Admiral Tony Radakin, said that Russian activity could “put at risk and potentially exploit the world’s real information system, which is undersea cables that go all around the world”. Targeting them, he suggested, might be considered an “act of war”.

It is obvious why. The most advanced militaries rely on them. In 2008, three cables linking Italy and Egypt were accidentally cut (100-150 are severed each year, according to Telegeography, the vast majority due to fishing equipment, or dragging anchors). Suddenly, data connectivity between Europe and the Middle East plummeted. At the time, Britain and America had more than 200,000 soldiers stationed in Iraq and relied on submarine cable networks for 95 per cent of their strategic communications, including the use of drones, critical for surveillance and counter-terror strikes. According to Lieutenant Colonel Donald Fielded of the 50th US Communications Squadron, while engineers struggled to repair the cables, daily sorties fell from the hundreds to “tens”.

“These are definitely critical infrastructure, both for finance and military activity,” says Bert Chapman, professor at Purdue University and author of the report Undersea Cables: The Ultimate Geopolitical Chokepoint. “Any attack on them could have a potentially decapitating effect.”

Many governments are wising up to the threat. Turkey is deploying six German-built subs in the sensitive waters of the Eastern Mediterranean, and will conduct surveillance on the network of cables its old adversary Greece is stringing to Cyprus, Israel and Egypt. Indeed, Egypt is strangely critical. Alexandria is the confluence of half a dozen critical long-distance cables – a junction box housing some 80 per cent of Europe-to-Asia communication. One of them is the SeaMeWe-4 internet cable, which runs 12,000 miles from Marseille to Singapore. In 2013, eight years after it started operating, it was attacked by three scuba divers, who were arrested by the Egyptian Navy. The men appeared to be diving for scrap metal, but their brazen lack of sophistication only served to ram home how vulnerable such cables are.



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