FEATURE
THE ‘WET WAR’
Could Submarine Cable Security Concerns Threaten Global Stability? BY JOHN TIBBLES
INTRODUCTION
Has there ever been a period when subsea cables a have been so often in the news? Not only have they been in the media almost daily, but for mostly the wrong reasons. They seem to have almost become either weaponised or legitimate targets rather than bridging oceans and societies to bring people together for peaceful reason. This was an idea postulated by the telegraph pioneers 150 odd years ago with the completion of first Trans-Atlantic cable. How have we come to this from a seemingly tranquil subsea environment that allowed telecom companies and more recently internet content providers to connect the world to an unprecedented degree? We have arrived at this worrying situation where our once niche and invisible industry is no longer threatened by geopolitical tensions but is the cause of them. The answer of course is politics!
SOME HISTORY
In the three decades since the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, telecom carriers, content providers and entrepreneurs built cable networks for their own services but also as business opportunities. Politics in that era that
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meant fishermen’s rights, local planning/zoning authorities and some regulatory issues. Often annoying, but benign compared with what we face today That isn’t to say that governments were not involved with cables via various security and or military bodies but there was not the focus that there is today. Ten years ago, a dragged anchor could cut a cable, and it didn’t make the news media, now its prelude to WW3. Subsea cables have existed for 150 years and have been targeted occasionally since then. In the late 1950s when the first TAT cables were built, they were to serve both civil and military needs. These early systems were largely built by and used by the USA’s, AT&T, who were the world’s largest international telephony carrier and used their own technology and resources to build the cables. They also used their domination of the voice market to their advantage, but they didn’t control the content of the calls. There were other parties, UK, France, Japan etc. who also had large volumes of traffic and the capability to construct, install and maintain such systems. This carried on well into the optical fibre age as the likes of TAT8 and PTAT lead the industry into the new era mostly dominated by consortium systems but also some