OPINION:
Within hours of the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the British navy cut five German undersea cables, making it impossible for Berlin to communicate with its embassies or others outside Europe. This meant that most news from Belgium, France and the Eastern Front with Russia reached the outside world through Britain.
Military historians call this a brilliant stroke. The British took advantage of Germany’s crippled communications to persuade the United States to accept their narrative as they lobbied the reluctant Americans to join them in their effort to defeat Germany.
Today, the vast array of cables running not just between Europe and North America but linking every country on every continent in ways undreamed of at the time of the Great War are just as vulnerable as the cables the British navy targeted more than a century ago.
There are today more than three-quarters of a million miles of public and private cables crisscrossing the world’s oceans and carrying, among other things, most of the world’s internet traffic. They are largely unprotected. Although the complexity of today’s cables would make it more difficult to catastrophically interrupt communications, defense experts believe it could be done.
Finland joined NATO last spring in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amid threats from the Kremlin. Then, in early October, a gas pipeline supplying natural gas that runs under the Baltic Sea was damaged, disrupting gas flow to the country. As Finnish authorities began an investigation to determine what caused the damage, suspicion naturally focused on the Kremlin, which predictably denied any involvement.
After determining that the damage was caused externally and may well have been deliberate, the Finns located a 6-ton anchor not far from the pipeline where it had been damaged along with three undersea cables providing internet and communications services to nearby Estonia. They raised the anchor and determined that it was Chinese rather than Russian.
A Chinese container ship, the Newnew Polar Bear, had dragged the anchor across the seabed and lost it when it snagged the pipeline and cables. It was photographed missing its front anchor when it docked later at Vladivostok, Russia.
Numerous attempts to communicate with the vessel or its owners failed, and it is reportedly back in China. NATO leaders claim that if it was a deliberate attack on the pipeline and cable, there would have to be a response, but since no one really wants a confrontation with Beijing, everyone is saying that it might have been an accident.
That’s not likely. Evidence suggests for it to have been an accident, the vessel would have had to have dragged the 6-ton anchor along the seabed for more than 112 miles until it snagged the cables and pipeline. An accident would require that no one on board noticed. That seems virtually impossible given the warning systems on vessels such as the Newnew Polar Bear and the effect dragging the anchor had to have had on the vessel’s performance.
When I asked if the damage could have been accidental, a former U.S. merchant mariner and ship’s captain responded, “The negligence (or stupidity) required to achieve such an accomplishment is incomprehensible to any professional marine.”
He said that modern vessels like the Newnew Polar Bear are constructed with three or four redundant warning systems that would have to be overcome to allow the anchor to be dragged as it was.
In addition, he said doing so would seriously affect the handling of the vessel and would have been noticed quickly even if all the warning systems had failed simultaneously. It had to have been intentional. He concluded that the Chinese must have been doing Moscow’s dirty work so that Russian President Vladimir Putin could profess his innocence.
It’s going to take four to five months to repair the pipeline and cables, but the real meaning of what happened is chilling and goes well beyond the inconvenience of this one incident. As Jack Sharpies of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies told CNN, what happened was probably “less about disrupting European gas supply and more about raising bigger questions about the safety and security of offshore infrastructure, not just gas pipelines.”
If that is the case, the world is being put on notice that the sinews of the modern world are as vulnerable to bad actors today as the old cables connecting North America and Europe were in 1914.
• David Keene is editor-at-large at The Washington Times.
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