Rusted Sky

The cables *are* armored, the pressures at the depths these things go put an incredible strain on crystalline structures (as well as copper), so wrapping was just the start and after that something to keep the cables protected was next going way back to the copper days. The armor is less closer to shore, but still nothing to sneeze at... and *how* you actually find out where a cable *is* as these are laid from the surface is a bit of work. Still decent bathy charts and some knowledge of where a cable is will help. The guess on Iran is that they aren't suffering a cable problem so much as a beginning of an internal crackdown and using this as a convenient excuse. As for Egypt you have a bathy and surface chokepoint: the Suez Canal and Red Sea. Folks really should lay cables out of shipping lanes, but since you lay them with a pretty large ship... *sigh*. So the big thing isn't this happening there, but that it *doesn't* happen more frequently, pointing to folks transiting as fast as possible through there.

There is no way to guard the things and the US had access to Soviet comms in Kamchatka by getting a submersible crew that spliced into their cables and retrieved weekly data captures from it. Fiber optic can have similar done to it, but a bit of quantum checking can be done to allow an individual to know if the actual line has been compromised... if you are doing that sort of security on the transmissions, of course.

I heard about this on the radio yesterday, and it also occurred to me that this would be a great way to wage cyberwar on the cheap. Satellite communications have suffered as a result of cable technology advances and lower cost per bits conveyed, but they are a lot harder to knock out, and the ground installations can be anywhere.
Finding the cables to cut them is no great feat; their landing points are well known, so their locations close to shore would be in a fairly narrow range. Granted, they would be easier to fix close to shore, but the disruption would be enormous. If I were planning this, I would drop a few hundred million on renting (or otherwise) 70 ships and take out all the cables on both ends at the same time, then dragging the ends away to make them harder to repair. Imagine: 21st century technology being taken out by 19th century technology...

The cables are armored, it's true - but that's against casual impact, not something like the oversized duck-bill cutter used on a paravane to snap cables on undersea mines. It'd take me about ten to fifteen minutes to draw up something a welder could produce that'd rake up the cable off the sea floor, then pass it to a cutter blade. With sufficient mass towing it (say, a 1000 ton vessel) that cable would last real quick in the cutter.

Get a couple of dozen in use, and the stuff on the ocean bed would be broken pretty fast.

I wonder if satellite capacity would be sufficient to keep things going?

And now we're up to FOUR cables cut!

Satellite capacity is limited via installed capacity: want more, it needs to be boosted into orbit. There is some extra capacity for each satellite and they can pick up some slack, but nothing compared to the bandwidth of fiber optic cable. With DWDM you can get... what is it... 64 channels per cable and each of those subdivided... hmmmm... been awhile since I've done the math. The basic answer is: no.

There are some major geographic choke-points for cables: Gibraltar, Bosphorus Straights, Red Sea, Persian Gulf/Hormuz, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South China Sea, Baja, Hawaii, Panama, Cuba/Florida, English Channel, Denmark. Wherever you get the sea narrowing or an isolated wealthy population center, you get a concentration of cables.

The other problem with dragging an anchor or equivalent is *wrecks*. If you are moving at any speed the moment you latch on to something substantial you get some basic physics at work. The best place if you did this sort of thing is by those channel concentration areas in near shore navigable waters clear of wrecks and having a sloping bathy profile. And that describes the Red Sea/Suez area pretty well... I can see this as low-tech terrorism with no *bang* involved, just inconvenience. But for actual Nation based warfare its pretty pointless unless you have an effective ASAT system to go with it. And that just limits things to all Nations capable of getting into orbit: US, Russia, China, Japan, India, North Korea, Iran, Syria. And an ASAT weapon can be as cheap as ball bearings on a retrograde, intersecting orbit, so it opens the realm quite a bit.

I seem to remember an SF story a while back where China drilled some large-bore slanting holes in mountains, stuck nukes at the bottom, and then packed the shafts with containers of ball bearings.

Fire off the nuke, and you've got the world's biggest shotgun, scattering the charges into LEO. Made it a trifle tough to get anything into space...

J.

AJacksonian -

Re satellite capacity - I was thinking it wouldn't be possible. Thanks for the confirmation.

Ben -

4? Got a link?

J.