Not all choking is physical: The Undersea Cable Trap

Britannia ruled the waves by taking pains to control choke points: The Pas-de-Calais, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, the Bab-al-Mandeb (‘Grief’s Gate’ in Arabic), the Strait of Hormuz and the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. Recession of Empire abandoned Calais to France, Suez to Egypt, Aden to Yemen, and the Asian straits to Singapore and Indonesia. Gibraltar is all that remains.

Some internet traffic goes overland and by space, but chunky fiber-optic cables on the sea floor carry the vast majority of it. In some places the cables are miles apart, but in places the cables lie hugger-mugger in narrow straits; many of them the same straits that the Royal Navy controlled with fleets and forts in years gone by.

There’s a lot of redundancy built into the way the Internet works, and cutting a bunch of cables wouldn’t cut anywhere — Britain, the UAE, Qatar — off entirely. It would, however, reduce transmission capacity so significantly and strain repair capability so severely, that the Internet would cease to function as expected.

Resilience of the cables is important, as is rapid repair of accidental breaks. A nightmare scenario, though, is deliberate simultaneous destruction of cables. Where could that simultaneity be easily achieved? In the strait gates of the world.

Subscriber Alexandra asked me to discuss this, and as with so many other issues I think I’ve made a good deep scratch in the surface, but more discussion will be needed.

Listeners might choose to watch this one on the Substack app or on a browser: there’s some mapping to look at. Unlike previous geostrategic map episodes, this one has suffered from an attack of production values, and I use tools more … electronic … than a pencil and Strathmore Bristol 400 paper.