How can we protect our undersea cables from sabotage?

The risk to commercial telecommunications cables is thought to be lower. Even though Britain is an island, it has lots of connections to the outside world, meaning if one commercial cable were severed, there would be plenty of back-ups. For remote islands such as the Scilly Isles or the Hebrides, however, there is less resilience, as seen when communications with Shetland were briefly ruptured by a fishing vessel in 2022. “To do enough damage to really harm the UK, you’d have to hit so many cables simultaneously, which would mean that all deniability would be lost,” says Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow in sea power at the defence think tank the Royal United Services Institute. “That said, even limited damage could [cause] serious disruption.” A greater threat to Britain perhaps lies in its pipelines to Norway, which supplied more than 40 per cent of the UK’s gas in 2023. “The Langeled pipeline from Norway is a real pinch point in our gas supply,” says Kaushal.