After the invasion of Ukraine, could Russia attack the submarine cables? This is one of the fears of the intelligence services which carefully observe these infrastructures, which are as little known as they are strategic. Few people know it, but almost all of our communications go through these cables.
Phone calls, WhatsApp or Facebook conversations, websites: 99% of our communications rely on these tubes made of steel, copper and plastic to protect the optical fiber. Today there are more than 430 of them, hundreds of kilometers long, thus connecting countries, servers from different continents, passing at the bottom of the Atlantic, the Pacific or the Mediterranean. A strategic market in which France is well placed.
Only three companies in the world manufacture this type of cable and the leader is based in Calais: Alcatel Submarine Network. 50,000 kilometers of cables are assembled each year in this historic factory. In a century, it went from telegraph cables to fiber optics. And today, its customers are called Google, Facebook or China Telecom. Florence Palacio, the director of the Calais site describes their activities as follows: “We buy optical fibers and our job is to protect this fiber by manufacturing the submarine cable. The position of Calais is strategic because indeed, we have the port nearby which allows us both to manufacture and to directly ship the cable which can leave the factory to be laid”.
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In these workshops, you come across coils of steel and aluminum, rolls of fiber, hundreds of meters of production lines running 24 hours a day. Once produced, the cables head for the seabed. They are rolled up in huge vats, loaded on board ships, then deposited thousands of kilometers deep. Delicate operation summarized by Thomas Lecointe, operational director in Calais: “We have a plow at the back of the ship which will come and open the bottom of the sea to lay the cable and bury it, and then, when we are in the deepest areas, where nothing can happen to it, we comes directly to deposit it at the bottom of the seas.”
“All the videos you can watch, the emails, the banking exchanges, there’s an awful lot going through those undersea cables. At certain times, streaming video consumes between 95 and 98% of the world’s Internet volume.”
Thomas Lecointe, COO of Alcatel Submarine Networkat franceinfo
But these cables may be protected, they are not immune to certain threats, continues Thomas Lecointe: “We are in an area in which we have very strong sea currents, the cable moves and, over time, it wears out on the seabed and risks being severed. Then we can have a ship , for example by dropping its anchor which, bad luck, will snag the cable and damage it. A trawl can take the cable or move it and damage it.”
Even sharks can attack these cables, cut them. To fix them, Alcatel Submarine Network has three maintenance vessels located around the world to intervene as quickly as possible.
In addition to accidents, there are also the risks of sabotage. Undersea cables have been targeted in the past. From the first world war, at the time, it was the telegraph. Russia was accused of cutting land cables during the annexation of Crimea in 2014. And last September, one of its scientific vessels, suspected of being a spy ship, was spotted in the off Normandy then escorted by the French Navy.
The threat is therefore taken seriously, but Camille Morel, specialist in the geopolitics of submarine cables, prefers to put things into perspective: “If you are targeting a transatlantic cable, for example, and you only cut one, the impact will be relatively small. On the other hand, it can indeed be a strong symbol that you are sending. It seems unlikely to me. today that Russia acts as such.”
“What could be achieved are more discreet cuts, not attributable through perhaps non-state actors. Westerners could not necessarily respond frankly to this threat.”
Camille Morel, specialist in the geopolitics of submarine cablesat franceinfo
Beyond the risks of sabotage, these cables are above all the object of espionage. According to a joint investigation by several European media, the United States, for example, succeeded in intercepting Angela Merkel’s conversations, between 2012 and 2014, by connecting to these submarine cables. Last month, the French army simulated a cable cut between the Antilles and France. An exercise to deploy alternative means of communication via satellites.