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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1304 thread views

Transnational Thursday for August 15, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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So is it safe to say that at the start of the next big war a bunch of important submarine cables/pipelines all get cut simultaneously? A bog standard chinese container ship "accidentally" cut a baltic sea pipeline last october, the houthis managed to fuck up some cables in the red sea, it clearly isn't that difficult.

Anyways in this case it was always blatantly obvious the ukrainians did this, they had something to gain, and the americans weren't going to give germany a slap in the face like this.

Simultaneously? Probably not, and possibly not at all depending what level of tit-for-tat one wants in the conflict. Not all big wars start with the intent of being big wars, and not all forms of disruption are tried, and while it's not hard to do it's not impossible to mitigate either.

But cables are notoriously vulnerable, and I can remember reading about fears of terrorists targetting undersea cable landing stations to break inter-continental network connections back in the 2000s.

So is it safe to say that at the start of the next big war a bunch of important submarine cables/pipelines all get cut simultaneously?

That’s been safe to say for a long time now. Russia has tested their capacity in the North Sea and Baltic Sea by doing exactly that several times.

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