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Ask HN: What would the impact be of Europe to America undersea cables being cut?

33 points by 35mm 5y ago

Putin has previously stated the goal of seperating Europe and the US. There was recently a suspicious faliure of the undersea cable between Norway and a key arctic satelite ground station.[1] So I'm wondering, what would the consequences be if the Atlantic cables connecting Europe with America experienced a sudden faliure? How much would it inhibit things like say Telegram within Europe? Is there anything we can do to mitigate these risks? [1]: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43828/undersea-cable-connecting-norway-with-arctic-satellite-station-has-been-mysteriously-severed

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ratg13 5y ago
I think you under-estimate the amount of undersea cables that cross the Atlantic. https://www.submarinecablemap.com https://www.submarinecablemap.com Even if someone went crazy and tried to sever all of them, traffic is still going to flow, it's just going to take a different and slower route. The cables can be fixed in a reasonable amount of time, so there is little incentive for anyone to even attempt this.
- pedalpete 5y ago
  Not only that, but the traffic would also be routed via the pacific. I don't believe there is any way to remove US/Europe without also removing Russia... or any country. Even taking out New Zealand or Australia would be a serious challenge.
- infini8 5y ago
  I’m just curious. Is there a reliable method of quickly identifying where the cable was severed?
  - jbothma 5y ago
    Broken fibres bounce light back. The time it takes for a pulse to return can be used to estimate the location of the break pretty accurately.
  - floxy 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_time-domain_reflectometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_time-domain_reflectome...
mullen 5y ago
Unlikely to happen, for several reasons: 1) Putin or any government cutting the Transatlantic cables could be seen as an act of war. 2) The Internet would just route around the issue(s). 3) Any ship caught cutting cables in the Atlantic would greeted by the US/UK Navy. 4) As someone else pointed out, there are a lot of Transatlantic cables, so it actually might be hard to cut enough of them to make an impact.
- fancyfredbot 5y ago
  Wouldn't it be rather hard to find a small underwater drone? I'm not saying that building a drone which could do that would be easy, but if you could build a number of them then I would have thought they would be be able to make a real mess of all these cables
  - throwawayvibes 5y ago
- lopis 5y ago
  So we would simply need a fleet of synchronized submarines to shut down all trans-atlantic connections.
anonuser123456 5y ago
This would make Russian submarines active combatants and put the entire Russian sub fleet at risk. I think the Russian military hierarchy would put up a strong argument against doing this.
throwawayvibes 5y ago