Submarine Cable Sabotage Concerns Grow: Morocco and Global Internet at Risk

Would submarine cables be the next target of sabotage after the Nord Stream pipelines? The concern is great given the usefulness of these facilities used for the internet or electricity. If they were to be damaged, it would affect many countries, including Morocco, and create chaos in the world because almost all intercontinental electronic communications pass through submarine cables, according to BFMTV.

There are more than 400 underwater lines, the longest of which is 3,900 km and connects Southeast Asia to Western Europe via the Red Sea. A single sabotage of these facilities and there would be no internet in Europe, warns Jean-Luc Vuillemin, director of international networks at Orange. This situation would especially block financial transactions like Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) and would result in financial losses of more than $10 trillion, which would trigger a new economic crisis in addition to the energy and food crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.

The concern is also raised by intelligence services that use these submarine cables to exchange strategic information for the security of states. "The seabeds are a new terrain of power relations that we must master in order to be ready to act, to defend ourselves and, if necessary, to take the initiative, or at least to retaliate," declared in March Florence Parly, former French Minister of the Armed Forces. The submarine electric cables that allow electricity to be transported from one country to another would also be threatened by sabotage. Yet projects in this direction are underway between France and Spain, Morocco and the United Kingdom, Greece and Israel, Norway and Denmark, etc.

In total, 72,000 km of submarine electric cables will be laid by 2030, said Christopher Guérin, CEO of Nexans, in an article in The Economist. Sabotage of Internet or electrical cables could be considered an act of war, even if in this case it would be difficult, if not impossible, to attribute it to a state.