How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

Opinion "As obsolete as warships in the Baltic" was a great pop lyric in Prefab Sprout's 1985 gem, Faron Young. Great, but ironically obsolete itself. Sweden has just deployed multiple warships in that selfsame sea to guard against the very modern menace of underwater cable cutting.

With so much of the world's international energy and data infrastructure at risk, it's worth digging a bit deeper.

On the surface, it makes sense to send surveillance and interdiction military machines to dissuade acts that rely on uninterrupted secrecy. After all, Sweden is NATO's newest member, a result of Russia's peerless efforts to enlarge and re-energize that organization. Showing willing is just the thing.

This underestimates the potency of the move. Sweden, like its compatriot Finland, has an extensive history of being a small nation reliant on its own resources, yet capable of rebuffing Russian intentions. The ability to keep an unruly superpower in order remains highly relevant today, and is the key to protecting all those glass and copper strands that weave the world together.

There's no better example of how neutral Sweden slapped the bear's paw hard enough to matter than the Whiskey On The Rocks incident [PDF]. Less widely known than it should be, in October 1981, the Swedes noticed that the Soviet Whiskey-class submarine S-363 had got itself stuck on a shoal in Swedish territorial waters. The boat captain's explanation that this was as a result of total navigation system failure didn't stack up as the rocks on which it was impaled were just 10 km (6 miles) from a major Swedish naval base, engaged at the time in a major exercise. How the blinded S-363 navigated some of the most dangerous seabed geography to get there was also a good question.

The Swedish sense of humor was further tested when a small coastguard vessel quietly scanned the submarine for a certain flavor of gamma rays – the sort that comes from weapons grade uranium-238 in general and, oops, the submarine's torpedo tubes in particular. So. Captain, we know you want to get home, but we have a few questions for you.

Things got even spicier when Swedish coastal radar reported incoming surface vessels from a Russia-ish direction. It looked like full-on military intervention. The Swedes went into their own full-on military response, activating shore batteries, launching fighters with anti-ship missiles, and going to radio silence. Unambiguous.

The Soviet rescue fleet turned out to be West German merchant ships, although as usual with Cold War stories, other narratives are available, including one where the threat was real but retreated once its bluff was called.

For the many Soviet observers in the area, there was no doubt about the absolute determination in Sweden to defend its borders and make aggressors pay, however unequal the numbers. Ten days and much fevered diplomacy after it grounded, the submarine was pulled off the rocks by the Swedes and sent on its way.

All this happened at the peak of Cold War uncertainty. Long-term Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was old and feeble and in the last year of his life, with his two successors barely lasting a year in power apiece. 1983 would see the Kremlin coming within a whisker of launching a nuclear strike during the NATO Able Archer 83 exercise. Nevertheless, Sweden stuck to its guns.

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Clarity defeats ambiguity; in the absence of clarity, ambiguity thrives. What are the consequences for cutting undersea cables? It depends on whether you get caught, who you are, and where you do it. It's easy, if you're a mischievous power intent on wrong-footing your enemies, to arrange accidents or mistakes, and just "see what happens" without fearing consequences. It's nicely ambiguous.

Clarity would look very different. Effective surveillance of undersea infrastructure to identify not just an oil tanker dragging its anchor in the busy Baltic but a rogue trawler off a remote island coast? Sure, we could do that if we wanted to. The militaries of many nations spent oceans of effort since the Second World War making surface and submarine vessel tracking work, and that was before commercial technology got even better.

Astronomers have a network that can swing global and space-based resources toward anything exciting enough within minutes of its discovery. Infrastructure operators and owners could take a lesson from that. Guaranteed identification of the perpetrator, backed by dogged interception, with extremely clear rules about what not to do, what to do if you muck up, and all the factors that would count against you – this is the stuff of international treaties and cooperative agreements on policy and action.

The idea is to raise undersea infrastructure to the status of a shared international asset of great value protected accordingly. By itself, Sweden demonstrated that it felt that way about its borders. Exactly as NATO does for its members. Make this trip for international energy and data, make everything within the outer cover a shared sovereign territory, and marvel at how well navigation improves in even the shoddiest anchor dragger. It might even get better for Russian submarines. ®