My family has probably watched Lord of the Rings a dozen times or more1. We can (and sometimes will) quote entire passages from the films.
For example, here’s a favorite. The wizard Gandalf speaks about the consequences of the evil Sauron gaining possession of a powerful magic weapon:
That's why I could not help but hear Ian MacKellen's Gandalf in my head when I read these headlines:
The Daily Express is an expert at sensationalistic headlines. But take a look at the coverage from more restrained outlets:
What is this new wonder weapon, and how much should we fear its unleashing?
From Gondor to Grapnels
Two separate developments grabbed media attention.
The best I can tell, a January 2025 Newsweek article got the hype train rolling. The article discussed a 2020 patent application by Lishui University in China. So, let's start with a peek at the actual application. You can view it in full here, but here are the basics about how the tool works:
- A ship would tow the "anchor hook" with sharpened blades on the sea floor.
- Operators monitor the tension on the line with a device onboard.
- Once the anchor blade cuts a cable and tension is released, they recover the anchor hook and look for copper traces on its blade.
If this doesn't exactly sound like rocket science to you, that's because it's not. This "weapon" already has a name: it's called a grapnel.
Grapnels have long been an industry mainstay not for cable damage, but for cable repair. When a cable has been cut in two, grapnels can grab each end and haul them to the surface. Once on deck, they can be reconnected (or “spliced” back together).
Often, cables can be damaged without breaking into multiple pieces. Repairing this damage requires first cutting the cable so it can be brought skyward and fixed. To do this, a cable repair ship first lowers a grapnel to snip a damaged cable and haul it to the surface. These "cut-and-hold" grapnels are essential for maintaining the 576 undersea cables currently in service around the world.
Does this Chinese patent application unleash any *new* technologies? Not as far I can tell.
In the images below, compare the simplistic schematic in the Chinese patent (top image) with the design from a pre-existing grapnel patent (bottom image). The older patent shows a lot of the hallmarks of what the industry uses today, including a mechanism to read changes in tension along the hawser (line). The date of that patent’s application? 1962.
In fact, we can go even further back. The grapnel design in the Chinese patent application bears a remarkable resemblance to the one that Victorian engineers used to recover a telegraph cable in 1865. Grapnels have been in use since 200 AD. Romans invented them for—you guessed it—ship-to-ship warfare.
The only possible innovation—if you could call it that—of the 2020 patent application is its emphasis on cable cutting over cable recovery and its low-tech approach to achieve cost efficiencies. But even here, the application is hardly breaking new ground. Accidents from large merchant vessels dragging their anchors already wreak havoc on cables. And they do it for free!
A more recent announcement by Chinese researchers set off a second round of media hyperventilation. This claimed innovation would allow for cable cutting via a rotating grinding wheel at depths up to 4,000 meters.
I’m not an engineer, so this is where I admit I’m a little … out of my depth2. That said, I find the goal of this device confusing because cables are not typically steel-armored in deep water. Depths below 1 or 2 kilometers call for lightweight cable to allow for recovery.
Further, existing cut-and-hold grapnels are already capable of deep-water operation. Marine specialist ETA claims its grapnel can operate down to 9,000 meters. Chinese industry’s novel approach to cable cutting may seem jarring, but it does not appear to offer substantially new capabilities.
How Should Governments Counter the Threat of Sabotage?
Thus far, I've been pretty tongue-in-cheek about China-cable-cutting coverage.
And, sure, some of the breathless claims are good for a chuckle. But I should acknowledge that state-sponsored sabotage is at least *plausible* as a future threat, even if there’s scant evidence that intentional state action is currently a cause of cable faults.
What to do? Two Thoughts for Governments Come to Mind.
Deterrence
Governments should consider crafting a policy of deterrence that would mark undersea cables as off-limits to foreign powers. To work, this message also needs to be communicated—presumably privately. (And who knows? Perhaps this is already happening.)
The economies of China and especially Russia are far less reliant on undersea cables than are those of the U.S. and Europe, so a symmetric strategy of deterrence ("if you cut mine, I'll cut yours") is unlikely to work. (A U.K. defense minister seems to have acknowledged this reality in recent Parliamentary debate.) Instead, governments should consider an asymmetric response to potential sabotage. What that response might be is, thankfully, several steps above my pay grade, but it’s safe to assume it should be flexible and context-dependent.
Help the Industry
That first point might help prevent actions that, to the best of our knowledge, have not even happened in decades. What can governments do in the here and now?
On this point, governments should realize that the goals of the private sector are already well-aligned with the public interest when it comes to planning cable redundancy. The private owners of cables are well-incentivized to build resiliency. Owners stand to lose millions in repair costs if their cable is damaged, not to mention lost revenues while the cable is offline. Google and Meta are both sinking literally billions of dollars in new cables along novel and unusual routes, mostly with a goal of securing geographic redundancy.
However, the private sector occasionally bumps up against frustrating regulations when trying to permit both the construction and repair of cables. Governments can most definitely help in that area.
Everyday Deeds
That brings us home to a point we've often made: cables break all the time (roughly 200 cable faults per year!). Conditioned by repeated accidental cable faults, the industry is already well-positioned to develop new approaches to prevent faults… and to conduct repairs when they do happen.
So let's spare a thought for those mariners whose daily labors keep the global internet up and running. In the words of good old Gandalf:
"[Some believe] it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay."
Footnotes
1. Listen. We are all reasonable people here. I'm sure we can all agree that the Extended Edition—not the theatrical cut—is the definitive film version of the Lord of the Rings.
2. I must beg your pardon for this horrific pun.
