A little-noticed outcome of the gaggle of meetings hosted by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently in Hiroshima was an agreement to establish a “Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience.”
The proposal seeks to strengthen and protect undersea cables, a core, but often neglected, component of the infrastructure of the modern economy.
Those cables are the backbone of the modern economy. The first submarine cables were reportedly used in the 1820s by a Russian attache in the Munich Embassy to send electric telegraph communications; the first undersea telegraph cable was laid in 1850 between England and France and the first permanently successful trans-Atlantic cable went into service in 1866.