Introduction: We Are More Vulnerable than Ever

The vulnerability of Critical National Infrastructure has been an interest of mine for many years. I first became worried about Britain’s lack of preparedness for an attack on CNI when I sat down to watch the Bond film GoldenEye. The film came out while I was Minister of State for Defence Procurement. I had just bought 67 Apache helicopters for the Army. One of the stars of the film was a stolen Tiger Eurocopter which, according to the film, was the only helicopter to be hardened against an ElectroMagnetic Pulse attack. I had not previously been aware of the existence of such attacks, let alone their significance. As I watched the film, a Eureka moment struck me: were the Apache helicopters I’d just bought secure against such a weapon? Had I bought the wrong sort of chopper?

Indeed, was UK infrastructure at large secure from the newly emerging phenomenon of electronic warfare?

To what extent was the western world dangerously dependent on technology itself, all of which depends on a steady supply of electricity? I have been obsessed since then with knowing what is and is not critical national – and international (cables, internet services) – infrastructure; and how that infrastructure might be open to attack, or even prey to natural phenomena such as solar flares. I am especially concerned that since my moment of insight, things appear to have gone backward, not forwards. We are more vulnerable than ever.

The public and politicians seem not only to lack the will to deal with the dangers but to be unaware of them. It is all too tempting to deal with the threats that are immediate. With an electoral cycle focused narrowly on the coming five years this is hardly surprising. But if other threats are just as dangerous in the long term to our values and interests, we must tackle them too.

We must also guard against concentrating excessively on those threats that we can see. It is a symptom of our myopia in Europe that our defence spending per head reflects our distance from the Russian border. Cyber-attacks have been much in the news of late, because they happen inside our infrastructure. The front line of the new warfare has moved from the borders of Russia to the computers on our desks.

The cascading consequences of a serious break in electricity are potentially catastrophic, and this is made all the more relevant by our increasing dependency on electric vehicles, the internet, Artificial Intelligence and Data Banks. The hunger for electricity is growing exponentially – alongside its fragility. Is it the new Single Point of Failure?