No international treaty obligates nations to protect or refrain from attacking submarine cables in wartime

The 1884 Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables prohibits cable cutting in peacetime but explicitly exempts wartime. The Geneva Conventions and Law of Armed Conflict have no specific provision protecting submarine cables as civilian infrastructure (unlike hospitals or water treatment). A belligerent can legally sever an adversary's cables as a military objective. This means the backbone of the global internet and financial system has less legal protection than a hospital. This persists because when these treaties were drafted, cable cutting was a minor inconvenience affecting telegraph traffic, not an existential threat to a nation's economy. No diplomatic effort to create a new cable protection treaty has gained traction because major powers want to preserve cable cutting as a wartime option.