{"id":143114,"date":"2025-05-30T03:52:12","date_gmt":"2025-05-30T03:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/143114\/"},"modified":"2025-05-30T03:52:12","modified_gmt":"2025-05-30T03:52:12","slug":"britain-is-wide-open-to-russian-undersea-sabotage-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/143114\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain is wide open to Russian undersea sabotage \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The reliability of U.S. support in that scenario is \u201cimpossible to know\u201d and \u201cdepends on what goes through Trump&#8217;s head at 3 a.m.,\u201d Shapps said.<\/p>\n<p>If sufficient quantities of gas could not be found to replace lost supply \u2014 for example, in the event of an attack on multiple pipelines \u2014 a Network Gas Supply Emergency could be declared. These procedures are enshrined in law but have never been triggered<strong> <\/strong>since the U.K. gas network was built in the 1960s.<\/p>\n<p>Initially, gas power stations could be shut down, leading to power cuts. These could be turned back on again quickly when the gas supply returned to normal, but in more extreme scenarios, factories and businesses \u2014 and, as a last resort, some households \u2014 could be cut off from the gas network entirely.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/12983108-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6682086\"  \/>The U.K.\u2019s biggest LNG supplier is the United States. | Olivier Hoslet\/EFE via EPA<\/p>\n<p>Energy industry experts, granted anonymity to discuss crisis planning, said in the event of such a drastic step, individual engineers would be required to reconnect each home to the gas network safely. It could take months before the network was back to normal, they said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Ireland, which is dependent on gas imports from Britain, would also be badly affected.<\/p>\n<p>The U.K.\u2019s latest National Risk Register, <a href=\"https:\/\/assets.publishing.service.gov.udak\/media\/67b5f85732b2aab18314bbe4\/National_Risk_Register_2025.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">published earlier this year<\/a>, contains a \u201creasonable worst-case scenario\u201d of a terror attack on gas infrastructure that leads to \u201crolling power cuts lasting up to three hours,\u201d and predicts that \u201crestoration of the affected gas infrastructure could take approximately three months.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The reliability of U.S. support in that scenario is \u201cimpossible to know\u201d and \u201cdepends on what goes through&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[7693,767,748,61825,6178,6659,2814,473,1312,35,3975,25833,393,7159,5435,61826,4884,475,806,6084,678,12270,5443,2441,517,1144,1115,2661,15857,46,2343,332,712,811,1199,16,15,49,333,1764,771],"class_list":{"0":"post-143114","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-baltic-sea","10":"tag-baltics","11":"tag-britain","12":"tag-claire-coutinho","13":"tag-conflict","14":"tag-crisis","15":"tag-data","16":"tag-defense","17":"tag-electricity","18":"tag-energy","19":"tag-energy-security","20":"tag-energy-supply","21":"tag-england","22":"tag-fossil-fuels","23":"tag-gas","24":"tag-grant-shapps","25":"tag-great-britain","26":"tag-imports","27":"tag-industry","28":"tag-infrastructure","29":"tag-ireland","30":"tag-liquefied-natural-gas","31":"tag-lng","32":"tag-markets","33":"tag-north-sea","34":"tag-northern-ireland","35":"tag-norway","36":"tag-oil","37":"tag-pipelines","38":"tag-policy","39":"tag-research","40":"tag-russia","41":"tag-scotland","42":"tag-security","43":"tag-services","44":"tag-uk","45":"tag-united-kingdom","46":"tag-united-states","47":"tag-vladimir-putin","48":"tag-wales","49":"tag-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}