interesting reason why the nbn is being pushed, page-5

By the way did you know that the main driver behind optical fibres development was the threat of nuclear war, the Yanks learned the hard way when they set off one of their bombs in the desert, it blew up any surrounding communications infrastructure, which was caused by huge voltages being induced into the copper by this new phenomenon called EMP.

It was one of those times when they had the solution before they had the medium, that is they had the idea of using electronics and lasers but at the time they didn't have the optical fibre developed at that point, it's development was driven by what happened in the desert explosion.