The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
Forty years ago, an interdisciplinary group of Harvard scholars – professors, researchers and practitioners – came together to tackle the greatest threat of the Cold War: the fear of a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. Today, we seek to recreate that interdisciplinary approach to tackle a new threat: the risk of conflict in cyberspace.
The problems that confront today’s leaders are substantial and diverse: how to protect a nation’s most critical infrastructure from cyber attack; how to organize, train, and equip a military force to prevail in the event of future conflict in cyberspace; how to deter nation-state and terrorist adversaries from conducting attacks in cyberspace; how to control escalation in the event of a conflict in cyberspace; and how to leverage legal and policy instruments to reduce the national attack surface without stifling innovation. These are just a sample of the motivating questions that drive our work.
The aim of the Belfer Center's Cyber Project is to become the premier home for rigorous and policy-relevant study of these and related questions.