Weapon targeting cyber attacks escalate
Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay, 2024 – *professor of political science at UC Sandiego, and ** Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto “Cyber Deception versus Nuclear Deterrence” Elements of Deterrence, online: Oxford Academic. Accessed via University of Michigan //DH
An attacker who hacks an adversary’s nuclear command and control apparatus, or the weapons themselves, will gain an advantage in war-fighting that the attacker cannot reveal, while the adversary will continue to believe it wields a deterrent that may no longer exist. The dangers of escalation are greatest in brinksmanship situations where actors are willing to use secret offensive cyber operations—which cannot be revealed in advance—to limit the damage of a nuclear exchange. The same strategic logic that leads us to view cyber warfare as a limited political instrument in most situations, as discussed in Chapter 5, also leads us to view it as incredibly destabilizing in rare situations. While cyberwar is not itself a weapon of mass destruction, the use of offensive cyber operations targeting actual weapons of mass destruction will tend to undermine crisis stability.