Cyberattacks enabled by quantum computing lead to escalating real world violence

To this point, we have viewed severe psychological harm as a conceptual threshold that can ethically and legally justify a military response. However, psychological distress suffered by civilians may also shape foreign policy decision-making. The pathway comprises two stages. First, psychological harm following cyberattacks shifts public opinion. Second, shifts in public opinion influence national decision-making. This pathway is indirect and offers a secondary perspective to consider the political consequences of cyber operations.

The pathway’s first leg links psychological harm and public policy preferences. Previously, we discussed how the anxiety and fear associated with political violence arouses a newly arisen perception of the world as a malevolent and dangerous place. As a consequence of their threat-driven emotional reorientation, voters adopt certain policy positions to regain a sense of security. When it comes to cyber-threats, recent empirical research verified that public exposure to cyberattacks leads to substantial shifts in political attitudes (Shandler, Snider, and Canetti 2022). Various studies have shown how exposure to cyberattacks corrodes public trust in government institutions (Gross, Canetti, and Vashdi 2016; Shandler and Gomez 2022), and influences support for intrusive surveillance (Snider et al. 2021). It is clear that the emotional distress associated with cyber-attacks generates the conditions for reevaluating core beliefs toward privacy, and that attacks are likely to spawn a realignment of the privacy-security paradigm for the digital age.

Why do cyberattacks have such potent political con- sequences? Cyberattacks exploit the absence of trustworthy attribution in cyberspace (Kello 2013; Poznansky and Perkoski 2018; Kaminska 2021), the lack of domain expertise among the public (Kostyuk and Wayne 2021), and the dread associated with cyberspace (Gomez and Villar 2018), to shake society’s trust in the safety and resilience of digital infrastructure. Believing that government authorities cannot effectively protect against damaging cyberattacks intensifies the public’s sense of cyber fatal- ism wherein omniscient and malicious perpetrators run havoc. It is quite astonishing that despite a singular absence of catastrophic cyber-strikes, more than 82 percent of the American public view cyberterrorism as a critical threat to society—far more than infectious diseases (72 percent), Russian military power (44 percent), or global warming (58 percent) (Brenan 2021). The public fear of cyber-threats is overwhelming, exacerbating the political consequences that follow any attacks.

We draw attention to one particular political outcome of exposure to cyberattacks that is especially pertinent to our enquiry—support for escalation and military retaliation. Widespread distress following cyberattacks elicits incessant public demands for military retaliation (Gross, Canetti, and Vashdi 2017; Shandler, Gross, and Canetti 2021; Shandler et al. 2022; Leal and Musgrave 2023). Even if the identity of the cyber-attacker is unknown, a frequent scenario in cyberspace, public anger still encourages a generalized desire for some kind of military action. If governments previously believed that “merely irritating” cyberattacks would fail to move a “merely irritated” public, this research suggests otherwise. Put simply, even nondestructive cyberattacks trigger substantial psychological harm, leading directly to public demands for a military response to cyber violence.

The mounting public pressure to retaliate following cyberattacks clashes with prevailing norms against cross-domain escalation in cyberspace (Kreps and Schnei- der 2019; Lin-Greenberg 2022; Valeriano and Jensen 2022). In this way, the de-escalatory nature of cyber-conflict may be counteracted by the imposition of extreme public pressure to retaliate, even across domains (Shandler, Gross, and Canetti 2021). In essence, we argue that the escalatory nature of cyber operations is not solely contingent on the technical characteristics of cyber capabilities, but that dynamics of public opinion must be incorporated into the evermore complex models of cyber-escalation. This dynamic is two-fold. While the previous section explains how cyber violence ignites fears and shifts public opinion, the following describes how public pressure can influence foreign policy decision-making.

There is extensive literature exploring the responsiveness of elected officials but no clear consensus about how they respond to the foreign policy views of their voters. While many scholars are skeptical about the role of public input, most agree that public opinion impacts decisions to engage in military operations to at least some degree (Sobel 2001; Klarevas 2002; Foyle 2004; Lin-Greenberg 2021). For example, Foyle (2004) demonstrated how the American public’s appetite for retaliation was a key factor influencing the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. Political and national security officials are understandably attuned to the views of the public they ostensibly serve, a political truth that extends even outside of democratic nations (Quek and Johnston 2017). An overwhelming public enthusiasm for retaliation following an attack will place considerable pressure on officials to approve military force.

That exposure to political violence brings about public pressure for retaliation is not unique to cyber-conflict. All acts of violence generate psychopolitical reactions. Still, there are reasons to expect that the process by which public opinion influences foreign policy decision-making may play out differently in the cyber realm. First, cyber- threats prompt outsize public panic relative to their actual destructive potential. The exaggerated public fear in the aftermath of cyberattacks is likely to pressure political elites who would otherwise be willing to dismiss many such attacks as de-escalatory behavior (Valeriano and Jensen 2022). Second, cyber-threats are still novel phenomena, and there is a lack of inter- and intra-national consensus about how to respond to such attacks. The lack of policy agreement provides greater room for public input, with elites becoming more willing to follow popular views in these cases (Kreps 2010; Kreps and Das 2017).