Nuclear Lessons for Cyber Security

Abstract

Identifying "revolutions in military affairs" is arbitrary, but some inflection points in technological change are larger than others: for example, the gunpowder revolution in early modern Europe, the industrial revolu tion of the nineteenth century, the second industrial revolution of the early twentieth century, and the nuclear revolution in the middle of the last century. 1 In this century, we can add the information revolution that has produced today's extremely rapid growth of cyberspace.Earlier revolu tions in information technology, such as Gutenberg's printing press, also had profound political effects, but the current revolution can be traced to Moore's law and the thousand-fold decrease in the costs of computing power that occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century.Political leaders and analysts are only beginning to come to terms with this transformative technology.Until now, the issue of cyber security has largely been the domain of computer experts and specialists.When the Internet was created 40 years ago, this small community was like a vir tual village of people who knew each other, and they designed an open system with little attention to security.While the Internet is not new, the commercial Web is less than two decades old, and it has exploded from a few million users in the early 1990s to some two billion users today.This burgeoning interdependence has created great opportunities and great vulnerabilities, which strategists do not yet fully comprehend.As Gen Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA says, "Rarely has something been so important and so talked about with less clarity and less apparent understanding [than cyber security]. . . .I have sat in very small group meetings in Washington . . .unable (along with my colleagues) to decide on a course of action because we lacked a clear picture of the long-term legal and policy implications of any decision we might make."

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