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.”
Speaker: Ji Yeon-jung, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom
This seminar will examine India’s strategy, agenda setting, and coalition-building to gain membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) as well as India’s broad efforts to build a reputation as a major stakeholder in the nuclear nonproliferation regime as a de facto nuclear weapons state. For the last two decades, India has been steadily working to gain international acceptance of its de facto nuclear status. Following the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008, India concluded eleven civil nuclear agreements creating an unofficial forum for India’s bid for membership in the NSG. Although India’s setback to its NSG bid at the Vienna meeting in November 2016 highlighted the challenges that India must continue to address, Ji Yeon-jung will argue that the number of achievements and engagements that New Delhi addressed in the past few years explicitly demonstrates India’s transitional status in the changing global nuclear order.
Ji Yeon-jung is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She researches India's nuclear policy and program and nuclear proliferation in South Asia. Ji was a visiting fellow at the Center for Air Power Studies, New Delhi (2011-2014), at the Institute of Indian Studies, Seoul (2014-2015), and at the Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses, New Delhi (2015). Prior to her Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowship, she taught courses on nuclear proliferation and India's foreign policy at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India.
