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.”
Biography
Leore Ben-Chorin was a Research Assistant at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She studies U.S. foreign policy and security issues, with a focus on Iran, Israel, and the broader Middle East.
Prior to joining the Belfer Center, Leore was a Herbert Scoville Peace Fellow at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. where she worked with Robert Einhorn and Steven Pifer in the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative. Previously, she was a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in St. Louis. She holds a B.A. in Political Science with an emphasis on International Relations from the University of California, Berkeley.