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.”
Fiona Cunningham is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She will join the Cyber Security Project at the Belfer Center as a predoctoral fellow in 2017-8. Her dissertation project explains state choices of military strategy in the nuclear, space, and cyber domains, with an empirical focus on China. Her research on China's nuclear strategy has been published quarterly journal, International Security. In 2015-6 she was a dissertation research fellow in the School of International Studies at the Renmin University of China, Beijing. Fiona holds a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and International Relations from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Sydney, both with first class honors. Before commencing her doctoral studies, she was a research associate in nuclear policy at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. She speaks Mandarin Chinese and French.