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.”
Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes examines the arms race during the final years of the Cold War and the Reagan-Gorbachev decade from memoirs, interviews, and newly released information in a third volume of nuclear history, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.