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.”
Radoslaw (Radek) Sikorski is a Fisher Family Fellow (in residence in April 2018). His is a Distinguished Statesman at the CSIS and a Senior Advisor at the Eurasia Group. He was previously a senior figure in Polish politics, serving as speaker of Poland’s lower house, as foreign minister in Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s cabinet from (2007 - 2014) and as defense minister in (2005 – 2007). He also held earlier positions in government, including as deputy minister of national defense in 1992 and as deputy minister of foreign affairs from 1998-2001. With Carl Bildt, the former Prime Minister of Sweden, he is seen as one of the principle architects of the EU Eastern Partnership Policy. In his early career, Sikorski was a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola.
Lord Peter Ricketts is a Fisher Family Fellow (in residence in April 2018) and a life peer in the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. Ricketts has spent 40 years as a member of the diplomatic service. His final post was as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to France from 2012 until 2016. Ricketts served as the United Kingdom’s first national security adviser from 2010 until 2012, and in that role was the coordinator of the 2010 National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review.