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.”
Dr. Abbas Milani is author of The Shah, a biography of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlevi that provides a revisionist account of the roots of the Iranian revolution and a detailed account of US relations with the Shah based on new archival material.
Abbas Milani is an Iranian-American historian and Iranologist. He is a visiting professor of Political Science, and the director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. He is also a research fellow and codirector of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.
This event will be followed by a book signing at the Harvard COOP at 7pm.