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
Nobuyasu Abe is an Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom. He was a senior fellow from 2018-2019. His areas of interest include nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation, and civilian use of nuclear energy. Abe is a former UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs and a former Commissioner of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission. He recently wrote on a Japanese perspective on the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty in Global Change, Peace & Security and on Japan’s dilemma over nuclear "No First Use" in the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. He earned his B.A. from Amherst College.
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Contact
Email: nobuyasu_abe@hks.harvard.edu
Phone: 617-495-1605
Mailing Address:
79 JFK Street
Box 134
Cambridge, Massachusetts