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
Alex Clark is an Associate and former Predoctoral Research Fellow with the Belfer Center's Environment and Natural Resources Program and Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program. He is a PhD researcher at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, where his research focuses on the identification and transmission of fossil-fuel related economic risks in the public sector, and how governments and their agents should respond to these risks, with a focus on China. Clark supports Oxford's engagement with Chinese academic and governmental institutions through the Economics of Energy Innovation and Systems Transition (EEIST) project. Clark is a Global China Initiative Fellow at Boston University, a former Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and Europaeum Scholar, and in 2021 was a Summer Programme fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
Clark has also worked as a consultant to the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI). He holds an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from Oxford University, and is a former holder of the Henry Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he focused on energy geopolitics and policy, electric mobility and international law.