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
Behnam Taebi is an associate professor of philosophy at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) and a Project on Managing the Atom associate with the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
His research interests are in energy ethics, nuclear ethics, and responsible innovation. He studied Material Science and Engineering (2006) and received his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Technology (2010). Taebi is currently working on a project on the ethics and governance of multinational nuclear waste repositories (with a personal grant awarded by the Dutch Research Council). He is the coordinating editor of a volume on The Ethics of Nuclear Energy (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and a special issue of Journal of Risk Research (2015) on "Socio-Technical Challenges of Nuclear Power Production" and is currently writing a monograph on Ethics and Engineering (under contract with Cambridge University Press). Taebi is a member (2016–2021) of The Young Academy, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Last Updated: Sep 18, 2020, 5:08pmAwards
Contact
Email: behnam_taebi@hks.harvard.edu