Belfer Center Senior Fellow David E. Sanger examines the latest news on the scope and scale of Russian cyberwarfare.

Belfer senior fellow and National Security Correspondent David E. Sanger discusses the wide disconnect between President Trump and U.S. intelligence during the Helsinki summit.

In the first generation of the online revolution, the question would have seemed absurd. In his new book The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age, Belfer Center Senior Fellow David Sanger addresses why that question has become less outlandish.

For 70 years, the thinking inside the Pentagon was that only nations with nuclear weapons could threaten America’s existence. But that assumption is now in doubt: in a world in which almost everything is interconnected – phones, cars, electrical grids, and satellites – everything can be disrupted, if not destroyed. In THE PERFECT WEAPON, Belfer Center Senior Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy David Sanger, the New York Times national security correspondent, details how this new revolution, being conducted largely in secret, is reshaping global power.

The Pentagon has quietly empowered the United States Cyber Command to take a far more aggressive approach to defending the nation against cyberattacks, a shift in strategy that could increase the risk of conflict with the foreign states that sponsor malicious hacking groups.

More than 30 high-tech companies, led by Microsoft and Facebook, announced a set of principles on Tuesday that included a declaration that they would not help any government — including that of the United States — mount cyberattacks against “innocent civilians and enterprises from anywhere,” reflecting Silicon Valley’s effort to separate itself from government cyberwarfare.

A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.

Although cyber weapons can usually be employed in a far less lethal manner than guided missiles shot from a drone, they have been deployed less frequently and under rules of engagement that are far less clear, at least to the public.

What started out as a counterintelligence investigation to guard the United States against a hostile foreign power has morphed into a political scandal about what Mr. Trump did, what he said and what he meant by it. 

Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and former Harvard Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye was honored  by the Center’s Cyber Security Project in April for his leadership and contributions to cybersecurity through the Belfer Center’s cybersecurity initiatives. Nye has announced his retirement at the end of the semester.