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
Jayita Sarkar is an Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom in 2021–2022 and an Assistant Professor at Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies, where she is also the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. From July 2022, Dr. Sarkar will be Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
Her first book, Ploughshares and Swords. India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) examines the first forty years of India's nuclear program through the prisms of technopolitics and geopolitics.
Dr. Sarkar's specialization is in global South Asia, connected partitions, global histories of capitalism, and nuclear technologies. Her prize-winning research has been published in the International History Review, Journal of Cold War Studies, Cold War History, and elsewhere.
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