Books

This article presents both the fundamental changes that have taken place in Israel's strategic environment, from conventional, state-based threats to primarily asymmetrical ones, and the responses it has developed to date. It also addresses Israel's relations with the United States and other primary international actors, as well as Israel's nuclear and regional arms control policy.

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.

Belfer Center Senior Fellow James R. Clapper offers a candid and compelling account of the intelligence community’s successes—and failures—in facing some of the greatest threats to America.

Scholars have considered many analogies for cyber capabilities, grappling with how these capabilities may shape the future of conflict. One recurring theme in this literature is the comparison of cyber capabilities to powerful, strategic capabilities with the potential to cause significant death and destruction.

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.

Understanding Cyber Conflict draws lessons from past technological disruptions to inform and shape responses to today’s cyber challenges.

This chapter looks at the emergence of nuclear technology and considers whether the trajectories and time lines of the adaptation to nuclear technology have any resonance with the cyber issue.

Why do nations break into one another's most important computer networks? There is an obvious answer: to steal valuable information or to attack. But this isn't the full story. This book draws on often-overlooked documents leaked by Edward Snowden, real-world case studies of cyber operations, and policymaker perspectives to show that intruding into other countries' networks has enormous defensive value as well.