Cyber-politics meets the statecraft game

Abstract

Scholars and military planners in most countries around the globe have long imagined cyberattacks as a kind of digital equivalent to nuclear war: devastating but rare. Remember the 1983 movie WarGames that showcased bringing the world to a nuclear Armageddon (in those days this was cyber fiction) by hacking into military computers. Such was the amplified impact (definitely for the cautionary good) of this movie on the then US government that five presidents, starting with Reagan, set up never ending string of Washington blue-ribbon commissions to address the specter of digital destruction by nation states (e.g., Russia, China, North Korea). Apart from US, the existence of such commissions are also commonplace in many other countries today to detect, deter, and mitigate the impact of cyber-threats from political competitors.