Want to win a nuclear war? Build better hackers, not better bombs
IN THE LONG VIEW OF HISTORY, North Korea getting a nuclear-tipped intercontinental missile in 2017 is the rough equivalent of an army showing up for World War II riding horses and shooting muskets.
Nukes are so last century. War is changing, driven by cyber weapons, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots. Weapons of mass destruction are dumb, soon to be whipped by smart weapons of pinpoint disruption— which nations can use without risking annihilation of the human race.
If the U.S. is innovative and forward-thinking, it can develop technology that ensures no ill-behaving government could ever get a nuke off the ground. Then we might be able to relax and return to laughing at Kim Jong Un for looking like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man topped by a small furry mammal.
This is the argument in a new book, Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules of War, by international law professors John Yoo (University of California, Berkeley) and Jeremy Rabkin (George Mason University). Their book connects war and nuclear weapons to a profound shift in the way the world works. We’re moving away from an era of mass production, mass media and mass markets, and into an era when products, media, markets and everything else are hyper-targeted and highly personalized. I’ve been researching that broad shift for a book that comes out in March, and it makes sense that it applies to war too.
This story is from the October 06 2017 edition of Newsweek.
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This story is from the October 06 2017 edition of Newsweek.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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