David Sanger The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age (Scribe, Melbourne and London, 2018)
The DVD cover for Alex Gibney’s riveting documentary Zero Days features a picture of a computer screen with a mushroom cloud rising high into the air and the caption World War 3.0. The cover of the September/October 2018 of Foreign Affairs carries the title World War Web: The Fight for the Internet’s Future, accompanied by the image of a menu of Wi-Fi options in different languages. David Sanger’s new book simply has a massive stream of zeros and ones as a background to its title. Welcome to the real/virtual world of our time.
At the very beginning of the Cold War, nuclear weapons were seen as changing the strategic landscape in ominous and complex ways. David Sanger has written a gripping analysis of the rise and disturbing potential of cyber weapons, which must sit up there with Brodie’s classic work The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (1946), as a red alert regarding the disruptive potential of a radically new class of weapons. Or, since Sanger himself would probably see this as excessive praise, at least as lucid call for a work of strategic thought at that level.
The overlap is that Brodie was seeking to draw attention to how radical a change nuclear weapons were in strategic affairs and Sanger is attempting to do the same for cyber weapons. In 1946, there were no agreed rules of nuclear deterrence and there was a delusion in certain high circles in the United States that it could monopolize nuclear weapons to impose a liberal world order in the wake of the Second World War. Ray Monk’s biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer Inside the Centre (2012) is probably still the best exploration of the atmosphere at that time.
Sanger’s core message is that something like this attitude appears to have prevailed for years now in the United States regarding cyber weapons, with the consequence that we have nothing approaching agreed international covenants on the use of such weapons or how to constrain their use in such a way as to avoid uncontrolled escalation. As Alex Gibney pointed out in his documentary, the use of the ingenious Stuxnet virus by the United States and Israel to try to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program was reasonably close to Harry Truman’s decision to use atomic bombs to compel Japan’s surrender in August 1945.The pressing question is now: What next?
Sanger a veteran reporter for the New York Times on national and international security affairs and a lecturer on those subjects at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (2012). That book touched on ‘Olympic Games’, the code name for the Stuxnet project, as well as a number of the other areas that he returns to in The Perfect Weapon, such as the challenges presented by China and North Korea. Like any good teacher, he keeps learning and updating his brief.
But perhaps the best conceptual complement to Sanger’s new book is another book published in 2012: P. W. Singer’s Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. Between them, these books offer the concerned citizen a first rate primer on the technological developments that transforming conflict and generating a whole range of new worries to keep us all on edge and worried about the human prospect. Indeed, Peter Warren Singer – a brilliant graduate of the top Ivy League universities, born only in 1974 - is ahead of the curve on cyber affairs and the weaponization of social media. So run with both: Sanger and Singer.
The greatest virtue of Sanger’s writing is that it is clear headed and morally grounded, not in any way breathless or apocalyptic. He builds on Fred Kaplan’s splendid introduction to the subject, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (2016) and his core concern is precisely the tight secrecy of the programs generating and utilizing these new weapons. He writes, early in the book:
Naturally secretive, intelligence officials and their military counterparts refuse to discuss the scope of America’s cyber capabilities for fear of diminishing whatever narrow advantage the country retains over its adversaries.
And its adversaries, from Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China to Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, are actively using cyber weapons and honing them for wider and more aggressive use. Sanger does his best to explain for us all what is happening and to point out how urgent a more open debate is to bringing the cyber arms race under some kind of control before it gets out of hand.
His most striking observation about where this could all go is an analogy with the emergence of airpower in the First World War. As he points out, in 1913 there were fourteen military airplanes manufactured in the United States. In 1918, with the US in the war, fourteen thousand were manufactured. Here is our problem: it is already the case that no contemporary military can afford to be without cyber weapons, ‘just as no nation could imagine, after 1918, living without airpower.’
By 1945, airpower had led to strategic fire-bombing in thousand bomber raids, nuclear bombing and the beginnings of ballistic missile building. We are now at roughly the 1918 position with cyber weapons. Sanger’s concern is that we are hurtling towards the equivalent of the 1940s in this field. In 2017, Sanger visited Henry Kissinger in Connecticut and asked that doyen of 1950s nuclear strategy what he made of the new developments. Cyber warfare, the 94 year old Kissinger responded, is far more complex than nuclear strategy – ‘and over the long term it may be far more dangerous.’ That’s why you should read The Perfect Weapon and come to grips with what’s happening – not least if you work in a policy, intelligence or military line position.