Once, Superpower Summits Were About Nukes. Now, It’s Cyberweapons. By David E. Sanger Published June 15, 2021Updated June 16, 2021, 5:56 a.m. ET
GENEVA — For 70 years, meetings between American presidents and Soviet or Russian leaders were dominated by one looming threat: the vast nuclear arsenals that the two nations started amassing in the 1940s, as instruments of intimidation and, if deterrence failed, mutual annihilation. Now, as President Biden prepares to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin here in Geneva on Wednesday, for the first time cyberweapons are being elevated to the top of the agenda. The shift has been brewing for a decade, as Russia and the United States, the two most skilled adversaries in the cyberarena, have each turned to a growing arsenal of techniques in what has become a daily, low-level conflict. But at summit meetings, that sort of jousting was usually treated as a sideshow to the main superpower competition. No more. The rising tempo and sophistication of recent attacks on American infrastructure — from gasoline pipelines running up the East Coast, to plants providing a quarter of America’s beef, to the operations of hospitals and the internet itself — has revealed a set of vulnerabilities no president can ignore. For Mr. Biden, nuclear weapons still matter, and his aides say the two men will spend a good amount of time debating “strategic stability,” shorthand for containing nuclear escalation. But the more immediate task, Mr. Biden told his allies at a Group of 7 summit meeting in Cornwall, England, last week and a NATO meeting in Brussels, is to convince Mr. Putin he will pay a high price for playing the master of digital disruption. It will not be easy. If a decade of intensifying cyberconflict has taught anything, it is that the traditional tools of deterrence have largely failed. And while Mr. Putin loves to boast about his huge investments in new, nuclear torpedoes and hypersonic weapons, he also knows he cannot use them. His arsenal of cyberweapons, in contrast, is put to work every day. Mr. Biden has made clear that he intends to give Mr. Putin a choice: Cease the attacks, and crack down on the cybercriminals operating from Russian territory, or face a rising set of economic costs and what Mr. Biden calls a set of moves by the United States to “respond in kind.” But on Sunday, while still at the Group of 7 summit in Cornwall, he acknowledged that Mr. Putin may well ignore him. < - > https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/world/europe/biden-putin-cyberweapons.html -- Iw mailing list [email protected] http://sticklist.org/mailman/listinfo/iw_sticklist.org
