Cyber Operations and Nuclear Stability: Networked Instability?

Abstract: The digital transformation of nuclear forces made modern nuclear forces more effective but potentially introduced strategic cyber vulnerabilities. Despite warnings about the cyber threats to nuclear stability, our understandings of when and why cyber operations create nuclear instability are rife with contradictory suppositions. Does entanglement create interdependence that stabilizes crisis dyads, or destabilizing pathways to inadvertent nuclear war? Do uncertainties about cyber vulnerabilities within nuclear command, control, and communications lead to a security dilemma that incentivizes preemptive nuclear use? Or does the uncertainty about how cyber operations create effects and vulnerabilities create incentives for restraint? This paper argues that current literature overlooks a foundational element of cyber and strategic stability: how the structure of networks determines the feasibility and effectiveness of cyber operations. By shifting the focus toward the intersection of network architecture and nuclear use, this piece argues that highly centralized information-processing or command nodes, which increase a network’s efficiency, can create incentives for deliberate nuclear escalation. Second, entanglement and network complexity increase the potential for inadvertent escalation or accidental nuclear use. Third, cyberattacks that exploit trust in data to degrade decision-making are the most dangerous for escalation risk.