Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cyberwar is routinely over-hyped as a substitute weapon of mass destruction. More typically, cyber operations work as complements to power in other domains, generally limiting the aggressive potential of cyberspace on its own. However, there are situations where complementarity can undermine the stability of other domains in the most dramatic fashion. We examine the unusual contingency of a nuclear brinksmanship crisis in which offensive cyber operations (OCO) against nuclear weapons and/or their command, control, and communications (NC3) undermine deterrence and make war more likely. Nuclear nations have traditionally been free to display their nuclear capabilities openly — often in contrast to other forms of military power — given the lack of effective countermeasures to nuclear attack and its obvious destructiveness. Nuclear transparency in turn makes it easier to judge the balance of power, reducing the danger of misperception and war. Military advantages achieved in cyberspace typically cannot be disclosed without compromising their military effectiveness. Because of this commitment problem, OCO are best used rather than threatened. Unfortunately, the same warfighting advantages of NC3 OCO become dangerous liabilities for deterrence. Variation in operational capacity to conduct, detect, and mitigate NC3 OCO can be expected to make brinksmanship crises more or less unstable, should they occur. Increased uncertainty about the true balance of power will tend to undermine both nuclear and conventional stability. Policy measures must look to improve rather than degrade nuclear transparency.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".