Nuclear‐ and missile‐related trade and developments for selected countries,July‐October 1997

The material in this overview is drawn from selected abstracts that appear in the Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ nuclear and missile databases. Transactions of nuclear and missile technologies, parts, and materials are listed according o the recipient country. Other developments are listed according to the country where the event or development took place.     

THE MORAL PERMISSIBILITY OF AUTOMATED RESPONSES DURING CYBERWARFARE

Automated responses are an inevitable aspect of cyberwarfare, but there has not been a systematic treatment of the conditions in which they are morally permissible. We argue that there are three substantial barriers to the moral permissibility of an automated response: the attribution, chain reaction, and projection bias problems. Moreover, these three challenges together provide a set of operational tests that can be used to assess the moral permissibility of a particular automated response in a specific situation. Defensive automated responses will almost always pass all three challenges, while offensive automated responses typically face a substantial positive burden in order to overcome the chain reaction and projection bias challenges. Perhaps the most interesting cases arise in the middle ground between cyber-offense and cyber-defense, such as automated cyber-exploitation responses. In those situations, much depends on the finer details of the response, the context, and the adversary. Importantly, however, the operationalizations of the three challenges provide a clear guide for decision-makers to assess the moral permissibility of automated responses that could potentially be implemented.