6 days ago
DZ Season 039 Part 02. World War III. Cyber World War III. Final Part.
The 20th Century, from about 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb, made using stolen intellectual property from the American Manhattan Project, with the help of some of the scientists who worked on that project and were spies for the Soviet Union, until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, the world lived in fear of a nuclear holocaust. This fear was not based on theoretical scientific models, not based on dubious assumptions, like climate change, this was based on the real fact that the it was known that the number of nuclear warheads in the world, if they were all used at the one time, would wipe out every human on the planet many times over – although as the title to the 1967 Jams Bond movie tells us, that would be more than enough because “You Only Live Twice”.
In my last programme I talked about nuclear war and how the world changed because of it. But since the 1980s, when the IBM Peanut was first launched into the world, the first desktop computer mass produced by a major company, the software powering those computers has gotten smarter and smarter, now coupled with the internet and cloud computing etc. Today we depend on them for almost everything. Which means that if you can attack key computers, you can come really close to winning a war without needing to use too much weaponry, and certainly not nuclear weapons. Although there’s a catch there that still make nuclear weapons something you have to take into the equation if you’re fancying trying to win a cyber war.
So how would a Third World Cyber War play out? Until it’s fought no one’s going to know. World War I and World War II weren’t anything like the experts had predicted.
One possible answer to that question is found in the fictional account of how a cyber war could run written by two cyber warfare experts.
One of the hottest selling books amongst the top level people at the Pentagon since 2016 has been “Ghost Fleet” written by PW Singer and August Cole. They’re both experts in cyber warfare and consultants to the US government and military at the very highest levels. So when they imagined a cyber World War III, it is worth everyone’s time to sit up and take notice and to consider the way that such a war could be fought, based on their expertise.
Some of the things that happen in the book seem incredible, seem like it has to be a work of the wildest science fiction, but it’s not. Every trend and technology discussed in the book is real – and it either already exists or is being developed right now.
So let me share with you how Singer and Cole see World War III happening. Some glimpses from their novel. If you’re really interested, get the book.
The Chinese are the bad guys and they’re called the Directorate – you need to read the book to understand why.
Tag words: Soviet Union; atomic bomb; Manhattan Project; IBM Peanut; Ghost Fleet; PW Singer; August Cole; the Directorate; COIL; Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser; Chinese Communist Party; CCP; F-35 Raptor stealth fighter; micro-chips; KC-135; Davis-Monthan Air Force; Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles; ICBMs; Clive James;