What’s the biggest single danger facing America today? According to recent national intelligence assessments, it’s not terrorism or nuclear weapons but cyberthreats. David E. Sanger of the New York Times has broken some big stories in this area. For one, he revealed Olympic Games, the code name for the most sophisticated cyberattack in history, the American-Israeli effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program with the Stuxnet worm. And with his Times colleague Bill Broad, he described, in 2017, a different cyber effort to neutralize North Korea’s missiles. In The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age (Crown, $28), Sanger explores the growing threat and use of cyberwarfare, the full dimension of which goes well beyond Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election in 2016. As Sanger notes, cyber capabilities now stand to transform military and geopolitical thinking and strategy as much or more than the advent of nuclear weapons did in the 20th century.
