Original subtitles

We have spent more than $2 billion on the greatest

scientific gamble in history, and we have won.

But the greatest marvel is not the size of the enterprise,

its secrecy, or its cost, but the achievement

of scientific brains in making it work.

And hardly less marvelous has been the capacity of industry

to design and of labor to operate the machines

and methods to do things never done before.

The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed

against those who brought war to the Far East.

It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.

It is an atomic bomb.

What has been done is the greatest achievement

of organized science in history.

It has the ability to cripple whole sectors of society.

The destructive capabilities are enormous.

It was the advent of weapons of mass destruction

and the opening of a Pandora's box

to which no one had predicted.

In the 20th century, humanity developed a weapon

capable of destroying humanity itself.

With literally everything at stake, this weapon of mass

destruction suddenly made war unwinnable.

One of the key objectives of war is to destroy an enemy's

will to fight, to undermine their psychological desire

to defend themselves or to attack you.

So throughout World War II, we saw a lot of

micro advancements in weapon systems and technologies,

but the breakthrough in nuclear technology was the key

game changer in that conflict.

Fission is the process when the nucleus

of an atom is split in two smaller nuclei,

releasing a large amount of energy in the process.

And that was significantly more impactful

than conventional weapons at the time.

It was discovered in Berlin in December of 1938 and caused

some alarm given the actions of the burgeoning Nazi state.

The Reich basically began to expand throughout Europe,

and one of the things they were trying to do is they were

trying to grab resources, both human capital,

but also resources that would potentially feed

into their nuclear or atomic program.

By the end of the war, the Germans were far

from delivering a nuclear weapon.

But that didn't halt the drive to nuclear fission, with both

the Allies and the Soviets actively recruiting physicists

to bring their knowledge into their ongoing programs,

including the now infamous Manhattan Project.

The Manhattan Project was the effort that was led

primarily by the US, the Brits, and the Canadians.

It was a collaboration between government, academia,

and the private sector to develop true disruptive

technologies that gave the Allied side a demonstrable

advantage when it came to a nuclear capability.

American physicist Jules Robert Oppenheimer was

nominated to direct the program in Los Alamos, New Mexico,

where on July 16, 1945,

they would conduct the Trinity Test,

when an atomic bomb was detonated for the first time.

The original military objective in developing the atomic bomb

was to drop weapons in Germany, to show the German population,

whose ardent belief was to never surrender,

that they could not win against the Allies.

Yet the Germans were defeated

before the atomic bomb became real.

However, the eastern theater

was still very much active, and the quasi-religious

Japanese fervor in their emperor's divine right

to govern meant that they would never surrender.

US President Harry S. Truman

decided that an atomic detonation was a risk

worth taking.

So the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

were the unfortunate recipients

of not one, but two atomic bombs.

With this bomb we have now added

a new and revolutionary increase in destruction.

And the world-shaking explosions of the atomic bomb.

On August 6th, 1945, the atomic bomb, Little Boy,

was dropped on Hiroshima.

70% of the buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed.

And over 40% of the population was killed.

That's over 80,000 people.

Three days later, in Nagasaki, a city that held four major

wartime industries, the US dropped the bomb

"Fat Man", containing 6.2 kilograms of plutonium

and a 21-kiloton yield.

The initial explosion

and its aftermath claimed the lives

of up to 40,000 people,

with the toll climbing to up to 80,000

over the next few months.

I now invite the representatives

of the Emperor of Japan.

The Japanese delegation lines up on the opposite side

of the surrender table from the Allied.

Two bombs.

Hundreds of thousands of casualties,

mostly civilians.

This was the new face of war.

But many wondered, was this the end of it...

or just the beginning?

Before that fateful day in August 1945,

humankind's ability to inflict mortal damage was always

relatively limited and predictable.

But the atomic bomb changed all that.

Nobody knew just how powerful it could be.

One nuclear bomb can destroy a city.

Several nuclear bombs can destroy the world.

The moment nuclear weapons arrived,

every other weapon became conventional.

The effects are so devastating on a populace

that their deployment is both a moral and strategic question.

They are usually used only as a last resort.

And we really have to take into account the toll

on human lives and the generational effects.

Official state that the US knows

of 24 Soviet rocket bases

prevent the delivery to Cuba of any further

offensive military equipment.

What are the Russians able to do if they want to?

With the need for additional offsetting

United States action, in order to preserve

the sufficiency of our strategic forces.

While no weapon had ever been invented

that hadn't eventually been deployed,

the consequences of nuclear weapons made war unthinkable.

So much of the 20th century was spent reshaping

the rules of conflict.

The alternative to nuclear annihilation became...

more nuclear weapons.

The Cold War wasn't actually, properly speaking,

a war insofar as it never turned hot,

and there were no military confrontations

between the Soviet Union and the United States.

There was an enormous competition,

an ideological competition,

an economic competition,

and, of course, a military competition.

There was an arms race.

But the two superpowers never confronted each other

on the battlefield, at least not directly.

The reason we never actually got into a hot war

or a nuclear war with the Soviets during the Cold War

was this concept of Mutually Assured Destruction.

This primarily referred to a system where both countries

held nuclear arsenals capable of wiping each other out.

If either launched an attack, the other would have the time

to counter launch missiles of its own, so that both sides

would be killed while watching the other die.

Hardly a traditional military victory.

It was deterrence on a grand scale.

"Mutually assured deterrence,

based on Mutually Assured Destruction,"

a phrase coined by Donald Brennan,

a strategist in 1962.

This theory of deterrence has largely been validated through

the fact simply that no one launched nuclear weapons

against each other throughout those 70 years of the Cold War.

Russian ships came out from Cuban ports

with their decks loaded with missiles.

The Soviets are withdrawing under pressure

from the New World.

That confrontation is now over.

The nuclear threat, while far from gone, is receding.

Once someone starts this spiral of violence, it's hard to stop.

President Clinton and President Yeltsin

made a historic joint announcement.

We have de-targeted all of our strategic nuclear missiles

for the first time in almost 35 years.

At the end of the Cold War,

there was an emphasis on making sure that smaller states

that had broken away did not get a hold of nuclear weapons.

There are around 13,000 nuclear weapons

that are still stockpiled in the world.

The overwhelming majority is controlled

by the United States and Russia.

Those have roughly 10,000 warheads between them.

The remainder are spread through at least six countries.

China has somewhere around 400.

France and the UK have almost 300,

or 260 in the UK's case.

Pakistan and India have their own arms race

between them, with over 150 weapons each.

And North Korea is believed to have

at least 20 nuclear weapons.

Israel is known or expected to have nuclear weapons,

but its government has never confirmed this.

A military advantage of using a WMD in warfare is that it

could quickly bring that conflict to its culmination.

In all calculations,

that, in the end, saves in total number of lives lost.

The destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons are enormous.

At the same time, when one looks at the Second World War,

half a million Germans were killed by Allied bombings.

And even in Japan, where two nuclear weapons were dropped

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

more Japanese died in other cities,

namely in fire bombings.

In the end, similar results can be achieved

by conventional weapons.

But the disadvantages of using WMD are pretty scary.

If you let a WMD fall into the wrong hands, well,

hey, you only have to look at North Korea.

Other disadvantages of WMDs are that they have

a large area of effect and they're indiscriminate.

If I were to use a nuclear bomb in a certain place,

it would kill everyone there.

Arguably, the most impactful second order effect

of nuclear weapons has been the long-term implication

of radiological impacts.

The ideas is that how these weapons have reached

into the soil, into the water ducts, and have infected

and imbued our food, our nutrition, our water

with infections

that last beyond generations, beyond borders,

into people that haven't been born yet.

What really distinguishes nuclear weapons actually is

that they have been designed to not be used.

So far, nuclear weapons have been used only twice

in history, and we all hope it's not going to happen again.

The whole idea of nuclear deterrence is based on the idea

that nuclear weapons aren't actually being used.

The first treaty ever that actually eliminated an entire

class of US and Soviet nuclear missiles.

When it was clear that nuclear weapons

were morally, politically, and logistically

a zero-sum game,

a new super weapon was needed.

The world had changed, and with change came

new vulnerabilities to exploit.

Since World War II, we have generally sought ways

to develop weapons that were less destructive,

but still able to deliver that knockout blow.

Since the end of the Cold War, the nuclear threat

hasn't really captured the imagination

of the public anymore.

The world had moved on, technology boomed,

the information age developed,

that proliferated throughout societies,

and offered new opportunities.

With the emergence of computer, and most importantly

the internet, a new area of warfare emerged,

namely cyber warfare.

Now, it was information and its denial that began

to attract investment, exploiting society's dependence

on a digitized, connected world, which could be

exploited to undermine society's will to fight future battles,

even possibly without human loss.

Not only are we increasingly connected to our devices,

but those devices have connected us

to virtually everyone.

When we talk about cyborg theory or the belief that

humans will continue to become increasingly dependent

on their technology,

the fact is, it's already here.

All of us are connected to our phones and other devices

in ways we never envisioned.

Most of us could not do without them,

even for a short period of time.

Everything has been connected at this point,

and if this gets knocked out

or destroyed, our society might be pushed back

into the pre-electric era.

And this might, in the end, kill more people

than any conventional military attack could.

The definition of weapons of mass destruction

is certainly changing today.

Previously, we've thought about this as destroying,

of killing enemies.

Today, it feels more about influencing the will,

dealing with a knockout blow to society.

At the heart of the drive to cyber warfare is a desire

to disrupt a society to such an extent that it focuses

inwardly on overcoming internal or perceived threats

rather than responding to an adversary's moves itself.

Our dependence on, and connection to these devices

really enable any small group or lone actor to take an act

that impacts us and interferes with those systems,

and they can cause devastating effect

It's like one man has

the ability to wage large scale warfare, and so the ethics now

are like, "Well, how do you stop that?"

In my opinion, you cannot stop it.

Government computers hacked again.

Information of at least four million

government workers, stolen.

An encrypted database storing user passwords has been hacked.

Investigators say many personal computers have been infected

with the virus program.

This could provide a roadmap to other sensitive

environments and data that they're going after.

In the cyber age, the battleground has pivoted

away from physical destruction, toward unleashing social

and economic chaos by choking off or corrupting the data

we all depend on.

So, at this point, there are basically

five domains of warfare,

three of which are rather old.

Land warfare, which has existed

since the beginning of humankind.

Sea warfare, which has also been around for a long time.

Aerial warfare really came about

during the Second World War or just before that.

Space has become the fourth domain

with satellites and space-based weapons.

More recently, a fifth domain of warfare has emerged,

the cyber realm.

You could argue that cyberspace isn't real, yet the effects

and consequences of an attack in cyberspace or the use

of a cyber weapon can certainly be felt

in the real physical world.

Hackers overwhelm a computer network

by flooding it with traffic.

Among those websites affected, the Treasury Department

and the Secret Service.

Pentagon and New York Stock Exchange.

There are flaws in the tools that we all rely on.

Anyone with a cell phone or internet account knows

that cyberattacks are committed almost daily.

What if a wide scale attack were launched

by a hostile government with large resources?

What happens when cyberattacks

evolve into full scale cyber war?

Just imagine this scenario.

Experts say it's too soon to know just who was behind it.

One says it could be a sign of what's to come.

You're in the office.

The first thing you'd notice was your internet

started to slow.

The time on your computer didn't reflect the real time.

Webpages would stop uploading and updating.

You might then try and pick up your mobile phone,

but it doesn't link to local networks because the navigation

and timing sequences that it relies on

have all been disrupted and destroyed.

Your link to the world, your phone, isn't working.

Getting a bit frustrated now, you might go to the TV

to find out what's happening, but those signals

would no longer be received, because terrestrial broadcast

is now fully digital and relies on timing and connectivity,

things that can be attacked and unpicked by cyber.

Panicking a little now, you might switch on the radio,

but radios, again, are digital, and those are also lost

in this attack.

With no connection to the world around you,

you try and get home.

There are different types of cyberattacks,

criminal attacks,

cyber espionage,

sabotage,

and then also the use of cyber

for psychological operations.

Cyber espionage is when an actor breaks into a system

and gathers a lot of information,

sometimes over weeks, and months and years.

Cyber espionage involves spear phishing

or botnets to compromise

security systems and steal secrets

and other sensitive information.

The Chinese have specialized in this recently,

stealing American designs for sophisticated aircrafting

technology and replicating them.

Cyber sabotage means that you infiltrate the system,

there are different ways to do that, and basically destroy

or sabotage the system from within.

This is the first worm designed to damage the physical world,

and critical infrastructure in particular.

Perhaps the most famous is the Stuxnet virus attack

on the Iranian nuclear program,

infecting their systems, making their centrifuges spin

beyond tolerance and affecting the constituent components,

rendering the weapons unusable.

It's a clever, witty, devastating attack,

and all done without the loss of life.

One aspect is economic cyberattacks.

Basically, what that means is an attack on an institution,

usually a bank or a business or a payment system,

that's meant to either pilfer money, freeze accounts,

or prevent people from being able to transact,

and in essence, basically shutting down an economy.

Our everyday technology has made each one of us

a potential soldier on a cyber battlefield.

And when the cyber war begins, we can all become casualties.

Cars have stopped moving. Everything is gridlocked.

People are crashing. Drivers are arguing.

As you try to get down to the metro station,

you realize that the metro had stopped running.

There are no signals, no power. People can't get in and out.

You try to withdraw some cash, but all the ATMs are down.

There's now widespread disbelief that everything

could slow down and stop.

And eventually, you might make your way home,

having walked for miles through this devastation of people

just not knowing what really was happening.

So what you're starting to see is basically the collision

of cyber warfare and conventional warfare.

As more and more devices on the battlefield

are interconnected and communicating

with each other,

you have more endpoints or more edge devices that can be

compromised by a malicious actor or a hacker

or a bad actor.

You can't hack a sword or a sling or a catapult,

but if you're looking at a weapon system or a drone

or a vehicle that's relying on that interactivity,

if you hack that network, if you hack that system,

you've basically taken that resource off the battlefield.

Three Russian companies seeking to interfere

in the United States political system.

A spy working in their company, writing software to change

the outcome of the election.

Both parties are desecrating the American democracy.

The computer hacking group Anonymous

is the supposed creator.

Let's take a look at the alleged recent interference

by Russia and China on US elections.

Russian and Chinese actors were able to get on social media

and amplify certain themes or use bots

to change people's calculations,

and ultimately, their efforts did not have a dramatic effect.

But the psychological impact made that an act

of psychological war.

These also may have a secondary effect that is inciting

rebellions within the country, which often end up in chaos

and violence, some even having fatal consequences.

Massive cybersecurity breach of our government.

A massive cybersecurity breach against federal agencies.

These malicious cyber activities began

more than ten years ago.

Hacking group believed to be connected to Russian

intelligence services has been attempting to break

into entities that are developing

a vaccine for the coronavirus.

When cyberattacks escalate to cyber warfare,

the weapon of mass destruction

won't be a bomb being dropped.

It will be a plug that's pulled.

But like a hydrogen bomb, its indiscriminate effects

will ripple outward, causing long-term,

widespread damage.

The battles are no longer in far flung fields,

conducted by military forces,

but in the homes and businesses of every civilian.

Your family is suddenly without light,

without television, without radio,

without any form of connectivity.

Nothing in the house that relied on electricity,

on any kind of signal, worked.

The inability for landlines to function

as well as mobile phone networks.

And you get home.

Your family is there saying there's no water

coming through the taps, that all of the water is gone,

that it's all stopped working.

You go to the loo, it's not flushing.

The effluence is left there. It's being backed up.

The smell becomes unbelievable.

The sounds coming from outside, starting with the panicking,

the arguments, the disbelief.

Followed perhaps quickly by looting and rioting.

The sense of uncertainty, the inability to process

what is happening, the disbelief that such a thing

could happen in a modern society today.

Hurricane Katrina is closing in

on the Louisiana coast now.

One of the largest relief efforts in our nation's history,

and the federal government has got an important

role to play.

With Hurricane Katrina, we learned

that American citizens, regular people, after 72 hours

of no electricity, no access to services or water or sewage,

that they turn to savagery.

And this would be repeated in every major developed nation,

if you either shut off the water or stop people's

ability to have their waste carried away at any large city

around the world.

Just three days...

people would be turning on each other.

It's like an apocalyptic movie.

If you cut off an entire civilization,

they can't feed themselves,

they can't get access to the food and water.

If you cause significant domestic unrest

within the country, the worst case scenario is you have

people turning on each other and killing each other.

You've now, in essence, basically debilitated

your adversary without firing a single shot.

You decide to leave the city.

You pack up a few quick belongings and you go down

to the garage to get into your car.

You press the fob. Nothing happens.

It's like the battery has died in it.

There's no connectivity. The lights don't flash.

Nothing is moving.

You get out the physical key and try and undo the doors.

And once you get in, you insert the key.

When it starts, how dependent is your car on connectivity?

And when it looks like things can't get any worse,

you start to understand that your life may be

at higher risk than you thought.

Until now, all violence on Syria's streets

was unverifiable.

The city center was littered with burnt out wreckage,

guarded by tanks.

Billowing clouds of tear gas filled the streets

across the capital.

A number have already been killed as darkness falls

on a city in chaos.

Victimized by this colossal failure of technology,

you might never even know who is responsible.

Is it a tragic technical problem?

The work of a rogue state?

Or your own government?

When everything falls apart, who can you really trust?

A term that you're starting to see really used in the realm

of cyber warfare and cyberattacks

is this concept of "false flag" operations.

The actual concept of false flag goes back to kind

of the golden age of piracy, where the Portuguese,

the French, the English, and the Spanish were attacking

each other's fleets in the Americas using false flags,

a pirate flag, or in some cases, presenting another

country's flag on their ships to shift blame away.

Up until recently, we thought that cyberattacks

against governmental entities or large corporations could

only be conducted by nation states.

That has changed.

Now we know that groups of hackers called hacktivists,

small individuals working together, or even

a lone hacker, can create devastating effect.

With all these cyberattacks going on, you might ask,

are we constantly in a state of cyber war?

Maybe this is the new Cold War of our era.

I think society is on the dawn of a new arms race

where it's about really creating and expanding a suite of very

disruptive technologies that are gonna reshape

the battle space.

But there is no winning that conflict.

And the concept of mutual destruction will hopefully

keep us at bay and prevent us from getting

into a much bigger conflict.

On the cyber battlefield, innovation comes

from corporations, not governments.

The arms race is controlled

by these international conglomerates.

And as we increasingly depend on these companies,

they gain more power over our lives, even governments

have found themselves beholden to these big corporations,

unaware of their agendas.

One fundamental change in warfare that we're currently

witnessing is that more and more private actors,

private civilian companies really, are involved

in military operations.

And in the cyber realm, companies dominate the cloud

and dominate the cyber realm.

The amount of money the Defense Department

has to spend is somewhat finite.

If you look at Apple, for example, the R&D budget

for Apple, in some cases, exceeds the defense budgets

of so many other countries.

So now you have companies or CEOs that have

the capability to conduct cyber warfare at their disposal.

Do these individual companies or CEOs have the same ethical

concerns or the same checks and balances on those

that governments and democracies have?

The problem is that companies

aren't democratically elected governments.

Often, it isn't even clear which nation a company

belongs to or feels like it belongs to.

So we are witnessing a change in the power dynamic between

states and private companies that are becoming

ever more powerful and ever more influential.

While those private companies are working

in strict collaboration with governments,

there may not be reason for alarm.

But what if an enemy country will offer more?

Will they turn their weapons against the government

and overthrow it?

And will we see this sci-fi scenario of civil societies

being effectively ruled by corporations?

It begins with a simple USB key.

Then, with surgical precision, penetrates

some of the world's most advanced computer security.

You could basically take down a country

just by cyber-attacking it.

Cybercrime has a devastating impact.

This is the cyber war, not a new conflict,

but an ever-developing battle.

These are compelling questions, and though it may be too early

to answer them, history has shown us that we should be wary

of unfettered technological advancement without careful

oversight, lest the next advancement is the new

Pandora's box, once opened, impossible to close.

The reality is that weapons of mass destruction, WMDs,

are not quite as precise as they seem.

The ripples and impacts of their use go far beyond

the intended victim.

Some governments seek ways to minimize collateral damage,

but still have a great impact.

This is one reason why cyber warfare

may be a weapon of choice.

With cyber warfare, they have the ability to employ

precision at scale with devastating effect.

Governments and corporations are starting to take the issue

of cybersecurity very, very seriously.

You're starting to see billions and billions of dollars

being spent.

And it's why we're investing two and a half billion pounds

in quantum computers.

Quantum memory is a building block

for future army quantum networks.

When it comes to technology, that will shape the future,

like quantum computing, artificial intelligence.

The UK and the US are working together to make sure

they are developed safely.

For every new cyber advance, there are hackers out there

trying to crack it.

As cyber technology grows more sophisticated,

so does cyber security.

And so far in this arms race, the good guys,

supposedly, are winning.

Still, a future of cyber warfare where systems are

under the threat of constant untraceable attacks affecting

the civilian population may already be on our doorstep.

A future of cyber warfare where systems are under

the threat of constant untracable attacks

affecting the civilian population

may already be on our doorstep.

Consider the enormous impact of the second order effects

of a large scale cyberattack.

It has the ability to cripple whole sectors of society

and destroy human life, large scale.

It's no wonder that companies and nations are spending

billions of dollars to protect their critical infrastructure.

So two technologies that are going to de shape and impact

conflict and warfare are going to be breakthroughs

in artificial intelligence and machine learning,

as well as quantum computing.

When we say "artificial intelligence,"

we mean "machine learning."

It revolves around a system that's able to process,

synthesize, manage, and make decisions

using large amounts of data.

If you take an AI system and you train it to attack

a certain password that has 256-bit military encryption,

it could take all the supercomputers you throw at it,

weeks, if not months, to crack that code.

In the meantime, that attack can be theoretically

identified, spotted, mitigated,

and addressed without it leading to compromise.

Yet, this can change with the breakthrough

of quantum computing.

While regular computers work based on regular binary code,

that's the classic 0s and ones,

quantum computing operates in qubits.

That superimposes those 0s and ones and can process

certain information 158 million times faster

than a regular computer.

Now, if quantum computing will work as it is predicted,

this will mean many things, but militarily speaking,

the biggest immediate risk that experts see

is that quantum computing could lead to the breaking

of encryption protocols as we know them.

Quite quickly, all encryption, say, of communication

or nuclear codes, could be broken

and be open to different actors.

When we talk about artificial intelligence,

some of the fears...

are that we can't control it, that it will get to a point

where it wants to control itself at that time.

There are those that argue that AI will be able

to incorporate that, but at this point,

I still feel that we need a human heart,

a human mind, human compassion,

and human empathy to make those decisions.

Nations do not distrust each other because they are armed.

They are armed because they distrust each other.

Annihilation of any life on Earth has been brought

within the range of technical possibility.

My fellow Americans, tonight we're launching

an effort which holds the promise of changing

the course of human history.

Now's an opportunity to do generations a favor

by holding them accountable.

This civilization may go under.

We need to ask ourselves whether we're doing

all we can to avert that.

In our response to these realities,

there is hope for peace.

The history of warfare has always been an arms race.

And in the last two centuries, as that race has sped up,

we have seen more unintended,

potentially devastating consequences.

Progress means moving forward.

But to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past,

we should take the time to fully consider

where the road we're on may take us...

and who's paying the fare.

The biggest transferable lesson from Oppenheimer as the father

of nuclear weapons to today is the idea that very few people

hold the power in their hands.

Cyber is done by specialists.

They require the detailed knowledge of people who sit

in small cubicles with supercomputers deciding

how to break down societies using specialist payloads.

It's that same small group of people that Oppenheimer used

in developing these capabilities,

but not in waging them.

This isn't a democratized case of decision making.

It's not soldiers fixing bayonets

or charging machine gun posts.

This is the people sitting in ivory towers,

in national capitals,

who are deciding when to hit the enter key

and sow destruction.

Or do we wanna create a network of libertarian

and decentralized states that are inter-reliant but each have

control of their own destiny?

It is up to us to choose.

One of the deepest concerns we should have

about the future of warfare...

is in it following society's...

trends and patterns.

The key of those at the moment seems to be the withdrawal

of human-to-human contact.

This idea that potentially we stop making warfare a human

endeavor changes the very nature of war and conflict

as we understand it.

So maybe going forward, we should make it

an intentional effort where we pause and think

and consider the ramifications of the choices

we are constantly making.