This in turn increases the risk from another area barely known about in the Cold War — cyber-attacks, said Camille M. Francois, an expert in the field at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
With their high level of automation, “nuclear assets are by their nature extremely vulnerable to cyber-attack,” Francois said.
And in addition, she told AFP, policymakers still have something of a “1980s mentality”, focusing on the idea of a lone hacker — like in the 1983 movie “WarGames” — and believing that cyber-attacks can only come via the Internet.