NATO Set to Ratify Pledge on Joint Defense in Case of Major Cyberattack
When President Obama meets with other NATO leaders later this week, they are expected to ratify what seems, at first glance, a far-reaching change in the organization’s mission of collective defense: For the first time, a cyberattack on any of the 28 NATO nations could be declared an attack on all of them, much like a ground invasion or an airborne bombing.
“Our mandate is pure cyberdefense,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the departing NATO secretary general, said during a visit to Washington over the summer. “Our declaration is a start,” he said, “but I cannot tell you it is a complete strategy.”
NATO’s tentative steps into the realm of computer conflict, at a moment when Russian, Chinese and Iranian “patriotic hackers” have run increasingly sophisticated campaigns, show the alliance’s troubles in innovating to keep up with modern warfare, at a moment when it is also facing one of its greatest political challenges since the end of the Cold War.
In interviews, officials said that the declaration that would be ratified this week — it was already embraced by NATO defense ministers in June — marks a long-delayed recognition that a NATO nation could be crippled without a shot being fired.
“If conventional war or nuclear war were to break out,” one senior NATO official said in an interview here, “there are detailed plans about how we would respond, and what capabilities are at the disposal of the NATO military structure.
Source: NYT
