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Thank you. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm here today with Ben Buchanan.

Ben did his PhD at King's College in London on war studies, and he's now a postdoctoral

fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where his research focuses on

cybersecurity and statecraft. He just published his first book on the topic and he's testified to the Senate.

Ben, welcome to rationally speaking. Thanks for having me.

So, Ben, your book is on something you call the Cybersecurity Dilemma. That's the title of the book.

Tell us about that. What is the dilemma?

Well, the title of the cybersecurity dilemma comes from this

older idea we have in international relations called the security dilemma. And the security

dilemma in one form or another has been around since the ancient Greeks. And the notion of the

security dilemma is that as one nation defends itself doing things that it genuinely thinks it's just for its own self-defense,

it unintentionally threatens other nations. And these other nations see the action and precipitate a

response. And the first nation sees that and responds in its own way. And you can have an escalatory

spiral, sometimes even towards conflict,

...