A New Cold War?

In chapter 22, Strayer discusses the world impact of Communism.  From it's simple beginnings to its underpinning as the foundation of nations, Communism has ultimately written many pages of what we know as history.  One of the more historically important aspects of Communism, however, is that of the nuclear arms race, primarily existing between the United States and Russia.  Historically, the United States was able to secure the majority of V2 Nazi rocket scientists at the end of World War II while Russia managed to only return a handful of scientists who had worked on the V2 program.  The importance of this event is indicative of a race that happened in parallel to the nuclear arms race -- the space race.  The space race has just the same historical importance as the nuclear arms race in that it was for national pride.  John F. Kennedy himself publicly stated that in ten years time, the United States would land man on the moon, and on that fateful day in 1969 Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the moon.

And while the space race is a rather historical legacy of the war between Democracy and Communism, it would seem as though the Cold War never really ended.  While, one might consider the fall of the Berlin Wall as an ending of the Soviet Union, and it in essence was, one could still say that the Cold War is in full effect and might even be heating up.  There is evidence of this in the fact that China, a Communist nation, has been taking the place of Russia as the adversary of  the United States just in cyberspace.  This notion of a digital Cold War is but spawning another race, this time firmly held in the world of ones and zeros.  

Hundreds of terabytes, if not thousands of terabytes of data have been stolen and compromised out of a fight to be the superior nation, mainly at the hands of the Chinese.  What should be noted, however, is that if the digital cold war were to go hot, it wouldn't be the traditional soldier in the "crosshairs" so to speak but the citizens of the United States who are affected the most.  A case study to what might occur includes the cyber attacks against Estonia as perpetrated by Russia and Russian sympathizers.  As a result, banking systems were taken offline, giving no access to banking information for any of Estonia’s citizens.  More devastating was the fact that the internet was basically brought offline for an entire country.  And while the incident is driven by pride of the moving of a statue, this incident is almost as symbolic as the first dropping of the atomic bomb in World War II.  

These are the new fears we face in this modern world.  It used to be a fear of being cut off from food, water, and shelter, but has escalated to adding the potentially for no communications, a destroyed financial system, and worse yet, potential disinformation at the hands of the "perceived" enemy whom ever they may happen to be as it's extremely easy to filter the true location of where network packets come from.  

Ultimately, these concerns drive the innovation of entire countries such that a way of life not be destroyed over the ideology of but a few.  Sadly though, there might not be a happy ending as we saw when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, but a constant reminder that our information might be stolen or poisoned and we might not even know it at any time.