Britain changes policy so it can use nuclear weapons in response to ‘emerging technologies’

Tom Plant, a director at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told CNBC: “I would not interpret it to include cyber-attacks in isolation, no.” He added that the “understanding of what constitutes emerging tech in government is not evenly distributed — cyber is definitely not ‘emerging,’ it’s pretty substantially emerged.” Either way, Plant believes that the change in language is significant. “I think it is a marker that there is the potential in the future for combinations of technologies and behaviors to come together that create emergent risks – which perhaps would not arise through the developments of any one technology in isolation – that are incredibly hard to predict and that there is at least the possibility that one or more of these as-yet-unknown emergent challenges might rival WMD in the threat they pose,” he said.