BEYOND SKYNET: RECONCILING INCREASED AUTONOMY IN COMPUTER-BASED WEAPONS SYSTEMS WITH THE LAWS OF WAR

摘要

According to security experts, the Stuxnet virus, unofficially attributed to the United States and Israel, "attacked and destroyed only specific gas centrifuges used to highly enrich uranium, operating at a specific speed ... unique to the machines operating at the Natanz facility" in Iran. Findings from security experts confirmed this; the weapon, with its built-in ROE to uphold the LOAC principle of distinction, initially proved harmless elsewhere-until a programming bug allegedly allowed the worm to infect other computers via the Internet. Even more recently, in May 2013, in a story whose elements are becoming increasingly more common, attackers targeted the computers of American government employees involved in nuclear weapons research to install malware.