About

The single most consequential security challenge of the current decade is not a particular adversary or a single category of attack. It is an architectural problem: the structural entanglement of cyber, space, and nuclear systems, and the governance vacuum that surrounds it.

The command, control, and early-warning systems that underpin nuclear deterrence now depend on satellite infrastructure that is itself vulnerable to cyber operations. Those satellite systems are increasingly dual-use — the same orbital assets that enable civilian communications and GPS navigation also support military targeting and ballistic missile defence. The cyber domain provides a persistent, low-threshold tool for reaching into both. The result is a coupling that existing governance frameworks were not designed to manage.

The Entanglement Problem

The danger is not that a cyber attack will cause a nuclear launch. The danger is subtler and harder to govern: that a cyber operation targeting satellite infrastructure — plausibly motivated by intelligence collection, pre-positioning, or compellence in a conventional conflict — could be misread as preparation for a disarming first strike.

James Acton's concept of entanglement captures the structural logic precisely. When the same physical infrastructure serves both conventional and nuclear functions, an adversary cannot reliably distinguish between a limited operation and the opening move of strategic escalation. That uncertainty is itself destabilising, independent of intent.

A Concrete Illustration

The 2022 Viasat KA-SAT attack illustrates the problem in miniature. A cyber operation targeting a commercial satellite communication system, conducted in the opening hours of the Russia–Ukraine war, disrupted Ukrainian military communications — but also knocked out wind turbines across Central Europe and disabled satellite modems in multiple NATO member states.

No governance framework determined whether this constituted an act of war, triggered collective defence obligations, or warranted a countermeasure. The Tallinn Manual 2.0 offers analytical tools; it does not provide binding thresholds. The gap between what the law says and what operational reality demands has never been wider.

Why This Problem Is Primary

What makes entanglement risk the primary challenge — above climate, pandemic risk, or conventional great-power rivalry — is that it combines three properties simultaneously. It is already operational rather than hypothetical. It is structurally resistant to existing arms control approaches because it cannot be verified or bounded the way nuclear warheads can. And it creates escalation pathways that move faster than diplomatic or legal institutions can respond. Climate change is a generational governance failure. Entanglement risk is a real-time one.

The Governance Task

The governance response requires integrating three bodies of work that presently operate in silos: cyber norms development (the GGE/OEWG process), space security (the Open-Ended Working Group on reducing space threats), and nuclear risk reduction. None of these tracks currently accounts for the interaction effects between them.

Building the analytical and institutional infrastructure to address that gap is the most consequential security governance task of the current decade — and the intellectual problem that motivates this platform. The Atlas exists to make that entanglement legible: to provide structured, evidence-based analysis of how cyber operations interact with escalation dynamics, infrastructure dependencies, and governance responses, so that the pattern becomes visible across cases rather than rediscovered in each crisis.