The New Nuclear: How the AI Race Will Rewrite the Rules of Global Conflict

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Presented at OAIC 2025 by

Daria Bahrami

The laws of armed conflict (LOAC)—codified through the Geneva Conventions and stabilized by nuclear deterrence—worked for traditional kinetic warfare, contributing to a statistical decline in formal international conflicts. But applying LOAC to the digital domain reduces these frameworks to performative theater because cyber operations follow fundamentally different rules. Digital attacks operate with deniable attribution, target civilian infrastructure without military necessity, and achieve strategic objectives through means that make proportionality calculations meaningless. Most critically, cyber escalation lacks the natural stopping points that made nuclear deterrence stable—there's no equivalent to mutually assured destruction.