Stevens launches Farber Fellowship talks

This past Tuesday, the College of Arts and Letters hosted its first Farber Fellowship talk between Professor Alex Wellerstein and Dr. David Farber called “Cyberwar in a Nuclear Age and Nuclear War in a Cyber Age.” You may not have heard of the David and GG Farber Faculty Fellowship before, most likely because it’s a very recent addition to Stevens. The Fellowship, founded by Farber and his late wife Gloria (or GG), was established to recognize and support CAL professors who study and raise public awareness about scientific and technological issues. Wellerstein was the inaugural recipient of the Fellowship. The speaking engagement between Wellerstein and Farber was the first event in a series of speaking engagements created by the Farber Fellowship, and it was a big success. Stevens students and media outlets packed into Babbio 104 to listen to the two men discuss their fields.

Wellerstein and Farber, experts in nuclear studies and computer science, respectively, engaged in an hour-long discussion on the current nature of nuclear and cyber war. After the first forty minutes of discussion, the floor was opened for questions. One topic which Wellerstein dwelt on longest was the risk of nuclear war. While Wellerstein doesn’t believe a large scale exchange between global powers is likely, he did mention the possibility of an exchange between countries like India and Pakistan. One of Wellerstein’s primary concerns was the usage of a small-yield weapon against a conventional force. If that happened, it could normalize the usage of nuclear weaponry in regular combat.

Farber, on the other hand, had a different problem. While Wellerstein decreed that it was highly unlikely for terrorists to get their hands onto a nuclear device of some kind, anyone can become an expert in hacking. Skilled hackers could do substantial damage to both our public and private institutions. Private companies without strong protection can lose the personal information of millions of customers in a hack. The sustained loss of power from the hacking of electrical grids could spell disaster for many. Farber noted that most of our infrastructure has poor protection against these kinds of cyber attacks. Following the talk, a reception was held in the Babbio 4th floor conference room.