“These nuclear systems are increasingly reliant on cyber-enabled components. The adversary has advanced its capability to threaten those nuclear weapon systems, including that cyber and supply chain. The demand for the capability to certify this advanced number of new systems that will be coming online and be able to protect them in this new type of threat environment there certainly were resource constraints that might limit their ability to certify that number of upcoming systems,” Chow told reporters.

When asked if more digital interlinks among weapons made it harder to certify and secure them, Chow took a diplomatic evasion. Difficult was not the right word. “It’s more complicated,” he said. “The proliferation of those sorts of technologies, its a fact of life of on our weapons systems. There are new tools to provide cyber resilience to reduce your risk the study found we need to consider those and come up with metrics that can help the decision maker.” Resilience in the context of digital and computer program functioning generally means ensuring that programs or systems continue to function as designed even when under cyber attack.