The STUXNET virus was a recent major story that, despite Iranian denials that it caused damage or interfered with their uranium enrichment efforts, seemed designed to successfully do exactly that. Then, today, there is this story:
The article also mentions that a few other Iranian nuclear scientists have died or disappeared in recent years, not to mention the confusing “is he or is he not a defector” story of scientist Shahram Amiri. Do all of these efforts indicate that, despite its threats and open speculation, Israel has decided that it is too costly and/or risky to openly and militarily attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and instead just do whatever it can covertly?
Even with the release of the latest State Department cables revealing a sometimes desperate request from some Arab leaders for a strike against Iran, the US (under both Bush and Obama) remain deeply skeptical about the effectiveness or wisdom of any attack. And that this skepticism is also restraining Israel from acting openly also for the foreseeable future.
I have no doubt that there is a concerted effort to screw up Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
As to who is behind it - the three obvious contenders are the US, Israel, and the Arab nations (particularly the Saudis). Beyond that, there is mere speculation. My own suspicion is that they all, to an extent, co-operate in this. It is in all of their interests.
No, when those fail to stop Iran there’ll probably be such a strike. I doubt the strike will stop them either; I wouldn’t expect anything short of being conquered or nuked to do so.
Considering the potential consequences, I’m pretty sure that most of the parties involved consider open war to be a last resort, if all other efforts fail. Covert war has always been a preferred alternative.
I keep thinking about how economically efficient the whole process was.
The end result is that no people were killed (excepte, perhaps, for those scientists who may have been so unlucky as to have been executed by the Iranian regime in an attempt to find the perpetrators), very little in the way of capital machinery was damaged, the NSA (or whoever) has honed their skills at covert hacking, and the world’s operating systems will be safer once the security holes revealed are patched.
It’s like a modern neutron bomb, except even more targeted and with less splash damage.
Yup. There’s no guarantee that war will solve this problem, or even improve the situation.
Yup. Economic and efficient. But what about effective? There’s no indication it slowed them down by any significant amount. Doing nothing would have been efficient and economical too, and not alerted them to their vulnerability to e-attacks.
It indicates they would rather try this first. Regardless of what you think about the nuclear program, it makes sense to try this first. It’s not a guarantee they wouldn’t try an attack if nothing else works, but I’m not sure an attack would work either. It’s a play for time if nothing else.
I think the most likely explanation for the deaths of these nuclear scientists is that they were killed by factions within Iran to punish them for their failure. The West is just a convenient scapegoat for the Iranis to cover their actions. And despite how viscerally satisfying it might be to a dictator to kill failures, it’s not conducive to the success of a program in the long run.
My impression is that it could have slowed them significantly, and additionally damaged lots of expensive equipment, destroyed morale in the researchers, and possibly wasted a bunch of materials as well.
Nuclear fuel refining requires really expensive capital investment. Significant sabotage could well slow their efforts by quite a lot.
I don’t know that it did that, but presumably some thought was put into how effective it would be before the worm was released.
Presumably, but the conclusion does not necessarily follow from that. If they looked critically at it and came to the reasoned conclusion that it would have a 50% chance of significantly hampering Iran’s nuclear efforts, that might easily be enough to justify trying it, but it still wouldn’t be any great surprise if it happened to fail.
I don’t know of any solid information about that. But most intelligence organizations don’t share information with me. There is no indication that this has made Iran more reasonable though. If it turns out to have had a significant impact, that will be revealed some day. The recent deaths of Iranian scientists could be related to this, either because of its success, or failure. Even if not, I’m sure it has stepped up Iran’s efforts to uncover espionage, and protect their systems from e-attacks. Personally I would have held back on this as a second-to-last-resort, but I don’t know what other information was considered in the decision, if it was even a reasoned decision.
Well, sometimes it’s the educated classes emigrating to another country for better economic prospects and sometimes it’s grey matter oozing through a .25-caliber hole in the forehead. Either way, it’s a brain drain.
Some think that the STUXNET may have originated in China. China had access to the security certificates of RealTek. They also had solid knowledge of Iran’s centrifuge’s, since they were of Chinese design.
China doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, but thinks sanctions are counterproductive, never mind war. And they want to maintain good relations with their 3rd largest supplier of oil. Crippling the centrifuges while maintaining warm relations with Iran solves a number of Chinese security challenges simultaneously. I have no idea about whether this hypothesis survives scrutiny though.
Suppose the Stuxnet worm resulted in an accident? \Let us suppose that the Iranians clean their PCs, and resume production of enriched uranium. However, the worm is still active, and instructs the centrifuges to go to maximum speed-which causes them to explode. The plant becomes contaminated with uranium U-235, and the workers (in their attempt to clean the debris) track the uranium all over the place. The whole plant becomes heavily contaminated, and workers start dying of lung cancer.
Would this scenario cause the Iranians to lash out at Israel or the US?
I’ve thought China was a prime suspect right from the beginning. China has already been incriminated in numerous computer hacking attempts, and were the ones most likely to have the knowledge of the design required to pull this off.
In addition, this is typical of the way China does things - avoid head-on confrontations, and instead probe for weakness and try to undermine the other side. They’re entirely capable of selling Iran all the parts they need for a centrifuge (extracting concessions for doing so), then promising to work with the world on sanctions (extracting concessions to do so), then cutting a deal with the Iranians to go back on the promise of sanctions (extracting concessions to do so), then to sabotage them in an entirely different way, defusing the whole situation.
Now they’ll probably help Iran get their program back on track, while extracting concessions to do so. If this is the way they’re operating, it’s quite brilliant.
On the other hand, the U.S. has done something very similar to this in the past. One of the lesser known successes of the Reagan administration was its plan to undermine the USSR by sabotaging its oil revenue. In the 1980’s, the CIA discovered that the Soviets had been stealing Canadian technology for embedded systems used to regulate the flow of oil through Soviet pipelines. Rather than announce this to the world and cut off the technology, the Reagan administration ordered that the equipment be programmed with a trojan horse to sabotage the oil pipelines.
After the gear was installed, the valves closed in a certain order that caused immense pressure to build, ultimately resulting in one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions ever seen. The explosion happened in a remote area and no one was killed, but it caused significant economic hardship for the Soviets.
One of the most important effects of the program to insert trojan horses and viruses in stolen hardware was that the Soviets could no longer trust the technology they were stealing, which cost them a lot of time and money. The Iranians are in the same place now - even if they buy or steal technology for their centrifuges and reactors, they are going to have to take extra measures to make sure it’s ‘clean’, and in some cases that may be extremely difficult.
It might not even be software - it could be weak points built into moving parts or parts under stress, or substitute materials that will deform under high temperature, or ball bearings slightly out of round inside sealed pumps, or whatever. Once you know your suppliers are screwing with you, it puts you in a very difficult position.
Whether this means no attack depends on the various intellgence agency’s estimation of how much damage has been done and how it has affected Iran’s nuclear timeline.