Not to get in the way of a rant, but by disrupting their equipment in the manner that we did, it can be verified that we set back their work, whatever-it-was-exactly-that-they-were-doing, by a significant amount of time. So either we set their nuclear program back, or their nuclear weapons program back.
But it happened.
Typed out a long reply, and the Internet ate it. Inbred, is anything I say going to effect your opinion? You seem to be implying anyone on the right, or maybe even who holds right leaning values is a war fetishist. To clarify, is that what you’re stating? If not, could you clarify what makes one a war fetishist instead of a military funding advocate, American exceptionalist, war hawk, etc? I lean right on some issues (one of them being military – we should have a well funded one… Although we can do that at 30% of our current funding easily), does that make me a war fetishist (if it helps with your choice, I own lots of guns and play war related video games from time to time).
I would go with a significant amount of time in the sense that in absence of Stuxnet it might have taken less time, and this difference in time is statistically different. Of course none of that is testable. Years? It starts to get doubtful since the estimates without Stuxnet are weak to begin with.
You know now that I think about it I should remove the right-wing part. War fetishists come in many forms and with many party affiliations. War Hawk is the more commonly used term. I am saying fetishist because War Hawk sounds to me like a person who advocates one rational approach to an international problem. I like fetishist because it sounds like somebody who cannot live without us being at war; somebody who needs the next enemy on the horizon. I was born in the early 70s. I cannot remember a time when there wasn’t somebody telling me that I better be ready to kill this or that country’s populace because of how much they threaten us. It might just be fatigue from the message but I don’t believe a thing these War Hawks say anymore, and when you really look at it, a lot of the things they say are completely baseless, yet lead to real world death and destruction.
The only difference between you and me is that I don’t have any guns. I don’t own one because I really just have no particular use for one.
Probably a silly question but did the worm actually work? did they actually screw up Iran’s nuclear program?
Yeep.
It depends. If it is done to us, it is unfair and chillingly evil: if we do it to them, they deserve it and humanity will be saved again.
Because our hearts are pure.
Inbred, if we’re talking about toolboxes, the people who have had a tool removed from their box by this development are the very “war fetishists” you despise.
Whereas before, a hawk could scream “We have to bomb Iran, before they get nuclear WEAPONZZZZZ!!!”, now that cry seems to have lost its urgency.
Do the U.S., Israel, G.B. and others working on replicating the Iranian P-1 centrifuge sequences also use some form, albeit different, of centrifuge technology to refine their own uranium to weapons grade purity or is a different process altogether?
Should I not be surprised that something seemingly so integral to the centrifuge operation would not be made by Siemens? Was this a pre-Stuxnet attempt by the Iranians to add a layer of security or did something in their process require customization?
The point I attempt to make is that appending a political leaning with the term fetishist, you do more to hurt your point than make it – and that does a disservice because you make a valid, if slightly more militant, point that I could easily see myself making.
I believe all current US nukes are plutonium based; i.e. do not rely on highly enriched uranium (U-235). The teardown of obsolete warheads has generated all the weapons grade uranium needed and in fact is a disposal/reuse problem. Most likely it’s “blended” with existing U-238 for use in fuel rods.
The PUREX method is most common for reprocessing (see nuclear fuel reprossing on the web for details and alternate methods). It’s described as a liquid-liquid ion exchange method, the details of which are over my pay grade. The still hot stuff is remanufactured into new fuel rods. The “depleted” uranium is stored, used to make kinetic energy penetrators in ammunition, used as very dense weights for balance/vibration damping purposes in aircraft, used as radiation shielding, …see google for uses military and civilian.
I just view it as further escalation. It is unsatisfying to me to temporarily satiate their demands. Attempting to satiate any animal’s response by giving them a smaller reward than they otherwise would like only reinforces the behavior. They will want bigger rewards as time goes on.
Anyway I doubt either of us could muster the evidence needed to convince one or the other of our separate points of view.
Sorry for the ‘militancy’ that TodderBob pointed out in replying to your post earlier, but I was reading the entire thread at once and it read to me like an echo chamber of how awesome this attack was. It bugged me because I view these positives as nothing more than fantasies.
Well, if you view Iran potentially having a nuclear arsenal as an destabilising threat to the region as I and many others do, this was preferable to actually expending explosive ordinance and killing people, no? Especially if its something that could be done again if necessary?
I doubt this would work again.
Once bitten the Iranians will be freaks about their IT security as regards this stuff. I’d be surprised if anyone could pull it off again directly against the centrifuges (certainly not without insider help).
Although perhaps as a next target you take out their local power plant with a computer worm. As I understand it these refining techniques require substantial amounts of electricity (IIRC the Oak Ridge facility during the Manhattan Project was sited where it was because it had access to the Tennessee Valley Authority power supply…Oak Ridge used something like a seventh of all the electricity in the US just to run its refining process).
I think it’s probably more likely that this will make future attacks easier, not harder. What we’ll probably see in response to this is new computer security regulations put into place by people who don’t understand computer security, and regulations like that often end up tying the hands of the folks who really do understand what they’re doing.
More to the point, now that the Iranians are aware of the possibility that their external hardware and control systems are potentially compromised, they can’t trust any of it. So they have to do extensive analysis of everything. Software has to be disassembled and analyzed. Computer chips become suspect. Tightening security and locking down the networks even harder makes it more difficult to do day-to-day work.
They’ll find it harder to recruit scientists and engineers, and extra security protocols will make it harder for those people to do their jobs.
Even if this virus has gasped its last gasp, the effect of slowing down the Iranians will last for a long time.
I wonder how hard it is to for them to get good ones now. Heck, Mossad has already likely killed off a few of them that have been assassinated in various ways so far.
I imagine that the high-level nuclear scientists in Iran are afforded a pretty decent security detail.
A slight hijack, please.
The cited article states that the worm “appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges”. Why a fifth? Why not all or most? How is that figure determined (or estimated)?
Thanks!
I think people like you should be filled with worry and have nothing you can do about it if you want my honest opinion. Look at what you wrote. You are creating this worm vs. ordinance scenario and it is a baseless scenario in two ways. First, war hawks are not using this as a replacement for anything. It is being used in addition to everything. Two posts down you discuss assassinations. We are arming anti-government forces in Iran. We are pressuring for further economic sanctions. We or Israel or whomever else we can get to do it will bomb Iran just as soon as it is feasible.
Second, here we are in this false versus scenario you are trying to get me to condone, to see the logic of, and people like you have no evidence that Iran really actually is developing nuclear arms. Even at 20% enrichment, which if I remember right is the last big achievement of the Iranians, has several legitimate uses that Iran already engages in. This statement that Iran is a few years away from a weapon has been repeated for far more than a few years. Well do they have it or not? People like you have no plausible way of describing why Iran would be any more destabilizing than it is now. People like you can present no plausible scenario where Iran would first strike with its nuke if it is actually developing one.
In the meantime, taking say Sam Stone’s guesswork to heart, an arm of Iran’s intellectual and technological development is being attacked by thugs. Iran’s crappy leadership can easily point to an outsider that is trying to hurt them and any peaceful revolution can be suppressed under the rubric that these protesters were mislead by foreign agents. So our attacks on an unsubstantiated nuclear program with unsubstantiated consequences is oppressing what I know to be a real anti-government feeling and technological advancement in Iran. Education and resistance are the forces of revolution as we recently learned in Tunisia. The paranoid imagination and shortsightedness of war hawks is guaranteeing that it is more difficult for change to occur in Iran.
As I said before there are only two ways to stop this from escalating. Iran can develop its nukes and follow the N Korea model or its government can change. That change in the government will not come from us as every revolution of the past 20 years in the Middle East and Eastern Europe has demonstrated. Even Iraq did not stabilize until the serious militia leaders in the country decided to make a government.
We have competent defenses. We have nothing to fear from an Iranian nuke and Iranian military. We have everything to gain from a well-developed, democratic Iran. Just leave them the fuck alone, gather information and stay on target with what Iran is doing, advance our own tech, and have the faith in people to let them get there.
Yes, I’m sure someone who is outraged on behalf of the Iranian government’s innocent motives for acquiring nuclear technology and ready to label as “thugs” anyone who wants to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of millenial crazies, is oh so very concerned about the fate of the democratizing forces in Iranian society and ready to support them.
I am not defending Iran. I care about the US involving itself in more death and destruction based on half truths and bad information. I am arguing against the notion that the war hawks among us and our allies are placated by e-warfare. It’s silly given that AFTER Stuxnet an Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated.
Also, I labeled the assassins who killed and injured Iranian nuclear scientists as thugs. What the fuck else are they?
I guess I know my response is a waste of time since apparently Iran is run by “millenial crazies”. This must be another “theory”. Thanks for baseless theory number 3.