Stuxnet: Made in USA & Israel

The Times has an in-depth article on the origins of Stuxnet. It appears to be one more thing the world will be able to thank George W. Bush for:

By the accounts of a number of computer scientists, nuclear enrichment experts and former officials, the covert race to create Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the British.

The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

And yes, I will say thanks to Obama as well, for his part in it.

There’s also this fascinating piece of information: The Times says that Israel built an exact duplicate of the Iranian centrifuges in the Dimona nuclear plant, and tested Stuxnet on it there. If true, it makes me admire Israeli ingenuity even more.

How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges.

“They’ve long been an important part of the complex,” said Avner Cohen, author of “The Worst-Kept Secret” (2010), a book about the Israeli bomb program, and a senior fellow at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He added that Israeli intelligence had asked retired senior Dimona personnel to help on the Iranian issue, and that some apparently came from the enrichment program.

“I have no specific knowledge,” Dr. Cohen said of Israel and the Stuxnet worm. “But I see a strong Israeli signature and think that the centrifuge knowledge was critical.”

And the same thing happened in the U.S., but with bad results:

But the United States and its allies ran into the same problem the Iranians have grappled with: the P-1 is a balky, badly designed machine. When the Tennessee laboratory shipped some of its P-1’s to England, in hopes of working with the British on a program of general P-1 testing, they stumbled, according to nuclear experts.

“They failed hopelessly,” one recalled, saying that the machines proved too crude and temperamental to spin properly.

Dr. Cohen said his sources told him that Israel succeeded — with great difficulty — in mastering the centrifuge technology. And the American expert in nuclear intelligence, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Israelis used machines of the P-1 style to test the effectiveness of Stuxnet.

When your inspiration is stopping the mad mullahs from destroying your nation, failure is not an option. A nuclear-armed Iran can’t destroy America. But one nuclear missile devastates the Jewish state. And we have seen how little the Arab and Muslim world care for Palestinian casualties caused by their fellows.

Stuxnet isn’t a cure-all. The only thing that will stop Iran is a change in government, and even then, I’m not so sure the new government won’t want to be a nuclear-armed state. But Stuxnet is giving us breathing room.