Civilized warfare

I have long held that Iran's nuclear-weapons program must be stopped by whatever means are necessary, regardless of cost; given the ideology and rhetoric of the mullahs' regime, there is an unacceptable risk that nuclear weapons in their hands would be used against Israel in what would fully qualify as a second Holocaust. (There's also an unknowable risk of the regime, or elements within it, supplying nuclear weapons to terrorists.)

Like most, I've always assumed that the only effective way of stopping the program would be an airstrike. This attack would need to not only destroy the nuclear program, which is dispersed all over Iran in well-defended sites, but also destroy most of Iran's conventional military establishment as well, to prevent retaliation against Israel, Gulf shipping, or US forces in Iraq. Such a massive strike would inevitably kill and injure great numbers of innocent Iranians, especially if nuclear materials were released into the environment, and would trigger all kinds of obvious international consequences. Only the need to prevent a second Holocaust could justify (indeed, mandate) such a horrific action.

Thanks to modern technology, we may be able to escape that terrible dilemma.

Word is starting to trickle out about the "Stuxnet" computer worm which, we now know, has been in action inside the uranium- enrichment centrifuge complex at Natanz. The program was a very sophisticated one. Not only did it cause the centrifuges to spin out of control for long periods, ruining their mechanisms beyond repair; it also caused the instrument panels to display false readouts indicating normal operation, so that the scientists had no idea that anything was going wrong with their equipment. By the time they finally discovered what was happening, about a thousand centrifuges had been wrecked, setting back the nuclear program several years -- and some experts think Stuxnet may still have more damage to inflict.

No one has claimed responsibility for Stuxnet and nothing has been officially confirmed, but this New York Times piece tells a convincing story. Stuxnet was a joint US-Israeli project, with some help from Germany and Britain. Its development was launched in the last months of the Bush administration and accelerated under Obama; with so much at stake, partisan differences vanish. Israel even built copies of the Iranian centrifuges so that Stuxnet could be tested on them before deployment.

It might be objected that the nuclear program has only been delayed for a few years, not stopped; but in those few years, the theocracy might fall -- or further viruses targeting other parts of the program might be deployed, creating still further delay or eventually stopping it entirely.

And so it seems that the mullahs' nuclear ambitions have been thwarted and the threat of a second Holocaust has been averted -- by a weapon which did no harm to any human being or to any civilian infrastructure. It's a cliché to claim that "civilized warfare" is an oxymoron, but this surely qualifies.