What do you do if you want to stop a country from getting developing its own nuclear weapon? You could put sanctions on them, but if they have something like oil which they can still sell that is not going to be as big a deal as it might otherwise be. You could take military action, but if the country puts its facilities in bunkers and upwind from a major city, bombing is not guaranteed to be effective and if it is you risk radioactive contamination of the city down wind.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
While that seems to be about the range of options we have with Iran there are others and one of them may have been attempted to some level of success. To make nuclear fuel, you have to take uranium and separate out the U-235 from the U-238 which makes up more than 99% of all uranium. One of the best ways to do this is by centrifuging the uranium over and over again in what is called a stepped process. This pulls the heavier U-238 to the bottom and leaving a compound with a higher ratio of U-235 at the top. You take the top and repeat and repeat and repeat until you have what is called Enriched Uranium which is 20% or more U-235 and is suitable for nuclear reactors and, of course, bomb making.
Iran has a huge facility with the capability of processing a lot of uranium, even though it is a slow process. However in the last year or so there have been reports of them having to take many of the centrifuges off line. Why? Well it might be because they have been the victim of a really good computer attack.
There is a virus called Stuxnet which seems to have been designed specifically to disrupt the working of centrifuges. What this virus does is get into the control system for the frequency converters which control the speed at which a centrifuge spins. It then starts to send a series of speed changes to the controller eventually accelerating the rate to over 1,410 cycles per second which is enough to cause a centrifuge to spin apart. In the end the program commands the controller to return to normal parameters, so any investigation of the destroyed machine will not show anything wrong.
We know that this virus is in Iran, their government admitted last year they were fighting it. Combined with the offlining of many of their centrifuges it is pretty easy to assume that the cause was Stuxnet.
Where did this virus come from? The New York Times has an article speculating that it came from Israel. From that article:
Last month, researchers at Symantec also speculated that a string of numbers found in the program — 19790509 — while seeming random, might actually be significant. They speculated that it might refer to May 9, 1979, the day that Jewish-Iranian businessman Habib Elghanian was executed in Iran after being convicted of spying for Israel.
Of course that could be misdirection and it is not like any government is going to admit to this kind of attack.
You might wonder how something as highly protected as a uranium enrichment facility would let a virus through. The most likely culprit is something almost everyone of us has, a jump drive. Think about the number of times in the last year or so that you have received a small or medium sized flash drive as a gift from a vendor or at a conference. They are almost always loaded with some useful bit of information about products. It is very easy to slip a hidden program into that information, and then when it is used in a secure location, the virus and "wake up" and start to spread through a network, even if it is not connected to the internet.
Is this what happened in Iran? No one but the perpetrator can say and they aren’t talking. Still this shows that there are far better ways to try to stop a nuclear program than the drum beat of war we hear from asshat conservatives over Iran’s nuclear program. The over all goal is to prevent them from getting a working nuclear weapon (though frankly I don’t see this as that big a problem, they might be a repressive government who hates Israel but any uses of a such a weapon would bring the full force of the world down on them.) given that, why not make it as hard on them as possible by disrupting the processes which boot strap you to a full working bomb?
It takes a pretty high level of skill and technology to go from raw uranium to a nuclear weapon. We and others in the nuclear club know the process and where things can be bollixed up, so why not go after that route? It is cheaper, safer for all involved and ultimately raises the cost of getting one of these weapons, perhaps to the point of being unviable.
The world would be a better place without nuclear weapons, however going to war over the attempts of various nations to achieve this milestone is not really an acceptable option. If we can use other means to prevent the successful development of them, then that is all the better.
The floor is yours.