The stunning revelations by Sanger, The New York Times's chief Washington correspondent, about the American role in using computer warfare to attack Iran's nuclear program already have made headlines, and rightly so. He persuasively shows that under Obama, the United States government has been engaged in what one presidential adviser calls "a state of low-grade, daily conflict."
The heart of this book is the chapter titled "Olympic Games," which Sanger writes is the code name for a joint programme of Israel and the United States to insert malicious software into the machinery of the Iranian military-industrial complex and so set back Iran's ability to manufacture weapons-grade uranium. Specifically, in 2008 and 2009 the software threw off the balance of centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear enrichment centre. It did so in a variety of unpredictable ways, making it at first seem like the problems were random or the result of Iranian incompetence. The key to getting inside the computers - which were not connected to the Internet - was to load the virus into thumb drives that Iranian nuclear technicians, perhaps unknowingly, would bring to work and plug into the computer systems there.
