Mutually assured cyberdestruction?

Over the past decade, on a far smaller scale, the country's military and intelligence leadership have gone through a parallel debate about how to use the Predator drone. Because it is precisely targeted, often on an individual, it is used almost every week.

And now we know that President Barack Obama, for the past three years, has been going through a similar process about how America should use another innovative weapon - one whose destructive powers are only beginning to be understood. In a secret programme called "Olympic Games," which dates from the last years of the George W. Bush administration, the United States has mounted repeated attacks with the most sophisticated cyberweapons ever developed. Like drones, these weapons cross national boundaries at will; in the case of Olympic Games they invaded the computer controllers that run Iran's nuclear centrifuges, spinning them wildly out of control.