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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

The current interpretation of events is that Stuxnet is a project of the Israeli government which has been at least partially successful in slowing Iran's attempts to build nuclear weapons.

Considering that the alternative would be bombing of nuclear facilities involving perhaps unauthorized overflights of neighboring countries and the risk of inflaming a hot war in the middle east (through the overflights and the bombings) I don't think I can rate this operation as anything other than a huge success.

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according to leaked cables some middle eastern countries actually encouraged us to bomb Iran. Otherwise I agree that a non-military solution is at least initially appealing.

  I fear whoever unleashed this has opened a pandora's box of destructive malware.  We've already seen things like China hacking major corporations and manipulating it's currency.  It's not hard to picture a future where malware is used to hurt the competition's production, at either a corporate or state level.

From the perspective of just about every other country in the region there is a hell of a lot of difference between Israel bombing Iran and the US bombing Iran.

A huge success would be if it derailed Iran's nuclear program completely and managed to contaminate the installations for the next couple thousand years, with enough warning as to avoid loss of human life, while forcing Iran to rebuild from scratch somewhere else and, at the same time, leave their authorities wondering what kind of bad luck hit them.

Of course, not all Israeli military want to avoid a confrontation. Military don't usually get medals for preventing wars.

All the current interpretations of events commit the fallacy of "if A then B, B therefore A". Just because centrifuges have purportedly been taken offline recently doesn't mean Stuxnet necessarily caused it. There are other potential causes that are more mundane.

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