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What always impressed me about Stuxnet wasn't the technical complexity, but the amount of spycraft that must have gone into identifying exactly what to program it to do, and what they could get away with.

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You don’t need to be a genius nor invest very deeply to figure out the technical details of introducing vibration into a high-speed centrifuge using SCADA (industrial automation protocol) in a barely noticeable way. As you suggest, tradecraft is the primary skill, jumping the air gap required an asset inside.

France has enabled nuclear weapons programmes of many rouge states.

Maybe Israelis just went to the Elysee palace, and asked?

I don't know about French nukes, but French-affiliated aerospace has a general rep as being leakier than most. Eh, "leakier" is a negative way of putting it . . how about "loose-lipped"? One tools selection from a French-based vendor - a cloud option for uncontrolled data - was turned down by uniformed dudes from the program office, based on this prejudice. But a similar cloud offering from "Ze Germans"? Oh, that was A-OK. Both products seemed built from compressed pellets of Turkish dander - of course they did, this is DoD shopping - but one of them did have that snappy Aryan zing.

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