Obama Ordered Stepped-Up Cyberattacks on Iran

President Obama inherited a third war from the Bush administration, and he has stepped it up significantly, the New York Times finds in a detailed look at American cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear program, based on 18 months of interviews with dozens of insiders. The program—America's first sustained use of cyberweapons—was started by George W. Bush in 2006, and code-named "Olympic Games." Obama accelerated the program, even after a programming error allowed part of it to bust beyond an Iranian nuclear plant and spread around the world, where it became known as Stuxnet.

The American cyberweapon, developed with the Israelis, was able to destroy centrifuges used for nuclear enrichment by sending orders to slow them down or speed them up so quickly that their parts were destroyed, sources say. "The intent was that the failures should make them feel they were stupid, which is what happened," one source says. Administration insiders say that while American cyberattacks haven't been limited to Iran, the focus "has been overwhelmingly on one country." Obama has often told his aides that there are risks to overusing US cyberweapons, according to the sources, who say Flame, the latest cyberattack to hit Iran, is not part of the US program. (More Stuxnet stories.)