08 December 2010
Hard Target
(Natanz Nuclear Complex, Iran. Graphic courtesy Digital Globe.)
Wikileaks is a great story on several levels, and I could drop into the gutter and recount the salacious circumstances that have brought Julian Assange low.
If I was going to do that, I would probably get us all worked up. When I read with amazement the account of how the little peacock got himself crosswise with the two Swedish women, I thought of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
I actually found myself feeling a shred of sympathy for the Australian egomaniac.
What he is accused of is conducting an intimate act with someone who deliberately and consensually in the sack with him, which brings the whole notion of relations between the sexes (is the correct term sex or gender these days?) into serious question, particularly if it means that it can land you in a British gaol.
Julian’s arrogance notwithstanding, he was hardly a hard target, and he may have got precisely what he deserves. But that is a matter for the Swedish and British courts to determine, and I have on excellent authority that the events that occurred under the endless sunshine of Scandinavian mid-summer will be played out in the endless night of the winter solstice season.
But what Julian has done through the miracle of the cyber world- publishing an unimaginably vast catalog of classified internal US military and diplomatic cables- has provided a rare public view of policy, and the link to military and clandestine operations.
There is nothing about the STUXNET worm in the traffic that has been revealed, though it is evident that a lot of people were interested in taking down the Iranian nuclear program.
The Saudis were, naturally, as the Sunni caretakers of the two cities claimed as holy by their Shia semi-co-religionists in Tehran. The Israelis, of course, who the Iranians have publicly declared should be pushed into the sea. The rest of the West as well, who in the form of America, guarantor of peace, and Europe and Russia, who have happily sold the tools and expertise to the Mercedes Mullahs who seek to build the Shia Bomb.
(IAF Strike Eagle F-15Is on the line. Photo IAF.)
America was urged to either unilaterally “cut the head off the snake” or, alternatively facilitate a surrogate military action. Something along the lines of the strike conducted by the IAF’s 69th Fighter Squadron on September, 2007 against the al-Kibar nuclear facility in Syria. It was an elegant operation, with commandos on the ground providing laser designator services to guide the bombs to efficient and accurate hits.
It took out a hard target, and the world purported surprise. What was most surprising, though, was what happened to the formidable Syrian air defense system, provided at cut-rate prices by the Russian Federation.
They went dead, and permitted the IAF to work without interference.
Sherlock Holmes once asked the amiable Watson about the curious thing the dog did in the night. You know what that was. Nothing. Zip. Nada.
Curious.
Nothing in the digital age ought to make us particularly surprised. Your home computer might actually be part of someone else’s army of zombie boxes, used to conduct denial of service attacks against banks, or Wikileaks, or humming silently in the night from your den as part of hacker war between China and Taiwan.
It is clear that there were airplanes, commandos, and something else- a cyber component to the attack on Syria that was an absolute game-changer. And that is what this is all about.
We still live, at least partly, in the physical world, as Julian Assange has discovered to his considerable discomfort. The distance between the IAF and the Natanz nuclear enrichment site in Iran requires the same sort of elaborate aerial refueling and overflight issues required in the legendary raid on the Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981.
On the verge of opening for business, the Israelis shut down Saddam’s nuclear capability.
The Iranians took note of that, and of what happened to the Syrian program. Natanz was constructed as a hard target. Iran has a sophisticated air defense system, and was angling for the S-300 integrated missile system. There is some traffic about that from Julian, though I am precluded from reading any of it for reasons of professional delicacy. In any event, with two wars already in progress, there was no stomach for overt military action in a nation that abuts the crucial oil shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz.
Open-source imagery of the Natanz facility indicates it is surrounded by a security fence and contains a variety of critical nodes, including deep underground facilities. It is a hard target, deliberately constructed that way to protect the estimated 50,000 gas centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
Making this facility so visible suggests that Iran could be hiding other, smaller facilities in plain sight. It makes their program more robust and dispersed and harder to take out than that of Syria or Iraq. Even if the Natanz site was destroyed militarily, Iran's decentralized gas centrifuge program could continue the enrichment program.
So, the question is not what to do, but how. I was going to get to that this morning, but regrettably the morning got away from me.
We would first need to talk about how this all works, since profound knowledge- intelligence, if you will, is required to destroy something elegantly. We are talking about a hard target that is working its way through technical issues that were solved at Oak Ridge more than sixty years ago. In fact, weapons-grade enriched uranium is still sometimes called “oralloy,” a short-hand version of the original term “Oak Ridge Alloy.”
We would also have to talk about the technology transfer issues by which German and Russian control devices are used to produce the nasty stuff. There are currently two generic commercial methods employed internationally for uranium enrichment: gas dispersion and gas centrifuge. The latter is more efficient, consuming only a fraction of the energy required for the former.
(Iranian IR-2 Zippe-type centrifuge. Image International Proliferation.org.)
It is great technology, if you are hankering to create U-235. The Iranian program is using the Zippe-type centrifuge, which was developed at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow by a team of Austrian and German scientists led by Gernot Zippe captured after the end of World War Two.
You need to understand all this to get a glimmer of what genius went into the creation of STUXNET, and the tradecraft used to apply it to a highly advanced, air-gapped, stand-alone system in a bunker behind a wire in one of the more paranoid states in the world.
Anyway, we will have to go behind the wire tomorrow. I told you this was a cool story.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
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