The year was 2010. As Iran pushed more aggressively to develop nuclear capabilities, America, Israel, and countless other nations watched with great concern. A nuclear-armed Iran would prove hostile to the Middle East.  Perhaps Iran’s nuclear initiatives—specifically, their centrifuges—could be physically wiped out, destroyed, made inoperable—all without a single bullet being fired. Impossible? Hardly. It happened with a combination of American and Israeli cyber ingenuity. It happened with Stuxnet.

 

Stuxnet: The Dawn of Cyber Warfare, by Charles Denyer, examines how by initiating this destructive piece of software, the United States and Israel effectively set off an arms race in cyberspace, and though Stuxnet is now gone (experts believe it stopped functioning in 2012), the ramifications are still with us. Just as the use of nuclear weapons on Japan by the United States during World War II ushered in the nuclear arms race, countries all throughout the world are pursuing a similar cyber-weapons race.