During the past few days there’s been a lot of media coverage of the incident that took place at Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Iran calls the incident “an act of sabotage” and US and Israeli media reports indicate that the incident was in fact a cyber attack caused by Israel's overseas intelligence agency, Mossad.
There’s not much public information available about the Natanz nuclear facility, but according to Wikipedia it’s a hardened Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) covering 100,000 square meters that is built 8 meters underground and located near Natanz, the capital city of Natanz County, Isfahan Province, Iran. The facility is part of Iran’s nuclear program and is “generally recognized as Iran's central facility for uranium enrichment with over 19,000 gas centrifuges currently operational”.
Not much is known about the incident either, except that on April 11th a large-scale blackout occured at Natanz, which Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency acknowledged had damaged the electricity grid at the site. Iranian news agencies were also quick to report that there were no injuries nor any escape of radioactive material.
Iran’s Natanz Nuclear Facility. Image credit: Hamed Saber (CC BY 2.0)
The Natanz incident was by no means the first time a foreign intelligence agency carried out a cyber attack on an Iranian nuclear facility. The most famous case is from 2010 when Stuxnet, a worm widely understood to be a cyber weapon built jointly by the US and Israel, took out and ruined almost one-fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges.
When reading about incidents involving nuclear facilities that are enriching weapons-grade uranium, I can’t help but once again think of the top three existential risks we face in the 21st century. These are, according to Yuval Harari, nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption.
It seems clear that when you’re carrying out covert cyber warfare operations against nuclear facilities, the risk that something very bad happens is high. One has to ask if the potential outcome, or the reward, is worth the risk.
What could go wrong? Well, I’m not an expert on uranium enrichment, but when we’re dealing with highly radioactive material, there’s always the risk of leakage. Furthermore, who knows how Iran will retaliate. So far we’ve only heard that Iran has vowed to take revenge “at a time of its choosing”, and it’s almost certain they will do something. What if they already have a dirty bomb that can be deploy against a target facility or even a city?
What outcome did the orchestrators of the attack desire? To throw a monkey wrench in the cogs of the Iranian nuclear program? To teach Iran a lesson, because what was taking place at Natanz was in violation of the 2015 nuclear accord? Or perhaps to cause confusion and disorder to the recent efforts between the US and Iran for finding a path back to a nuclear deal?
Whatever the motivation for the Natanz attack was, and however compelling the risk/reward calculation looked, it’s undeniably true that there’s a high risk of disastrous consequences when nuclear facilities are involved.
Why not instead give diplomacy a chance? Surely the best outcome would be, specifically when it comes to the Iranian nuclear situation, if both Iran and the US could get back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal?