Considering that Iran went on to develop uranium enrichment capabilities it hardly seems like Stuxnet was a final win, though it certainly delayed them.
In World War 2 the British developed "exploding rats." The idea was to pack rats with explosives and leave them near boilers. The person shoveling fuel would eventually find the rat and shovel it in to the furnace to dispose of it - where a relatively small explosion would cause the pressure vessel to rupture and take out an entire train or industrial facility.
A single shipment of 100 explosive rats was sent across the border and was intercepted. What resulted was a massive amount of German energy spent on trying to detect rat shipments and having to consider exploding rats in their threat model for every further operation.
Stuxnet not only delayed the the Iranian nuclear efforts, it made everything a hundred times more complex going forward because they realized not even air gapped computers were safe. Not to mention they no longer trust any of their monitoring or instrumentation, which Stuxnet made a point of faking... imagine trying to debug even the smallest issue when you don't trust a single piece of data.
Long term effects of Stuxnet are unclear. In the short term, it was a huge win in delaying the programme and sending a message that even air gapped systems are at risk. In the long term, Stuxnet put the programme and every adversary on notice that they should increase focus on security practices.
The list of countries America tells other countries to treat poorly is getting kinda long.
So I could actually rattle them off the top of my head once:
Myanmar
Sudan
Iran
North Korea
Cuba
That last one is a funny one, the original pariah. But like you can't go to these countries for contests, or accept prize money there, so for instance the Rubik's Cube championship can't be in Cuba, because Americans who are damned good at it can't win.
And it wasn't a very large amount of land. Sudan yeah, that was the biggest country in Africa before it split. But it was remote from where I was in Chile, much more than half the world away. Never met a Sudanese, nothing.
Now it's like Belarus, Russia, China soon, North Korea, Cuba always always, South Sudan, uh, Yemen, there's more...Libya for a while, like EVERYONE EVERYONE IS SANCTIONED.
When everybody's sanctioned, nobody's sanctioned. America is sanctioned.
This is a pretty ironic view. What you're regretting losing only ever existed during the unipolar moment anyway. The era preceding it was literally called the Cold War. Emphasis on War. Now that the unipolar moment is ending you're blaming America for sticking to its guns and refusing to do business with countries that agitate for its downfall or destruction?
And yet we leave our own infrastructure connected to the internet. It’s like we want our power grid to fail, our dams to release a flood, our water supply to be over-floridated.
Didn't we just talk about how Stuxnet showed that even airgaps aren't 100% secure?
The benefits of being connected to the Internet are the same as before; but the benefits of the airgap are smaller than we expected them to be. Hence we would expect our preferred trade-off to swing in favour of more connections?
I live in Chile. In practice you would lock up (and even set up your lights with an endemic light timer so it looks like you're home) and the alternative is homelessness. Actual homelessness, not eviction. You still pay rent, only there's no roof over your head. You'd be homeless, not evicted. The ruins of your former house are a better home than the street. Shit in the corner, rebuild, that sort of thing. In practice you would not leave for vacations and for sure exercise right to bear arms, that's what's up. The police will ALWAYS tell you you're in safe hands with them don't get a gun in urban areas. They'll say it'll be used against you. I guess it could if you're a wimp. Yeah I'm such a wimp, the thug will walk right up while I do nothing but hold the gun, suck the bullets out of the barrel with his powerful lungs, and spit them out back at me!
Delaying has always been the point, whether it's Stuxnet or technology export bans or assassinating 4 scientists in the streets working on the program.
The damage goes way beyond delaying them one time, it also makes it way harder to use COTS hardware in the future. It's going to be a lot harder to get work done when you can't just buy a computer off Amazon.
They already had enrichment capabilities. What stuxnet targeted was and I believe is an active enrichment plant.
I don't think it did more than delay production and destroy some really expensive centrifuges but it could have been a message like "we'll get you no matter what" in order to bring them to the table or something.
