from NEW SCIENTIST:

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When George W Bush handed over the presidential reins to Barack Obama in 2008, he asked that the incoming man continue running what he regarded as two of his administration's most promising security programs: the remotely-piloted drone war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan - and the development of a cyberweapon nicknamed 'the bug', aimed at destroying Iran's nascent nuclear capability.

Obama agreed - but we have now come to know that bug by another name: Stuxnet.

This revelation is at the heart of an apparently impeccably-sourced book due to be published in the US on 12 June. In Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, author David Sanger alleges that Stuxnet, which eventually wrecked hundreds of uranium centrifuges in Iran in 2010, was created by cyberweapons experts at the US National Security Agency in collaboration with 'Unit 8200', a cyber operation of Israeli intelligence.

The worm worked by issuing commands that suddenly slowed the fast-spinning centrifuges - smashing them to pieces in the process. While motives alone have always suggested US and Israeli involvement in Stuxnet - they are after all the most vocal opponents of Iran's nuclear power and weapons capability - the book is the first account to provide evidence to back that theory. No forensic analysis has yet come close to identifying the authors of the worm.

Sanger says the Stuxnet program - then codenamed "Olympic Games" - began under the Bush administration  with a low level spyware campaign that gradually mapped the network configuration of the computer and embedded control systems in Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Once the spyware reported back, coders were able to construct software that would use that map to invade the plant's control systems to issue overspeed and sudden braking commands - while reporting that all was fine to operators. The plant's management fired some operators as a result, thinking them incompetent.

Some of Sanger's anonymous sources - who he says are "American, European and Israeli" - are extraordinarily close to the White House and publication of an excerpt in the New York Times (where Sanger is a journalist) today will doubtless have kicked off a hunt for moles in Washington, DC. For instance, Sanger describes in detail one such Bush administration meeting in the White House Situation Room in which the wrecked "rubble" of a test centrifuge from the Oak Ridge Lab in Tennessee was revealed to demonstrate how well an early version of Stuxnet worked in tests.

Under Obama, all was not sweetness and light between the US and Israeli coding teams: Stuxnet was meant to stay within the Natanz network only - but Sanger quotes a US source saying a coding error by the Israelis led to the bug copying itself in the outside world. As a result Obama is said to have come close to shutting the program down - but decided its continuing nuclear havoc was worth the risk. However, Stuxnet's subsequent discovery by antivirus firms, who undertook widely-publicised analyses of its code, tipped off the Iranians to its presence.

Stuxnet's heritage lives on however: in proving that malware can attack and destroy industrial infrastructure, it was merely in the vanguard of a new breed of viruses, like the recently discovered Flame, whose capabilities could be profound.