State sponsored attempts to hack public network infrastructure fit into a totally different category. These are not the same.
There's plenty of literature on this. Whoever created stuxnet created another monster too.
From what we know the US was doing everything possible to be restrained about this stuff, keep it on the downlow as is the way, and history has shown they were very much right. It's insane what's happened in the aftermath.
We created a monster. We really did. It's clear to anyone watching.
There are plenty of American military projects that deeply worry other countries.
"The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike."
https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
Box 2: A small theocratic dictatorship, ruled by a Supreme Leader for life, who has been at constant war with its neighbors for pretty much all of modern history and still openly calls for the obliteration of some of them. It's a place where people are executed for adultery and homosexuality, and until recently the preferred method was stoning. After losing a half-million people in human wave attacks during its last big war, the country's Supreme Leader wants a bigger badder boom.
If these two things are the same in your mind, you are so far outside the bounds of rational thought that I'll just have to assume you're trolling.
As other pointed out, before stuxnet cyberwarfare wasn't as firmly acknowledged as an official arena, so this type of high profile attack on unprotected target is something you get to do once, and the CIA used it to toot its own horn basically.
I expect it was much like the Manhattan project: they spent all that time developing a weapon so when it came time to use it there wasn't much reflection about how to employ it strategically.
Stuxnet targeted some common industrial controllers being sold not only to Iran, and one usage was the control flows on the dams. Basically it just caused the control flow gates to jam. This one that I know of is not military at all!
The stuxnet targeted parameters was Siemens S7-300, connected with a Vacon or Fararo Paya PLC, spinning between 807 Hz and 1,210 Hz. It then periodically modified the frequency to 1,410 Hz and then to 2 Hz and then to 1,064 Hz.
What specific dam had their control flow gates jammed because of this? Please provide name, date and optionally a link.
