Since the Soviet Union became the second nation with nuclear weapons in 1949, American presidents have tried to answer a very difficult question: how can they keep other countries from getting nuclear weapons, and can that be done without going to war. Responses have varied across the decades and administrations, with treaties and test bans shaping the process. It turns out that early in the Obama administration, when it appeared inevitable Iran would complete a nuclear weapon, the administration devoted resources to crafting a cyber weapon to halt the process, and they gave it a name straight out of a bad movie: Nitro Zeus.
In the high desert near Bluffdale, Utah, there lurks a creature made entirely of zeroes and ones. Called "MonsterMind", the project is an automated cyber weapon, perched atop the data flows into the National Security Agency's Mission Data Repository. According to recent revelations from former government contractor and NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Monstermind is both tremendously powerful and easily fooled. Here's the skinny on the biggest revelation from Wired's recent profile of Snowden. Author James Bamford writes:
