Yesterday Reuters reported US President Barack Obama emphatically stating that Joe Biden’s comments this week on ABC were not a “green light” to Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Yet he did reiterrate Biden’s argument that Washington cannot “dictate to other countries what their security interests are.”

If Israel were to decide to try to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, how might it do that? It sounds almost like something from a spy novel, but Reuters’ Dan Williams reports that Israel may use “cyber warfare” to accomplish that goal.

“… malware — a commonly used abbreviation for “malicious software” — could be inserted to corrupt, commandeer or crash the controls of sensitive sites like uranium enrichment plants.

Such attacks could be immediate, [Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit] said. Or they might be latent, with the malware loitering unseen and awaiting an external trigger, or pre-set to strike automatically when the infected facility reaches a more critical level of activity.

As Iran’s nuclear assets would probably be isolated from outside computers, hackers would be unable to access them directly, Borg said. Israeli agents would have to conceal the malware in software used by the Iranians or discreetly plant it on portable hardware brought in, unknowingly, by technicians. “A contaminated USB key would be enough,” he said.”

(To get the whole story, click here.)

Mind you, click here and here for a reminder, again from Dan, that Israel also possesses, it is assumed, more traditional weapons of mass destruction. Dan told us Israel has just sent one of its nuclear-armed submarines through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea in what officials called a deliberate signal to Iran.

Meanwhile, as Obama calls for engagement and diplomacy, top US military advisers argue he needs to hurry up.

“There’s a great deal that certainly depends on the dialogue and the engagement,” [said Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff] . “I’m hopeful that that dialogue is productive. I worry about it a great deal if it’s not.” Mullen noted that some forecasters believe Iran could be as little as a year away from developing a nuclear bomb, adding: “The clock has continued to tick.”

(See the entire story here).