U.S. had cyberattack planned in case Iran nuclear deal failed

BERLIN — In the early years of the Obama administration, the United States developed an elaborate plan for a cyberattack on Iran in case the diplomatic effort to limit its nuclear program failed and led to a military conflict, according to a forthcoming documentary film and interviews with military and intelligence officials involved in the effort.

The plan, code-named Nitro Zeus, was designed to disable Iran’s air defenses, communications systems and key parts of its power grid. It was shelved, at least for the foreseeable future, after the nuclear deal struck between Iran and six other nations last summer was fulfilled.

Nitro Zeus was part of an effort to assure President Barack Obama that he had alternatives short of a full-scale war if Iran lashed out at the United States or its allies in the region. At its height, officials say, the planning for Nitro Zeus involved thousands of U.S. military and intelligence personnel, spending tens of millions of dollars, and placing electronic implants in Iranian computer networks to “prepare the battlefield,” in the parlance of the Pentagon.

The U.S. military develops contingency plans for all kinds of possible conflicts, such as a North Korean attack on the South, loose nuclear weapons in South Asia, or uprisings in Africa or Latin America. Most sit on the shelf and are updated every few years. But this one took on far greater urgency, in part because White House officials believed there was a good chance that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel would decide to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the United States would be drawn into the hostilities that followed.

While the Pentagon was making those preparations, U.S. intelligence agencies developed a separate, far more narrowly focused cyber plan to disable the Fordo nuclear enrichment site, which Iran built deep inside a mountain near the city of Qum. The attack would have been a covert operation, which the president can authorize even in the absence of an ongoing conflict.

The proposed intelligence operation would have inserted a computer “worm” into the f acility with the aim of frying Fordo’s computer systems — effectively delaying or destroying the ability of Iranian centrifuges to enrich uranium at the site.