The Stuxnet worm which speeded up Iranian nuclear centrifuges in 2010, causing a third of them to shatter, seems a more clear-cut example of cyberwarfare. Since Iranian nuclear facilities are not connected to the internet, a tainted memory stick was presumably introduced to a technician's laptop. The one-off nature of this attack makes it a poor instrument of warfare. Whoever engineered the worm had access to Siemens' designs for the main operating computers, "legacy" information which cannot bypass the Iranians' defensive security systems. Such precisely engineered programmes are also ill-suited to causing a more widespread electronic apocalypse of the sort imagined by Richard Clarke. Around 100,000 computers — from India to Indonesia — were also infected by the Stuxnet worm, with no appreciable ill-effect. 

If the threat of cyberwarfare — in which not a single person has been killed or wounded so far — has been exaggerated, there is one area of genuine concern. Thomas Rid rightly draws attention to Chinese and Russian enthusiasm for a UN international code of conduct, including networks used to subvert "political, economic and social stability". Their real concern is with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which now play a prominent role in asymmetric domestic conflicts between peoples and their governments. That is what they really want to "regulate" — their euphemism for the ability to shut them down. Since there is no reason why such networks should automatically operate in a subversive way here too — although they may have been a factor in the recent English riots — we should be very cautious about what apocalyptic invocations of "cyberwarfare" might really entail.