Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

by Andy Greenberg

it has to be turned into a gas and pumped into a centrifuge’s long, aluminum cylinder. A chamber inside the length of that cylinder is spun by a motor at one end, revolving at tens of thousands of rotations per minute, such that the outer edge of the chamber is moving beyond the speed of sound. The centrifugal force pushing from the center toward the walls of that spinning chamber reaches as much as a million times the force of gravity, separating out the heavier uranium-238 so that the uranium-235 can be siphoned off. To reach weapons-grade concentrations, the process has to be repeated again and again through a “cascade” of centrifuges. That’s why a nuclear enrichment facility such as the one hidden deep beneath Natanz requires a vast