On June 7, 1981, 8 F-16 fighter jets, each carrying two, 2,000-pound bombs, departed from an Air Force base

near Eilat, heading southeast so that they could avoid Jordanian airspace. They then turned

north and headed through Saudi Arabia toward Iraq, where, avoiding radar detection, they bombed Saddam Hussein's

nearly operational nuclear facility. The pilots then made their way back to Israel, and Operation

Opera, one of the boldest and most brilliantly executed operations

in the history of military aviation, was successfully completed.

Think for a moment about all that went into that operation. Not only the 8 F-16s, but also

6 F-15 support planes that accompanied them, and the rescue helicopters, and additional planes,

sitting on the tarmac, waiting to take off at a moment's notice to rescue potentially

downed pilots. In 1981, in order for Monachem Begin's government to neutralize a nuclear threat

from a hostile power, it would have to risk an operation that complex, that daring,

that expensive, dozens of lives on the line, potentially dozens or even more civilian casualties

on the other side. Millions upon millions of dollars in equipment. This operation was a success,

thank God. But to aim for that success, you'd have to be willing

to sacrifice an awful lot. Now let's fast forward to 2010, some three decades later. Israel faces

another adversary, equally bent on developing the nuclear capacity to threaten Israel existentially.

But now, rather than strap ton-sized bombs onto fighter jets and fly them in radio silence,

weaving under and around radar sensors, the Israelis neutralized that threat by means of a computer virus.

It was developed and deployed from an air-conditioned office building.

We're in a world now in which a new battlefield has opened up,

not only the sea, land, and air, cyberspace is a new theater of war. Israel's done very well in

that theater, and its military investment and military success has given birth to startups, and now

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