Kevin Maney USA TODAY

Imagine Saddam Hussein sitting in one of his palaces, tapping on his laptop, maybe shopping at Uranium Online.

Which actually exists, by the way. Tag line: ''The nuclear fuel e-commerce solution.''

All of a sudden, Saddam's computer explodes with e-mail. It's all spam, made in America -- thousands of offers. Consolidate your debt. Earn money working at home. Enlarge your breasts.

It would be like Internet carpet bombing. He'd surrender within days.

In reality, the U.S. military is developing cyberwarfare weapons. Details of the program are top secret. OK, it probably doesn't involve unleashing spammers on Iraq, but you never know.

Whatever the plan, the concept of cyberwar brings up a whole boatload of questions. No nation has ever used Internet technology to launch a military cyberassault. Cyberattacks would be one of those technological firsts that changes the nature of war, historians say. In that sense, it could have an effect like the longbow, a technological advantage that helped the English whip the French, albeit slowly, in the Hundred Years War.

Although, cyberwar could be more like the first nuclear bombs in one important sense: As with the first nukes, no one knows what might happen if cyberwar is unleashed. It could backfire and result in rapacious attacks on U.S. computer systems. So the United States seems to be thinking hard about whether and how it would use this new weapon.

Of course, cyberwar doesn't involve a better way to kill people or blow things up, which is a welcome divergence from the history of new weapons. As unknowns go, it's not nearly as frightening as biowarfare. Still, its impact could be great.

''The danger from computer warfare is very real,'' says Amir Aczel, author of books such as The Riddle of the Compass, about significant technologies of the past.

Under U.S. Strategic Command in the Pentagon is a unit called Joint Task Force-Computer Network Operations. In military parlance, it's the JTF-CNO, or just the CNO. Under the CNO comes the CND (Computer Network Defense) and the CNA (Computer Network Attack). All are extremely secretive. You won't see the CNO, CND or CNA on CNN.

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