http://jeffreycarr.blogspot.com/2012/06/myth-of-cia-and-tran...
Also, this story seems to be taking on a life of its own. You have some details that were not in previous rounds. Integer overflow based on uptime was not in the original unverified story.
I think this account might be a bit wrong. The one I read said that the CIA acquired a "shopping list" of Western technology that the USSR wanted to acquire. It included the pipeline control software, so they arranged for a trojaned version to become available to the Soviet shoppers.
Apparently this was a pretty common Soviet activity. Their electronics technology was behind the West's, in general. IIRC, many US semiconductor designs has little cartoons on the dies to taunt the Soviet reverse engineers.
In response, the US introduced an integer overflow bug that was uptime dependent, and took something like 6 months to hit. The bug simultaneously cranked up the pumps and closed all the valves in the network.
It was known that the Soviet economy would crash in under a year without the ability to cheaply move natural gas, so they couldn’t test long enough to find this.
A year or so later, the DoD’s seismographs detected the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history.
The main impact wasn’t the explosion or the short-term economic damage. The main impact was that the USSR stopped trusting stolen software, which set them way further back, economically and militarily.
Arguably, that ~one line of code was infinitely more sophisticated than stuxnet.