What an absolute tragedy. Well done to Iran for coming forward, admitting it and expressing their regrets over it. It's a stark cry from the utter denial others have expressed when similar accidents have happened, and astronomically further than when George H. W. Bush proclaimed "I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy." when the Navy shot down Iran Air flight 655 in '88.
This coming forward will save the families and nations involved time and effort, and hopefully bring closure all the more quickly for them.
One oops and maybe something gets nuked, but I don't think it makes any sense to worry about the whole world being destroyed. Why would they? I mean, if the US was hit, it would be like 9/11 only bigger, and I'm sure people would be talking about glass parking lots, but why would all the missiles be launched towards everywhere? Who wants to destroy the world and why wouldn't they have done it already? Same goes for a…
> why would all the missiles be launched towards everywhere? Because that's the way nuclear deterrent theory works. If you collapse the game theory calculus down, it turns into "Any technology or action that makes it less likely an adversary will respond with an unacceptable counterstrike on me makes it more likely that I will consider a first strike a viable option." Examples of technologies or activities with this…
"Because that's the way nuclear deterrent theory works."
The theory is that the US has committed to blowing up...Japan, say...if North Korea should succeed in missiling San Francisco?
Why the scare quotes? I think we can be pretty confident that Iran did not do this on purpose.
Every time a BBC link is posted this comes up. BBC does not use scare quotes but BBC prefers (requires?) important/central descriptive or modifiers to be directly quoted, even when they’re single words.
This is not a BBC link (British Broadcasting Corporation). It is from CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).
One oops and maybe something gets nuked, but I don't think it makes any sense to worry about the whole world being destroyed. Why would they? I mean, if the US was hit, it would be like 9/11 only bigger, and I'm sure people would be talking about glass parking lots, but why would all the missiles be launched towards everywhere? Who wants to destroy the world and why wouldn't they have done it already? Same goes for a…
> Who wants to destroy the world and why wouldn't they have done it already? Who wants to shoot down a civilian airliner and why wouldn't they have done it already? It's not about the desire to destroy humanity. It's about the catastrophic scenarios that can arise when nuclear armed countries think they're under nuclear attack and start getting jumpy about counter strikes or even pre-emptive strikes. The only sensibl…
People shoot down civilian airliners "all the time". Nobody shoots down all the airliners in the world.
If you destroy the world after being nuked, that is strictly worse than not destroying the world after being nuked, so nobody would do it. Since nobody would do it, and that is obvious, there is no such thing as holding the world hostage as a deterrent. If you maintain that some person or group is insane enough to destroy the world, there still can be no deterrent because you can't expect insane people to behave according to logic or plan.
> I guess credit to the Iranians for admitting their mistake. They denied it up until a few hours ago even after the video evidence first dropped. After a bunch of countries said they had intelligence that it was shot down they walked back their story.
They denied it at first, yes. But they were also surprisingly open to allowing foreign investigators on site. They even agreed to give the black boxes over to the Ukrainians. If they were trying to hide something I feel like they would have handled it much differently. Like, for instance how the Russian-backed forces acted when they did the same thing in 2014. Deny, deflect, deny, repeat. The truth would have come ou…
“A senior administration official said Friday that he thought the Iranians wanted American investigators there to keep up the appearance that they did not know what had caused the crash.”
That seems very likely. They probably had anti-aircraft and anti-missile missile systems fully armed and something either automatically mis-categorized the aircraft as a bomber or missile and shot at it or someone got nervous and trigger happy.
you're probably right -- but the fact that a missile can fire automatically with either 1): inaccurate confidence in the target being what they think it is or 2) an improper confidence threshold allowing for the misclassification of an airliner as a missile, is pretty scary. One likes to think that automatic missiles should be fairly accurate and confident in their assessments. My question i've wondered : was the sen…
If you’re expecting a lion to jump out of the bushes and you see the bushes rustling, do you wait to make sure or do you run?
Of course you run.
And don’t forget there is a long history of using civilian craft to sneak military things in and out of warzones. Even using hospital ships to transfer munitions.
What an absolute tragedy. Well done to Iran for coming forward, admitting it and expressing their regrets over it. It's a stark cry from the utter denial others have expressed when similar accidents have happened, and astronomically further than when George H. W. Bush proclaimed "I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy." when the N…
No this isn't well done.
It took them three days to say this. How did it take them three days to realize they shot a missile? Especially since they had a denial campaign going on for three goddamn days.
This was just external pressure on Iran forcing them to do this. If this flight wasn't an international one it would've been swept under the rug.
One oops and maybe something gets nuked, but I don't think it makes any sense to worry about the whole world being destroyed. Why would they? I mean, if the US was hit, it would be like 9/11 only bigger, and I'm sure people would be talking about glass parking lots, but why would all the missiles be launched towards everywhere? Who wants to destroy the world and why wouldn't they have done it already? Same goes for a…
I think you don't have an appreciation of the devastation that modern thermonuclear warheads are capable of, as well as the sophisticated delivery systems that the United States has concocted and refined over many, many years.
Modern warheads are smaller, not larger - everybody knows that. And what "sophisticated" means is better targeting, which is why smaller weapons can be used. Those things seem to point away from blowing up the entire world. I don't know if it's true, but there was a rumor that if one wanted to, it would be technically feasible to make a hydrogen bomb of unlimited size - e.g. crack the planet in half. However, that path was not taken.
you're probably right -- but the fact that a missile can fire automatically with either 1): inaccurate confidence in the target being what they think it is or 2) an improper confidence threshold allowing for the misclassification of an airliner as a missile, is pretty scary. One likes to think that automatic missiles should be fairly accurate and confident in their assessments. My question i've wondered : was the sen…
If a strike aircraft were that close to a sensitive military installation (by accounts: missile R&D facility) then it could launch weapons at any second. There likely wasn't "human-scale" time to confirm identity. And specifically against a US adversary with stealth technology, it would make sense to have automated air defense systems on a hair trigger and human air defense systems with extremely liberal RoE. What se…
> extremely liberal RoE
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, "RoE" stands for "Rules of Engagement".
> I guess credit to the Iranians for admitting their mistake. They denied it up until a few hours ago even after the video evidence first dropped. After a bunch of countries said they had intelligence that it was shot down they walked back their story.
They denied it at first, yes. But they were also surprisingly open to allowing foreign investigators on site. They even agreed to give the black boxes over to the Ukrainians. If they were trying to hide something I feel like they would have handled it much differently. Like, for instance how the Russian-backed forces acted when they did the same thing in 2014. Deny, deflect, deny, repeat. The truth would have come ou…
If they didn't they would've lost any support they had left in the world.
They would be left alone against the US. They had to.
Iran did the right thing after realizing the thing they wanted to do was too costly.