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Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

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Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#61

Post by mthoms »

dole wrote: post #45
mthoms wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/middleeast/missile-...

That would have gone terribly. The Iranians aren't that stupid.

What I think likely happened is that the Iranian aviation authority was misled by their own government and actually believed it was an accident. At least at first.

Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#62

Post by mola »

aaron695 wrote: post #37

We live in a world where we punish for incorrectly jumping to conclusions. But we don't punish for not stating correct conclusions when things happen. Which seems to be a fault in the way things work. People who go with cowardice, of lets not talk to soon, or don't speculate, or just tow official lines rule. It's why we had Weapons of Mass Destruction. It's why Science has the replication issues. It's not a small thi…

Speculation is good, when done by people with proper knowledge and information. Anyone can be correct in hindsight, just by pure 50% chance.

If we start punishing ANYONE with a speculation regarding ANY situation, we'll end up both punishing everyone, and be swamped with uninformed noise.

we do punish informed and knowledgeable people when they don't speak up, this is usually the basis for negligence law suits.

Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#63

Post by gizmo686 »

serf wrote: post #29
api wrote: post #19

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…

As others mentioned, it was not an automatic attack; humans were in the loop. Even with humans in the loop. I think it is fair to say that sensitivity was set very high; the only difference is that it is much harder to control high sensitive humans are.

Regardless of that, keep in mind that this happened hours after Iran bombed military bases of the country that runs the worlds largest airforce, and days after said military bombed their general.

Under these circumstances, it is entirely reasonable, normal, and expected that Iran would set their sensitivities to very high. It is also expected that doing so greatly increases the risk of an accident, which is why countries only do it when they have extra reason to suspect an attack is likely. The downside of a false negative is not 0. It is that who-knows-what gets bombed, and who-knows-how-many people die, causing who-knows-how-much damage to the country and its ability to defend itself in the future.

This situation is also how wars start. We got lucky that the mistake seems to be such that the big players (eg. the US) are willing to let this go as an accident and let hostilities return to their normal simmer.

Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#64

Post by ethbro »

perl4ever wrote: post #44
csallen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Possibly.

But it is also strictly dominating (in the time before nuclear exchange) to make everyone else believe with absolute certainty that you're willing to destroy the world after being nuked.

Therein lays one of the quandaries of nuclear weapons policy.

Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#65

Post by konart »

Aeolun wrote: post #52
aaomidi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if it was external pressure, we’re still waiting for Russia to say the same. Iran actually did.

> Iran actually did.

No, Iran was _forced_ to do so, they don't two shits otherwise.

Not so much preasure on Russia in case of MH17

Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#66

Post by seer »

csallen wrote: post #32
perl4ever wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think MAD was an effective strategy when you had one and only one sure adversary. Only one other country that was willing and able to come at you with nukes.

Today’s world - say someone nuked Moscow - who would the russian nukes be set to fire on? USA, China, Germany? If it was a single nuke it most probably is from a terrorist / under cover organization from one of the smaller nations Russia has wronged in the past who had gotten their hands on a nuke somehow. And Russia’s calculus is relatively simple. Who has the USA wronged recently? Quite a lot of players outside of China, Russia, Europe would like to see USA’s demise. So who should the USA retaliate on?

I highly doubt that a MAD doctrine is still in effect. That’s why nuclear subs are such an attractive weapon - you can wait and see who your enemy is, and then glass the bastards days / months later.

Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#67

Post by bigiain »

aaomidi wrote: post #47
cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #41

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.

A possible explanation might be that the guys who actually fired the missile have spent three days trying to avoid blame, and that it's taken that long for the truth t make it's way up the leadership ladder.

I suspect if I was an army grunt who'd fired of a shoulder launched missile only to realise just too late that it was a civilian airliner, I'd be AWOL and in hiding for _way_ longer than three days...

Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#68

Post by ethbro »

perl4ever wrote: post #42
ethbro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

See point on attribution.

How do we know the weapons originated from North Korea, and not Japan, or the UK, or some other unlikely source?

Because we saw the missile radar tracks? What if it was a shipping container or UUV bomb?

This is why huge sums of money have been spent on post-detonation nuclear fingerprinting with high accuracy.

Absent a high likelihood of correctly attributing the source, one must default to retaliating against everyone.

Only once one establishes a credible belief in an adversary that the true source will likely be discovered can one relax policy to retaliation only against the source (and probably its allies).

Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#69

Post by bigiain »

Aeolun wrote: post #56
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #24

Horribly tragic. But let those who have never shot down a civilian airliner in error be the first to throw stones...

Not like throwing stones will have any effect at this point. Iran is already pretty well covered in them.

"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein

Re: Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says

#70

Post by egdod »

cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #41

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…

That’s a commonly repeated bit of fake news. Bush did say that, but it unrelated to Iran Air 655. Here’s the actual context:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4763550/user-clip-george-h-w-...

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