I looked up nuclear close calls because I thought false positive almost-launches only happened once or twice in the past. I had no idea the last one was in 1995 or that there were much more close calls than I expected. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
The last one likely wasn't 1995, that's the most recent publicly known. There is no way that India, Pakistan, and China have zero combined close calls.
I think it may have gotten some criticism at one point (I guess what doesn't these days), but probably one of my favorite books is on this topic, Command and Control.
It goes through a number of accidents that I wasn't personally aware of, but also goes through a number of political items that make the whole situation very scary, Such as I think it was the US Air Forces massive push back to putting any codes on the weapon triggers, or setting every code to 0000 when finally forced to do so. Or how a technician was able to smuggle out a training nuclear bomb to show his girlfriend what he did at work, which was stored with the live nuclear bombs.
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 any other country.
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.
I think the B83 (1.2 megatons) is the highest yield weapon currently in the US arsenal.
Which, while terrible (9 megatons ~= pressure wave that levels most structures in a largish city), pales in comparison to something like the B41 (25 megatons) or the B53 (9 megatons).
Generally speaking, the US and Russia both realized (~70s) that building excessively large bombs was inflexible and a waste of resources.
MIRVs have multiple smaller bombs, that can do much more damage than a single of equivalent tonnage to their cumulative (due to volume being more concentrated over ground plane, like cluster bombs).
> 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 result: missile defense, hypersonic reentry vehicles, hard target capable systems, smaller / tactical-sized warheads, launch site or attacker obfuscation.
Raising the likelihood that in the event anything happens to me I will ensure an unacceptable number of nukes are delivered to your country is one of the easier ways of ensuring deterrence and making the entire business unpalatable.
Nobody wants to destroy the world. But it's in everyone's interest to make everyone else think they're absolutely willing-to and capable-of, in the event they're strategically attacked.
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).
You're saying that assuming a nuke goes off and nobody knows where it came from, that logic dictates the US or anyone else will nuke the whole world. I utterly don't believe that this is a thing that is planned or arranged to happen.
No, I wasn't making a moral argument. I was talking about facts as I see them - I don't believe that the US or anyone else will blow up the world in response to being nuked. That is based on my thinking the game theory logic doesn't hold together and never has, but also historical events that indicate it was definitely invalid as of sometime in the 1960s.
The theory is that the US has committed to ruining things for everyone if bad things happen to them. Otherwise, hostile countries would have an incentive to create false flag attacks, or to incite an enemy to attack in truth. But if Iran knows that North Korea nuking DC means that they get nuked too (along with essentially everyone else on the planet), there's less incentive to make it happen.
Same goes for Russia/China - wouldn't either of them 'love' a world where the US got in a nuclear exchange with the other? No more competition!
> 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 sensible strategy is, basically, to Launch All The Things and wipe out your enemy before they can do the same.
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.
> 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.
The result of that strategy is irrelevant because it's obviously impossible. Sane people wouldn't destroy the world and insane people can't be relied on to do anything with certainty.
Any analysis of a game that relies on impossible moves is meaningless.
I don't think I've expressed moral opinions...? My comments are generally about my expectations for peoples' actions, not whether they should blow up the world.
Regarding your last sentence, logically inconsistent people cannot be relied upon to predict the actions of sociopaths.
Conversely, sociopaths, or just ruthless people with a goal of spreading disinformation, will promote logically inconsistent views, or the idea that trusted people are logically inconsistent.
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.
We know thanks to 9/11 that if the US is attacked it will retaliate against it's historic regional enemies without bothering you wait for confirmation or proof.
I bet if the US were nuked they would say it was Iran and North Korea working in sync and try to find confirmation in the ruins of a devastating counter strike.
This is what scares me. That life springs up all around us in our galaxy, and promptly 'F's it up before we even discover radio communications. So, if we ever find life, say on a Jovian moon, we've just increased the odds that there have been intelligent life... that just wasn't intelligent to not knock each other out.
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.
Yes, it was. Planes are very reliable. What's the odds there's a crash in Iran hours after they attach the US and are on high alert for a counter attack?
Sure. Sydney Airport on a pleasant summer afternoon? Odds so close to zero that it doesn't matter. Tehran Airport at what could be the start of a war with the US? If I were an insurer I'd be pricing that risk _way_ differently.
Not a “safe bet.” Reasonable assumption yes but no more. An American Airlines planet crashed only a few weeks after the September 01 attacks, but it was just an actual accident.
No, this is not chance of a crash anywhere, it's that a crash happens in Iran where there just aren't that many flights. Even more on this day when many airlines suspended flights. The math here is probability of air crash times number of flights in Iran, it's such a low number that one would be silly to think it's a coincidence.
The "engine failure" claim was simply unreasonable. Considering the altitude and the weather, there were a few ways that the aircraft could just suddenly go down without warning:
1. bomb on the aircraft
2. missile strike
3. collision with an aircraft larger than a hobby drone
I agree it's interesting. But since I haven't seen it mentioned here elsewhere in this thread, I'll bring up the alternate theory that this is a "limited hangout". In this version, Iran starts by professing complete innocence, but eventually confesses to shooting down the plane by mistake, whereas in actuality they shot down the plane intentionally. I have estimate of the likelihood of this explanation, but if it were true, I think it would be a very effective strategy of misdirection.
The main argument against this interpretation is that Iran would have no reason to intentionally shoot down an innocent airliner. I don't know that this is true. One theory is that there were people on the plane they wanted dead even at significant cost in embarassment. This doesn't seem impossible. Another theory is that they shooting was done intentionally by a faction trying to make Iran look bad, and Iran decided that calling it a mistake was less embarrassing than calling it treason or mutiny.
Anyway, my point isn't that there is necessarily some deeper conspiracy, only that it may still be too early to claim that the initial conspiracy theory was entirely correct, or offers a full explanation.
Yes, fair enough. I think our immediate theories on seeing the video didn't try to establish the level of intentionality, but were still correct about the basic facts known so far ("uh, that plane looks like it got shot down by a missile, probably by Iran").
So tragic, and I guess credit to the Iranians for admitting their mistake. It's good to see both sides walking back from war.
Edit: the voting behavior of this is pretty extreme, but I don't even know why. Do people think it isn't good they admitted it? Or is it simply "Iran should never get credit for anything"? Or is it "of course they had to" (which is clearly not the case, as the MH17 and initial denials around the shoot down of Korean Air 007 and Iran Air 655 shows)
> 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.
That's a stretch for them to claim that. More like being the aggressors in Iranian waters. Still afaik they did own up to shooting down the airliner, and did not try to blame Iran for doing that. Happy to be proven wrong.
The Wikipedia article you read says the US maintains that is what happened. The settlement they paid was specifically worded so that they could maintain that position. Claiming self defense is them claiming Iran was attacking them, or at least "someone" that was implied to be Iran, making Iran the one to blame.
Sorry to double post, but I was thinking about this. I think you assumed I meant the US blamed Iran for firing the missile that brought down the airliner, when I was saying the US said that Iran intentionally caused the accident. An understandable confusion given the connection to current events.
Even after Iran confirmed their missile was the one responsible for this crash, it was prudent to deny it until they ruled out a foreign infiltration. Stuxnet showed how far the US will go to infiltrate Iran.
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 out eventually in Iran. Video or not. After all, this incident happened over a populated area with the worlds best intelligence apparatus laser focused on it.
“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 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.
Oh I agree. I'm just saying there never seemed to be an organized or vigorous campaign of denial. The government was denying it while at the same time, the aviation authority seemed to be signalling that it welcomed international assistance.
>They would be left alone against the US. They had to.
That didn't deter the Russians in Ukraine. They still tried to cover it up. Badly.
I'm not sure your exact point, and where it conflicts with mine. You're saying that Iran would have preferred to sweep this under the rug? Well obviously.
I'm only saying that unlike the Russia incident they didn't even seem to attempt an organized cover up.
Putin isn't capable of admitting that he needs to use a toilet from time to time, because that isn't the way the KGB does things.
In addition I don't want to credit anybody with doing anything good as it is related to harming civilians. Nothing Iran can do related to that plane should in any way reflect anything but negatively on them, unless they can undo the shooting.
At this point we should seriously ban Anti-Air technology, it has already killed more people in peace time than nukes.
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.
Possibly. Though surely someone (or some algorithm) in the decision chain finds it odd that the enemy bomber takes off from their own countries airfield.
You don't usually see the take off on radar, especially not with high terrain around.
Western airport radar has gotten pretty good at picking up a plane within 2 miles from the runway but that's if it's specifically designed for it and positioned at the airport.
So some mobile missile launcher array would see the plane pop up a lot later. Someone sitting at the screen with their finger on the trigger could be startled by the first flight of the day and launch.
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 sensitivity deliberately set very high so as to provide counter-attacks no matter what? If that's the case, isn't it more than accidental?
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 seems like it should have happened is that the international airport grounded all outbound traffic and parked all non-emergency inbound traffic in holding, until such time as Iranian air defenses could relax their posture to guarantee safety.
I've wondered if this flight was the first departing flight for the day at 6:15 AM, so the first radar track headed towards the R&D facility and thus the "scenario fulfillment" they'd been waiting for all night (as mentioned by another poster).
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.
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.
Yeah. I tried to say that Iran has been sanctioned with so many measures for so long now that anything more we add won’t really make a difference, but I guess that went wrong :)
I’m no fan of what Trump did. But after a lot of sabre rattling and threats against the US, Iran holds a state funeral where innocent Iranians get crushed to death, launches a token missile strike, then incinerates a bunch of innocent Iranians by accident. How many own goals can you kick in one week?
I don't get what you are comparing? Trump's actions were deliberate, and almost universally acknowledged as misguided, dangerous, and foolish (with the reneging of a working deal the first and largest blunder).
Iran, under pressure, made a mistake. An accident happens. I don't see how one assigns some score to these events, yet your comments reads like "they deserve a few more assassinations and maybe a bit of bombardment for being so stupid as to show nerves when attacked by the fragile masculinity of a superpower in decline".
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 thing.
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.
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.
Meanwhile Iran also killed 1500 people a few weeks ago and there's been no news about that.
Iran was pushed to do this by the international community. Russia doesn't give a shit. Europe depends on Russia, so the consequences for Russia weren't a big deal.
Even if forced, it could deny it to high heaven. It is already isolated on the world stage, it is already under sanctions.
It chose not to deny. However, I would suspect it did so, just to demonstrate the crazy things a world on the brink of war can bring about.
Perhaps it's leaders calculated its to their benefit to own up and then say see what happens when nations are teetering on the edge of armed conflict.
OTOH, in case of MH17, even if there was no video, there were a lot of signs directly pointing to Russia. Russia was also forced, but it didn't give a shit.
In my book forced means the result is achieved. Russia did not take responsibility == it wasn't forced to.
Pressed? Yes. But not forced to. And unline Russia Iran didn't have any room to deny it, really. In MH17 case you might have all kind of info that points toward Russia, but still not enough to force it to admit responsibility.
In Iran's case - it was their system (owned by them), operated by their gus, stationed on their territory etc. There is really nothing to deny here. And yet they only confirmed their mistake only after being forced to do so.
PS: also - yes, they calculated this would be better for them in perspective. (again, unlike MH17 case)
Russia was never allowed to be part of investigation and offered to help with some data and was rejected.
Why would investigators reject possibly relevant data? It’s like if new evidence was brought up in court, but the judge would say “nah, thank you. We got enough. We know anyway who did it.”
Malaysia, who’s airline was shot, was also not allowed to participate in the investigation. I wonder why.
Because they could spread misinformation or selectively disclose some information while withholding information that could harm them.
It makes a ton of sense to not let the suspected parties join the investigation.
Well, you could make the same argument in court. Why allow defence to present their side of story? What if they lie and spread misinformation. Better not listen to them and just make a judgement without them.
By not allowing Russia to present their story because “what if” you are preemptively saying that they are guilty.
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...
The Iranian military would undoubtedly have known which missile systems would have been deployed in the area as well as the launch and impact characteristics of such systems. It would also be fairly unbelievable if one of the launchers came back two missiles short without any follow up.
While the thought-making process leading up to launch may take time to deceiper, I doubt they had any doubt as to what caused the crash.
Do you doubt there are lies between different layers of governance? And do you also doubt there's heavy cognitive dissonance required already in such theocratic nations?
We don’t need to. The point is that these elaborate theories are unnecessary. The government likely knew they were at fault, tried to avoid blame, and eventually fessed up. End of story.
There are the guys that shot the missile. The ones that command those guys, the ones that command those and commanders above those.
In the chaos of the tragedy, no body wants to open their mouth, in case they are executed for saying something that is against the direction which the nations top leaders want to take.
Then come the top leaders. With the escalating tensions with the US, having recently sent a barrage of missiles to Iraq, they are holding on to the horses of the country, on the edge of a cliff.
They have to discuss and deliberate a myriad of issues that are consequential to their every word.
They cannot be too rushed to say that they shot the plane down. It might create a chance for the US to spin this as a deliberate murder.
And all these are humans. Humans that run nations, whose millions of peoples lives are at stake.
Three days is perfectly OK.
I am glad Iran is honest enough to admit it's mistake, unlike Russia, for example.
Three days of silence? Yes. Three days of active denial? Hell no.
The Head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization had this to say: «The version that the plane was shot down by a rocket cannot be true under any circumstances … it is impossible from the scientific point of view.»
If they really wanted to tell the truth after some days then why wouldn't he just shut up in the meantime?
It’s not okay at all. They were furiously denying all claims that it was shot down by them. Saying it was scientifically impossible and that it was a sneer campaign by the states.
ONLY AFTER the video of it being shot down appeared did they admit to it. But only after several countries publicly said that Iran shot down the plane.
So no they didn’t do a good job. Stop giving them props for shooting down a plane and lying about it until they were exposed by the media.
Iranian officials did deny shooting the plane initially. They were indirectly compelled to accept their mistakes by several foreign agencies and by videos that surfaced on social media. They might be better than Russia but that not cannot cover up their lies over this issue.
They knew they shot down the plane just a few minutes after they did it. Yet, they lied about it 3 days straight. Admitting it after 3 days is surely more honest than Russia still not admitting they shot down MH17 5 years ago, but I wouldn't say it's "well done".
If you really want to compare the two events, note that after ~4 hours after the event the US did acknowledge it had shot down the airline. While it did to continue to maintain it wasn't in the wrong, there's a stark difference between that & the multi-day denial of Iran.
There's a pretty good short documentary about the USS Vincennes accidental shooting down of an Iranian commercial flight in 1988. Notably, it discusses the psychological phenomenon of "scenario fulfillment" that allegedly contributed to the disaster.
I'll leave it to more informed commenters here to discuss whether or not such a thing actually exists. But regardless, it's an interesting watch.
And before someone pounces, I'm not bringing this incident up due to any ideological "anti-US" agenda or some such silliness. I just think the doc is interesting, relevant, and worthy of discussion.
Yes. Considering the level of incompetency in Iranian military, the first thing they should do is stop the nuke program and focus on reforming their military.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadIt’s nuclear weapons. One wrong “Oops!” by the military and the entire world self-destructs in mutually assured annihilation. Absolutely depressing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)
It goes through a number of accidents that I wasn't personally aware of, but also goes through a number of political items that make the whole situation very scary, Such as I think it was the US Air Forces massive push back to putting any codes on the weapon triggers, or setting every code to 0000 when finally forced to do so. Or how a technician was able to smuggle out a training nuclear bomb to show his girlfriend what he did at work, which was stored with the live nuclear bombs.
Anyways, super interesting book.
Which, while terrible (9 megatons ~= pressure wave that levels most structures in a largish city), pales in comparison to something like the B41 (25 megatons) or the B53 (9 megatons).
Generally speaking, the US and Russia both realized (~70s) that building excessively large bombs was inflexible and a waste of resources.
The actual first-order effects are generally smaller than what you'd expect: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
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 result: missile defense, hypersonic reentry vehicles, hard target capable systems, smaller / tactical-sized warheads, launch site or attacker obfuscation.
Raising the likelihood that in the event anything happens to me I will ensure an unacceptable number of nukes are delivered to your country is one of the easier ways of ensuring deterrence and making the entire business unpalatable.
Nobody wants to destroy the world. But it's in everyone's interest to make everyone else think they're absolutely willing-to and capable-of, in the event they're strategically attacked.
The theory is that the US has committed to blowing up...Japan, say...if North Korea should succeed in missiling San Francisco?
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).
You're making a moral argument for why it shouldn't be so. I'm making an ammoral, logical argument for why it should.
Same goes for Russia/China - wouldn't either of them 'love' a world where the US got in a nuclear exchange with the other? No more competition!
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 sensible strategy is, basically, to Launch All The Things and wipe out your enemy before they can do the same.
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.
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.
Any analysis of a game that relies on impossible moves is meaningless.
People who share your morals probably wouldn't destroy the world. But there are absolutely scenarios where logical people would do so.
"Insane" has the same problem.
Logically inconsistent people cannot be relied upon to do anything with certainty. But sociopaths can.
Regarding your last sentence, logically inconsistent people cannot be relied upon to predict the actions of sociopaths.
Conversely, sociopaths, or just ruthless people with a goal of spreading disinformation, will promote logically inconsistent views, or the idea that trusted people are logically inconsistent.
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.
I bet if the US were nuked they would say it was Iran and North Korea working in sync and try to find confirmation in the ruins of a devastating counter strike.
Of course, there are regional reasons for this, multiple reasons that sadly never seem able to coexist with other people or tackle global challenges.
What happens if, say, the US or Russia detect what they think is an incoming attack and have the time to respond before it hits?
Nuclear capabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad
MAD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
Revenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-deadly
But indeed, the biggest bug of them all is us, humanity.
Subhead: Offers “thanks” to ComputerGuru
It's a safe bet.
1. bomb on the aircraft
2. missile strike
3. collision with an aircraft larger than a hobby drone
4. metal fatigue
5. evil in the cockpit
The main argument against this interpretation is that Iran would have no reason to intentionally shoot down an innocent airliner. I don't know that this is true. One theory is that there were people on the plane they wanted dead even at significant cost in embarassment. This doesn't seem impossible. Another theory is that they shooting was done intentionally by a faction trying to make Iran look bad, and Iran decided that calling it a mistake was less embarrassing than calling it treason or mutiny.
Anyway, my point isn't that there is necessarily some deeper conspiracy, only that it may still be too early to claim that the initial conspiracy theory was entirely correct, or offers a full explanation.
Edit: the voting behavior of this is pretty extreme, but I don't even know why. Do people think it isn't good they admitted it? Or is it simply "Iran should never get credit for anything"? Or is it "of course they had to" (which is clearly not the case, as the MH17 and initial denials around the shoot down of Korean Air 007 and Iran Air 655 shows)
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.
Even after Iran confirmed their missile was the one responsible for this crash, it was prudent to deny it until they ruled out a foreign infiltration. Stuxnet showed how far the US will go to infiltrate Iran.
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 out eventually in Iran. Video or not. After all, this incident happened over a populated area with the worlds best intelligence apparatus laser focused on it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/middleeast/missile-...
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.
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.
>They would be left alone against the US. They had to.
That didn't deter the Russians in Ukraine. They still tried to cover it up. Badly.
I'm only saying that unlike the Russia incident they didn't even seem to attempt an organized cover up.
People need to not forget these events and I'm worried one "good" (read: expected) act from them is going to make them forget.
I've lost family members to this corrupt country, so I'm a bit biased when I hate any sort of praise when they do the expected thing.
The Dutch are the ones who led the investigation and are now charging Russian citizens
In addition I don't want to credit anybody with doing anything good as it is related to harming civilians. Nothing Iran can do related to that plane should in any way reflect anything but negatively on them, unless they can undo the shooting.
At this point we should seriously ban Anti-Air technology, it has already killed more people in peace time than nukes.
Western airport radar has gotten pretty good at picking up a plane within 2 miles from the runway but that's if it's specifically designed for it and positioned at the airport.
So some mobile missile launcher array would see the plane pop up a lot later. Someone sitting at the screen with their finger on the trigger could be startled by the first flight of the day and launch.
One likes to think that automatic missiles should be fairly accurate and confident in their assessments.
My question i've wondered : was the sensitivity deliberately set very high so as to provide counter-attacks no matter what? If that's the case, isn't it more than accidental?
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 seems like it should have happened is that the international airport grounded all outbound traffic and parked all non-emergency inbound traffic in holding, until such time as Iranian air defenses could relax their posture to guarantee safety.
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, "RoE" stands for "Rules of Engagement".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_engagement
The warning system is automatic, but it is a human (in this case on heightened alert) that pulled the trigger.
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.
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.
Iran, under pressure, made a mistake. An accident happens. I don't see how one assigns some score to these events, yet your comments reads like "they deserve a few more assassinations and maybe a bit of bombardment for being so stupid as to show nerves when attacked by the fragile masculinity of a superpower in decline".
Yes Trump’s actions are deplorable, I agree.
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 thing.
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.
This coming forward will save the families and nations involved time and effort, and hopefully bring closure all the more quickly for them.
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.
Iran was pushed to do this by the international community. Russia doesn't give a shit. Europe depends on Russia, so the consequences for Russia weren't a big deal.
No, Iran was _forced_ to do so, they don't two shits otherwise.
Not so much preasure on Russia in case of MH17
It chose not to deny. However, I would suspect it did so, just to demonstrate the crazy things a world on the brink of war can bring about.
Perhaps it's leaders calculated its to their benefit to own up and then say see what happens when nations are teetering on the edge of armed conflict.
OTOH, in case of MH17, even if there was no video, there were a lot of signs directly pointing to Russia. Russia was also forced, but it didn't give a shit.
In my book forced means the result is achieved. Russia did not take responsibility == it wasn't forced to.
Pressed? Yes. But not forced to. And unline Russia Iran didn't have any room to deny it, really. In MH17 case you might have all kind of info that points toward Russia, but still not enough to force it to admit responsibility.
In Iran's case - it was their system (owned by them), operated by their gus, stationed on their territory etc. There is really nothing to deny here. And yet they only confirmed their mistake only after being forced to do so.
PS: also - yes, they calculated this would be better for them in perspective. (again, unlike MH17 case)
Then the cell phone video of the second missile hitting the plane came out. It's easy to own up to mistakes when your hand is forced.
Why would investigators reject possibly relevant data? It’s like if new evidence was brought up in court, but the judge would say “nah, thank you. We got enough. We know anyway who did it.”
Malaysia, who’s airline was shot, was also not allowed to participate in the investigation. I wonder why.
By not allowing Russia to present their story because “what if” you are preemptively saying that they are guilty.
Why was Ukraine allowed to participate?
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...
The Iranian military would undoubtedly have known which missile systems would have been deployed in the area as well as the launch and impact characteristics of such systems. It would also be fairly unbelievable if one of the launchers came back two missiles short without any follow up.
While the thought-making process leading up to launch may take time to deceiper, I doubt they had any doubt as to what caused the crash.
Think of how many level of people are there.
There are the guys that shot the missile. The ones that command those guys, the ones that command those and commanders above those.
In the chaos of the tragedy, no body wants to open their mouth, in case they are executed for saying something that is against the direction which the nations top leaders want to take.
Then come the top leaders. With the escalating tensions with the US, having recently sent a barrage of missiles to Iraq, they are holding on to the horses of the country, on the edge of a cliff.
They have to discuss and deliberate a myriad of issues that are consequential to their every word.
They cannot be too rushed to say that they shot the plane down. It might create a chance for the US to spin this as a deliberate murder.
And all these are humans. Humans that run nations, whose millions of peoples lives are at stake.
Three days is perfectly OK.
I am glad Iran is honest enough to admit it's mistake, unlike Russia, for example.
Three days of silence? Yes. Three days of active denial? Hell no.
The Head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization had this to say: «The version that the plane was shot down by a rocket cannot be true under any circumstances … it is impossible from the scientific point of view.»
If they really wanted to tell the truth after some days then why wouldn't he just shut up in the meantime?
However, they could have said even they were not sure, and that they are investigating.
So no they didn’t do a good job. Stop giving them props for shooting down a plane and lying about it until they were exposed by the media.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4763550/user-clip-george-h-w-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Aftermath
Ronald Reagan, the actual president at the time, did apologize a few days after the event.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/07/06/r...
If you really want to compare the two events, note that after ~4 hours after the event the US did acknowledge it had shot down the airline. While it did to continue to maintain it wasn't in the wrong, there's a stark difference between that & the multi-day denial of Iran.
I'll leave it to more informed commenters here to discuss whether or not such a thing actually exists. But regardless, it's an interesting watch.
https://youtu.be/lRJnumxuHwY
And before someone pounces, I'm not bringing this incident up due to any ideological "anti-US" agenda or some such silliness. I just think the doc is interesting, relevant, and worthy of discussion.
https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2017/9/23/75c570944...