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Ukrainian plane was 'unintentionally' shot down, Iran state TV says
- seibelj 7y agoThis is why my number 1 fear for the destruction of humanity is not climate change, plague, asteroids, or super volcanoes. It’s nuclear weapons. One wrong “Oops!” by the military and the entire world self-destructs in mutually assured annihilation. Absolutely depressing.
- grp000 7y agoI 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
- boomboomsubban 7y agoThe 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.
- kevin_nisbet 7y agoI 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book) 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.
- perl4ever 7y agoOne 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.
- arthurcolle 7y agoI 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.
- perl4ever 7y agoModern 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.
- ethbro 7y agoI 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. The actual first-order effects are generally smaller than what you'd expect: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
- cma 7y agoMIRVs 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).
- chime 7y agoAka The Great Filter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
- powerbroker 7y agoThis 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.
- sebazzz 7y agoOr a software bug or hack of course. The ignition of a weapon is just some relais somewhere. The targeting is all digital also nowadays. But indeed, the biggest bug of them all is us, humanity.
- tus88 7y agoAs if there was any doubt about this conclusion.
- dilap 7y agoWhy the scare quotes? I think we can be pretty confident that Iran did not do this on purpose.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- flyingcroissant 7y agoIt’s a quote. They’re not scare quotes.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoEvery 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.
- smnrchrds 7y agoThis is not a BBC link (British Broadcasting Corporation). It is from CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).
- dilap 7y agoHeadline: HN user dilap claims BBC quoting style is “confusing” Subhead: Offers “thanks” to ComputerGuru
- ComputerGuru 7y agoI think the Onion does the same thing ;)
- throw7 7y agoI'm sure trump is happy that not 1 american _citizen_ was on that plane. And I'm sure he's not learned anything from this.
- cjbprime 7y agoIt's interesting that for once, the immediate rumor take within an hour of the event (e.g. in the HN thread about the video) was simply correct.
- avocado4 7y agoIt was glaringly obvious from the first report considering the ongoing missile strike.
- eloff 7y agoYes, 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? It's a safe bet.
- c0nducktr 7y agoI'd assume the odds of a country shooting down an aircraft that took off from their own airport ought to be pretty low as well.
- bigiain 7y agoSure. 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.
- idiocratic 7y agoMost major airlines suspended flights to and from Teheran on that day, so the odds were a bit higher than normal.
- gumby 7y agoNot 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.
- nl 7y agoSo 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)
- awb 7y ago> 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.
- boomboomsubban 7y agoDenying it until they completed their investigation is just smart. The US has a history of blowing up planes and blaming Iran after all.
- eloff 7y agoSorry, what history?
- jacquesm 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
- reaperducer 7y agoAs unfortunate as it was, one incident ≠ "a history."
- 7y ago
- api 7y agoThat 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.
- thelittleone 7y agoPossibly. Though surely someone (or some algorithm) in the decision chain finds it odd that the enemy bomber takes off from their own countries airfield.
- t0mas88 7y agoYou 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.
- serf 7y agoyou'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?
- ethbro 7y agoIf 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.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoHorribly tragic. But let those who have never shot down a civilian airliner in error be the first to throw stones...
- Aeolun 7y agoNot like throwing stones will have any effect at this point. Iran is already pretty well covered in them.
- bigiain 7y ago"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
- Aeolun 7y agoYeah. 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 :)
- Gatsky 7y agoI’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?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoI 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".
- Gatsky 7y agoI’m comparing Iran to other countries that can safely organise a funeral and don’t shoot down planes because they are ‘nervous’. Yes Trump’s actions are deplorable, I agree.
- aaron695 7y agoWe 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.
- mola 7y agoSpeculation 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.
- loquor 7y agoYour comment reads like a Seth Godin blog post.
- cmdshiftf4 7y agoWhat 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.
- aaomidi 7y agoNo 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.
- Aeolun 7y agoEven if it was external pressure, we’re still waiting for Russia to say the same. Iran actually did.
- aaomidi 7y agoMeanwhile 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.
- konart 7y ago> 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
- kumarvvr 7y ago
- mthoms 7y agoThere'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. https://youtu.be/lRJnumxuHwY 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.
- tunesmith 7y agoWith that in mind, it's even more amazing we've avoided full-on nuclear war multiple times.
- bufferoverflow 7y agoIran doesn't have the capability to deliver their nukes. No ICBMs capable of reaching the US, they can only try to use a long range bomber plane. https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2017/9/23/75c570944a324dd7bb03afaf28abc671_6.jpg https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2017/9/23/75c570944...
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoThey also don't have nukes, making the lack of missiles somewhat secondary.
- tunesmith 7y agoI meant in general, worldwide with other countries, but that is good to know.
- omilu 7y agoIran can NEVER have a nuclear weapon. Just nope.
- sbmthakur 7y agoYes. 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.