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NYT Confirms Israel Killed an Iranian Nuclear Scientist with a Robot Sniper
- mc32 5y agoI’m sure this question comes up in high up meetings. What positions are taboo for this sort of thing? Offing enemies on foreign territory isn’t new. (poisoned umbrella tips, polonium laced teas, Hillary and her drones, etc.) but now that more remote means are available to more regimes and governments what keeps someone from liquidating a pariah head of state or their inner circle? It would seem the big players have some kind of tacit agreement, but what happens when a second rate dictator uses this option?
- samhw 5y ago> What positions are taboo for this sort of thing? I'm not sure what this question means exactly? Are you asking what kind of targeted foreign aggression is informally permissible?
- SiempreViernes 5y agoI don't think Israel have any taboos regarding who to kill in Iran, the constrains come from the US and the limited deterrence provided by possible Iranian response.
- lazide 5y agoIt usually boils down to ‘will they be able to hurt us in a way that will outweigh the value to us of taking this target out’. If a 2nd rate dictator takes out someone from a 1st world country or their allies this way? They won’t be a dictator for long, guaranteed. Someone will get a UN resolution going, call for a coalition, and within a week they’ll have their palaces bombed - if folks want to spend the effort doing it that way instead of having Mossad or the CIA put a bomb in their car anyway. Someone from a 1st world gov’t wanting to do this to a 2nd tier gov’t? Well, how much pull does that person have with the 1st world gov’ts allies? Is there major business or economic blowback possible? Would they be able to start a war or blow something up that would hurt us? Is there bad PR to worry about? A congressional or parliamentary investigation that could happen? Or like in this case is the target considered ‘a bad person’ working for a ‘bad country’ that is already sanctioned and won’t hurt any major 1st world economic or business interests? If not likely to stir up any fuss and could make something happen someone wants, some enterprising group is likely to take them out. Either military, intelligence, or private.
- rjsw 5y agoFor me, killing Qasem Soleimani should have been taboo.
- mc32 5y agoApparently Castro in his own country wasn’t. That general was in a foreign conflict directing insurgent operations against us. Do you think Iran would vacillate about liquidating a general from an inferior adversary if that adversary were inflicting loses upon it, in say, Syria?
- weswpg 5y agoAre you suggesting that we should take moral cues from our enemies? Or that normalizing peacetime assassinations won't have an obvious destabilizing effect?
- mc32 5y agoIdeals are nice, but realpolitik sneaks up on you and you do have to do what they would do, else you are going to suffer more then the moral guilt. War is war. There is nothing nice about it. All these these morals are only carried out 'because you can afford them' not because you have to. At one time, in war, one spared enemy commanders, that was nice for when the upper ranks were from the elite and you ransomed them off or traded. Today, this is not the case. I don't see a lot of daylight between these two things.
- uncomputation 5y agoWhat are you talking about? The US is not at war with Iran. We assassinated a general and nuclear scientist with drones after we pulled out of a nuclear agreement they agreed to. They have since said they are open to rejoin the nuclear agreement with little US response. Before we go all war hawk, let’s remember that Iran has repeatedly expressed interest in rejoining the international community and renegotiating the nuclear deal.
- debacle 5y ago"What happens when China starts using this option?" Is the real question. Maybe they already have. Maybe they are content to let the old powers continue to play by the old rules, while they wage a much more economic war. In the last 20 years I have watched the US decry left and right while we seemingly accelerate our own diplomatic malpractices.
- mc32 5y agoI think the Soviet Union/Russia (in the modern era) let this genie out and it's not going back in. If they use it, we may be able to impose economic sanctions for some time. If they get so sanctioned it makes little difference, like with Russia, then nothing will stop them at that point.
- RaketenStadt 5y agoStrange place for you to force a Hillary mention. If you'd read the article you'd understand that if you want to politicize this you can start with Trump: > Israel had paused the sabotage and assassination campaign in 2012, when the United States began negotiations with Iran leading to the 2015 nuclear agreement. Now that Mr. Trump had abrogated that agreement, the Israelis wanted to resume the campaign to try to thwart Iran’s nuclear progress and force it to accept strict constraints on its nuclear program. Curious, have you even heard of the JCPOA?
- rjzzleep 5y agoPart of the article makes it sound like there was no physical person close to the vehicle with the rifle, other parts make it sound like the rifle was merely AI assisted, whatever that may mean. At the very least people assembled the whole thing and probably drove it to the target location also. At least the NYT article seems a bit better, and looking at the picture in the NYT article it seems like there were quite a few shots fired. I wish there was some more detailed information here.
- lima 5y agoThe big difference is that with the robot, the hit team has already left the country.
- belltaco 5y agoHow did they get the pick up truck close to him them? Put it at a stationary location that he usually drove by? Or remote/self driving? Or hired someone local that didn't know the full plot?
- lazide 5y agoMy understanding is that a big part of this type of operation is understanding their target, the patterns and schedule they move by, and then selecting a good spot that is going to work to take them out when they aren’t expecting it or prepared, and they have a good opportunity to escape or not get caught. So most likely left there the night before (or even longer), they knew when he would be by (and it wasn’t going to be a one-off), and there you go.
- Aeolun 5y agoThis makes me sad. While I think we ideally shouldn’t build any more nuclear weapons, I don’t think we should prevent any country from doing so. It’s so hypocritical. Aside from that, this machine is disturbing, but not more so than a reaper drone. I’m not quite sure why they’d go through the trouble.
- sidlls 5y agoIt’s not hypocritical at all, as the whole point is to maintain an imbalance of power and capability in one’s own favor. The public reasoning and ceremony around why we prevent others from getting this capability may be run through with hypocrisy, but the real reason isn’t.
- derstander 5y ago> the whole point is to maintain an imbalance of power and capability in one’s own favor That’s one strategy. Another, once the nuclear cat is out of the bag, is mutual assured destruction (MAD). If that’s your strategy then it is hypocritical because then the point is that everyone has enough power to destroy everyone else so no one will make a move. I personally think that both strategies are stupid. The former will just breed current and future resentment and the latter is vulnerable to one unstable person with authority to use the weapons. But I don’t have any sort of alternative so it seems like preventing others from getting nukes and then falling back to MAD is just the way the world is working.
- sidlls 5y agoMAD is about having sufficient alliance networks with enough power to guarantee mutual destruction, not having everyone with lots of nukes. And usually “alliance networks” meant the old US/Soviet divide.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoThe whole point of nukes is that any given nation can take responsibility for its own defense and is not dependent on allies who may throw them under the bus if it is useful to do so. Alliance networks are what gave us WW1.
- arenaninja 5y agoSo from reading the article's first couple of paragraphs my obvious question was how do you dispose of the equipment to not allow it to fall into enemy hands? And of course they didn't: > While the pickup truck exploded after the assassination, it failed to destroy the smart rifle system beyond recognition. This allowed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to piece together what occurred Using remote AI-assisted seems a logical conclusion. Heck I imagine they hire somebody fresh out of high school who enjoys playing CoD to pull the trigger. It's lower casualty than drones but higher risk if you can't dispose of your tech appropriately
- ren_engineer 5y agothe terrifying thing will be when this type of system gets deployed at scale with drone swarms. The dream of any authoritarian government to use against citizens to keep them in line
- tobmlt 5y agoThis thread makes me wonder how many knife-missiles the USA has in stock. (I am using the opportunity to reference the fact that the USA indeed has a “knife missile” and it is similar in principle if not in capability to the knife missile if the “Culture” series by Ian M. Banks.)
- f0e4c2f7 5y agoBetween that and Musk's coming neural lace I'm ready to sign up for Contact baby!
- tobmlt 5y agoGive me a neural lace with which I can stop a knife missile, or contact which stops the figurative knife missile forever, and so am I.
- tomjen3 5y agoDo you have any additional details about this knife missile?
- blunte 5y agoIt's really so amazing to watch how humanity is spending great amounts of creative energy toward the goal of ending humanity.
- rocgf 5y agoThe goal is not to end humanity, though.
- gberger 5y agoThe goal is to end humans.
- myth_drannon 5y agoThe stated goal of Iran's government is to end a specific group of humans that identify themselves as Israelis by using nuclear or conventional weapons.
- blunte 5y agoOf course that's not the goal in most cases (but it obviously is the case where warfare is involved - at least ending a subset of humanity). But if you look at food/diet changes, lifestyle changes, warfare changes, energy source/consumption changes, and so on, you can see we are working toward the end of humanity. Hopefully it will take a very long time, but there will be a tipping point where it becomes _very_ unpleasant. Let's extrapolate with some current technologies a bit. We have these pretty cool gunshot locator systems; we have AI or robotic attack systems; we have broader control systems which can disable power and water from target zones. Heck we can control and overload industrial systems, potentially causing mass casualties. No one sets out to end humanity. Well, most people don't. But degree by degree (pun not initially intended) we get closer to self-induced extinction.
- s5300 5y agoI'm somewhat unconvinced. I think there's a decent amount of fantastical evangelicals attempting to create their own little rapture at this point. https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/3/15/17117298/mike-pompeo-trump-secretary-of-state-politics-battle-evangelical-holy-war-christian https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/3/15/17117298/mike-pompe... WAPO and others have better pay walled articles.
- kyrra 5y agoOriginal NYTimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuc... Mirror: https://archive.is/mPBhk https://archive.is/mPBhk
- nestorD 5y agoA very good article trying to answer the question "How efficient is it to assasinate nuclear scientists?": https://thebulletin.org/premium/2020-11/overview-nuclear-scientists-as-assassination-targets/ https://thebulletin.org/premium/2020-11/overview-nuclear-sci...
- vmception 5y agoIt just seems so dumb and a waste to kill people like that without pretty much any shock or scrutiny. I value intelligence, and people who aren't demonstrating intelligence get to live through the most absurd circumstances. So it is really disturbing for me to see these meticulous targeted assassinations that at best only serves to delay the nuclear program, and at worst accelerates the irradiated glass theme park they're trying to avoid.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoReading the article (its short) it's a one ton robotic apparatus + gun, mounted, or at least transported, by a pickup truck. The gun utilized satellites to calculate its shots. This particular one wasn't much of a remote weapon deployable anywhere, but rather a weapon that replaces the requirement for an actual sniper to be competent and have a clear LOS. On some level I'd expect this thing could, for example, shoot through opaque conditions like smoke, or walls if the ballistics don't threaten it too much . It seems like it fired several shots which would help in that regard. You still, practically for a device this heavy and presumably expensive, would want a human driving it around and setting it up.
- walrus01 5y ago> The gun utilized satellites to calculate its shots. highly doubtful. More likely it was something like a good quality camera fitted to a scope, outputting around 1.5 to 2 Mbps H264 or H265 4:2:0 color space video, with a data link over satellite to a remote controller. Some person staring at a screen with ability to pan and tilt the weapon.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoThe article states > The gun itself was connected to an Israeli command center via a satellite communication relay. There an operative was able to control the gun and take aim at its target via a computer screen. Seems I misread that.
- nisegami 5y agoTrying to imagine how this would feel different from a video game if you didn't know better and coming up pretty short.
- ethbr0 5y agoThe key "AI" contribution, after you dig down through all the media misunderstanding, appears to be this: [NYT]> The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper’s response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray. So aiming and firing was initiated by a human, but hardware and software attempted to mask the time delay in doing so against a moving vehicle. Which seems plausible: optical flow + basic vehicle vector and velocity calculations. There's also some stuff in the various articles about facial recognition, but that sounds a bit far fetched and unreliable. If you have a person in the loop with enough resolution to accurately aim, then why are you running facial recognition to discriminate targets?
- phaedryx 5y agoI am simultaneously in awe of the tech that it would take to pull this off and in complete revulsion at what was done. It was interesting when I was in college to see which degrees required ethics classes and which ones didn't. Computer Science required us to take ethics classes. I assume because of the effects technology can have. It is really subtle too. As one of my professors noted: "I'm sure none of you would write a 'BombJerusalem()' function, but you might write a 'Target(city)' function without realizing the implications."
- flyinglizard 5y agoOut of everything Israel has done, assassinating the chief of the Iranian nuclear weapons program is pretty low on the ladder of complex ethics issues. I promise you no one in the Israeli security apparatus batted an eye, and it’s not because they are any less moral than you.
- jimnotgym 5y agoI don't understand your comment. Initially you suggest that this was not so bad considering the other things they have done... suggesting that their standards were different to some. Then you go on to say they have the same moral standards as _person_on_street_. This seems contradictory?
- kcplate 5y agoWhen the leader of another country is on record calling for your genocide and actively pursuing weapon programs that can make that a reality—you might have slightly different standards on how far you might be willing to go for protection than other countries that do not have countries calling for their genocide. Since WW2 the Jewish people tend to operate under the philosophy of “When someone tells you he wants to kill you, you should take them seriously” because the last leader of a country who decided to kill them and make an effort of it, managed to eliminate 2/3 of the jews that resided in Europe and about 40% of them worldwide. I think that even though I am not Jewish, if I had that history and the current regional political climate…I probably wouldn’t bat an eye at a robot sniper since my moral standards would be shaped by a very real and very recent effort to wipe me off the earth. That could change a perspective and standard. And I realize that Israel is not just Jews, but does anyone really believe that the phrase “Death to Israel” means “Death to the Arabs living there too”?
- Waterluvian 5y agoAre Iranian nuclear scientists civilian or military?
- yyyk 5y agoThe guy was a brigadier general. A fact weirdly not mention in any article on the issue, but at least mentioned in the wiki page.
- LightG 5y ago"Looking forward to seeing how this technology makes it into domestic situations. It's just like space and other military technology. It'll benefit us all in the end." //////supervomit
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- josh_today 5y agoI wonder if the scientist was voluntarily working on Iran’s nuclear program or if he had no other choice. It was said he liked to read poems and enjoy everyday life pleasures, maybe this was an escape he didn’t mind. Either way this will not stop either country’s ambitions.
- debacle 5y agoMany Iranians are very proud to be Iranians in the same way many Israelis are proud to be Israelis. If those two countries could decide on peace (or rather, if the majorities in each country that want peace could push aside the warmongers), the Middle East and the entire world would be a much better place.
- josh_today 5y agoAs a Persian Jew I agree 100%. It’s really only both govts that hate each other. Amongst both peoples, it’s all love.
- endisneigh 5y agoI know nothing about guns, but assuming someone is walking at a typical pace, what kind of latency would you need for a robot to actually (remotely control and) shoot someone via a robot?
- walrus01 5y agoI think a lot would depend on whether the target was approaching you in a near linear straight line, or traveling sideways across your field of view in azimuth. As described in the NY times article it sounds like the gun was set up to shoot straight down the road into the windshield of the approaching car.
- jeffreyrogers 5y agoThe article says there was a 1.6 second delay between what the operator saw and what the gun saw, but it's going to depend a lot on distance and angle.
- jhauris 5y agoThe article mentions a 1.6 second transmission delay. You can imagine how much someone could potentially move in 1.6 seconds, regardless of other factors. Distance is the largest normal factor, and is not mentioned in the article. Under 100 meters bullet drop and time to target are negligible; with a stabilized rifle (as in this case), it would just be a matter of putting the crosshairs over the target. The communications latency, however, would make even such a short shot extremely challenging. I wonder how the AI mentioned compensated for that. They imply the vehicle may have been moving during the shot. So during a 1.6 second (presumably round trip) delay, you would need to account for movement of the vehicle during that time, movement of the target during that time, movement of the target after firing (for longer distances), wind effects on the bullet (for longer distances), and bullet drop (usually trivial, but still). I don't know what kind of help the AI provided, but I wouldn't want to be the one with my hand on the button (normal ethical questions of assassination aside).
- hestefisk 5y agoI really struggle to be impressed by this as it’s a gross violation of national sovereignty, similar to US aggression in the Middle East. Imagine the other way around - headline: Iranian military shoot Israeli nuclear scientists on way home from work. It would likely cause WW III! This kind of intervention is wrong and should be condemned by the international community, not celebrated.
- ethbr0 5y agoI mean, Israel and Iran have both been quietly blowing holes in each other's ships for the last several years, and there's been no war. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/world/middleeast/israel-iran-ship-mine-attack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/world/middleeast/israel-i...
- oliwarner 5y agoDoes that mean it's okay? Not trying to put words in your mouth, but it feels like you're saying the rest of the world isn't allowed to care because this is what they do. We sanction Iran for aggressive behaviour in the region. Our national reactions to this seem a little one-sided.
- mc32 5y ago>We sanction Iran for aggressive behaviour in the region. You're making their actions out to be equivalent. Iran is fomenting unrest in a whole region. Israel is trying to neutralize (not eliminate) an enemy that has vowed repeatedly to eliminate it from the planet.
- uncomputation 5y agoArguably, Israel has fomented unrest in the ME as well with a continued history of genocide against Palestinians. I do not understand how assassination will in any way “neutralize” an enemy. I guarantee if Iran assassinated a high-ranking Israeli or American official, the response would be far from neutral. Just look at the inciting incident for WWI.
- tediousdemise 5y agoThis seems pretty terrorist and illegal to me. Is it not a violation of Iran's sovereignty?
- hestefisk 5y ago100%. Not dissimilar to when US carry out drone strikes randomly in Iran or send in marines to catch Bin Laden, in complete violation of sovereignty.
- BrandoElFollito 5y agoI wonder why the gun is not aiming on its own, like a human would do. There would not be a problem of laatency, you would just state the expected result (shot the head you would point to first, or shot in the windshield, ...) and let the gun do it on autopilot.