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Comment by plan6 | Hacker News Reader

You are correct. It seems like they don't plan to use them intentionally to carry nukes. They could perhaps be fitted with one and possibly wire it into the self-destruct mechanism, but that would take a lot of work, I'd think.

They do carry a bomb, though- it's not meant for combat, but could be abused for such to make the entire plane a bomb carrying device, if it were taken over:

"Granted it is removable, but they also carry, as it was described to me, a 2000 lb class (or maybe more reasonably it was 500#, but the 2k figure seems to stick out in my memory for some reason) HE warhead in the spine for range control/destruction purposes if anything goes awry. Long story short, it would take a lot more money and a lot more testing to ever make them combat capable."

http://www.f-16.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=27741

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Those are absurdly high figures for a range safety package - it's a self-destruct system, meant to terminate out-of-control flight by making the platform no longer airworthy. You don't need a Mark 82 to do that.

Indeed, a firsthand source [1] describes the QF-16's range safety package thus:

> A small ball of flames burst from the middle of the aircraft, followed by thick black smoke, but no sound. The sound followed soon after with a deep reverberating boom.

> The extent of the damage went undetected at first, due to the amount of smoke billowing from the wreck. Once it cleared, it revealed the F-16 had been split in half between the cockpit and the wings.

Something on the scale of a 500- or 2000-pound bomb, as this random forum commenter suggests, would've scattered pieces of aircraft all over the hardstand, in which it would also have left a hole.

[1] http://www.defense-aerospace.com/cgi-bin/client/modele.pl?pr...

Look, the Air Force has plenty of real combat drones with actual remote weapon controls. This is simply a target drone program to follow up of QF-4 program since we are running out of old F-4s. No sane actor would do anything you suggest since there are purpose built drones that have actually been used to do weapons release. We have enough existing ability to drop weapons that the new Navy drone will actually be used for refueling missions to keep the hours off the F-18 airframes.

It's also worth considering that, if Skynet decides she wants a squadron of B61-armed F-16s to play with, there are easier ways to get one. Like, oh, lying to people.

Why do people get so hung up on the idea that a superhuman AI can't gain access to weapons if there are no weapons equipped for direct remote control? Why expect a superhuman AI to have difficulty suborning humans through deceit? I mean, don't get me wrong - I tend to think that whole avenue of existential threat analysis owes much more to science fiction and the seductive nature of apocalypticism than to anything in reality. But if those are your priors, this seems a very odd oversight.

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