Mossad assassinated Iran’s chief nuke scientist with remote AI gun – report
jpost.com
jpost.com
It was only a matter of time before this happened though. With off-the-shelf technology today, even lesser advanced nations, groups and even individuals could put something like this together. Throw in the skills of a more advanced nation, and you get something like this that works from a mile away and effectively destroys all trace of itself before anyone notices. Devices like this could lie in wait for years waiting for the target information to be passed to them. We live in interesting times.
Again according to the NYT what was astonishing was the accuracy. Fifteen rounds were shot and no one other than the target was injured.
Of course, take it all with a grain of salt, as both Iran and Israel have reasons to lie about what actually went down. Israel would rather everyone believe they’ve got super James Bond devices rather than moles in the Iranian intelligence and security apparatus. Weirdly, Iran would rather everyone believe that too.
On one hand, it could mean less collateral damage and fewer civilian casualties than drone strikes.
Just yesterday, the US had a drone strike that killed 10 civilians. The military and administration proceeded to lie about the strike and pretend they hit the target, but they were called out by the NY Times and had to backtrack.
We could see fewer civilian deaths with technology like this.
On the other hand, this could reduce the "barrier to action" that countries have before they attempt a targeted killing.
Which means even less "due process" for foreign internationals who are perceived to be enemies of the state. If the CIA thinks you're a threat, you're dead.
Let's ignore the question of how good the CIA is at intelligence-gathering.
However, then the question is: "is it even the 'correct' target?"
The recent "ISIS-K" that turned out to be an innocent aid worker and his family is exactly how this can work wrongly: the weak link isn't the weapon; it's the targeting process that can be imprecise and inaccurate. A human process primarily. Are the rules of engagement correct? If not innocents get killed. What is the intelligence source? How is it analyzed? What cross referencing is used? How accurate are sensors and the matching to the target? Etc. Etc.
Manned aircraft aren't susceptible to that, but even then as Iran starts to get more modern Chinese and Russian SAM systems and gains experience with them Israeli manned excursions will get less frequent.
Your question was loaded but I answered it anyway- shame on me I guess.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuc...
>The Eliminator LaserScope is the most innovative and effective hunting riflescope in the world. With the push of a button, the Eliminator IV ranges and displays the distance to the target (factoring in angle). It instantly calculates and displays the exact aiming point and wind data all inside the scope for complete situational awareness.
>The built-in laser rangefinder is now capable of ranging out to 2,000 yards. Trajectory compensation is accurate at any magnification, and the integrated inclinometer compensates for shots at any uphill or downhill angle.
https://www.burrisoptics.com/scopes/laser-range-finding-elim...
This system gives a shooter the calibration data and they can adapt second to second. Replicating a brain for a truck mounted gun with a 1.5s latency is a 10x magnitude of complexity
Yeah but if that 10x complexity jump is wrapped in an off-the-shelf facial recognition algorithm and some 30 year old motion control algorithms does it really matter?
It's not even too much to say that the only really sovereign countries are countries with nuclear capabilities or the ability to acquire them very quickly.
Also, as I remember US bombed major cities using nuclear bombs, world didn't end.
It’s not like Israel is attacking Iran for shits and giggles.
And being a country of 9M surrounded by hostile powers means you make yourself appear as threatening as possible.
I doubt it. We don't know what would happen in a fictional hypothetical situation.
>Next, the report details how the sniper who took out Fakhrizadeh did so remotely from Israel, over 1,600 kilometers away, since the hit squad had long ago left Iran.
Except maybe because a Kalman filter expects Gaussian inputs, something fancier is used to deal with nonlinear inputs?
Quite disturbing to read.
Is it okay to assassinate scientists? How about tech CEOs and software engineers?
To me, the most troubling thing is that Iran seems to do nothing in response.
I don't understand these replies.
Anyways, lots of countries (Iran included) fund these type of spy groups. They do bad shit. That is their function. I imagine their masters think the ends justify means. Regardless, complaining that spy agencies are unethical is like complaining the mafia is unethical. Its just something that basically goes without saying.
In both cases it's mostly posturing, but killing scientists and saying we had to, it's self defense is especially disgusting to me.
Personally I think that it is not outside any moral boundaries to assassinate a scientist which is working on WMDs. In fact, I'll claim the opposite: if you are a leader of a country which you know is potentially targeted by WMDs and you have the strategic and tactical opportunity to assassinate the people working on that program, then you should.
Going back to laws, being a scientist doesn't give you any kind of immunity to any law. It shouldn’t grant you immunity here. Once you work on military programs, it's all fair game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice
INTERPOL does come after you.
There are also extradition treaties.
However, most of HN is American, this is an American site linking in this case to a story in American media. Complaining against the lesser 'offender' (if at all) in a site hosted in a greater 'offender' is unfortunate. Also, the ordering of the posts is affected by upvotes, and the GGP's post is first. I suspect that plenty of US people who do shrug their shoulders at that drone strike upvoted that post.
* Wikipedia comes up with the odd missile-strike against the islamic state.
Edit: There's a difference between financing terrorism/freedom fighters, which about every country in the region (and basically everybody else) does, and preparing a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_attack
That isn't to excuse anyone, but yes, Iran and Israel have effectively been at war for decades.
Burgas bus bombing is another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Burgas_bus_bombing
Arms, money and support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad is another one (Hezbollah is practically an IRGC unit). Arming various militias in Iraq, Yemen and Syria against Israel and its allies.
Says who?
>Retired in the 1990s, the Jericho-1, like its successors, was intended for nuclear delivery.
>From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, Israel developed a longer-range version by extending the Jericho’s length to 15m and increasing the diameter to 1.35m. Designated the Jericho-2, this system has an estimated range of 1,500–3,500km, with the same 1,000kg payload.
>According to several analysts, Israel also has an intermediate-range missile, possibly called the Jericho-3. Reports of testing – in 2008, 2011, 2013, 2019 and (possibly) 2020 – related to a longer-range system support this assessment, but it has not been verified.
https://www.iiss.org/blogs/analysis/2021/08/israel-ballistic...
Just like power within a nation, it’s violence that maintains order in the end.
The US had the motto “might makes right”. Wikipedia seems to suggest that there is no agreed upon meaning to that statement, but I always viewed it as “being right doesn’t matter if you can’t back it up with force”.
But, it seems like you are trying to push a certain agenda and paint the info in a certain way.
Here's another way to frame the same info: At least someone tries to prevent a war and prevent bad actors from obtaining nuclear weapons.
We used to have inspectors to do such a thing. Now we're just left with an incredibly convenient Schrodingers nuke to keep those not yet fatigued in a constant state of fear.
First, we used not to blaim anyone without a due process....before you take a stand and blaime Israel, instead maybe you should argue to send inspectors to examine if the article is true, maybe it is not Israel or this never happened, did you follow a due process before publically assigning guilt?
Second, who are "we", in your srnyense? The West, China? Iran, Hizbollah, Americans? UN?
I recall no inspectors during Cuban crisis, hmm... why threaten world with nuclear war, instead there could be annual inspections!
If you want to say that something being reported by the NYT and corroborated by another paper isn't enough, feel free to do so, but it's not relevant to my comment
As for the rest of your comment, it seems you need to do some preliminary reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_...
Cuba doesn't factor into this, they weren't a signatory.
> we used to have inspectors to do such thing
I understood it to mean that the inspectors would take care to prevent Iran nuclear weapons. Which I found to be a ridiculous claim but formally correct. The same way my claim that you should not trust NYT report in this case, before some due process is ridiculous.
For Cuba, I was referring to missile crisis between USSR and USA. It is always good to be well read thank you for your suggestion, but I think the quoted link to wikipedia is due to your misunderstanding ..
Beyond that, do we agree on this: Iran developes nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, and openly threatens to destroy Israel and the scientist was a key figure in it.
If we agree to this, than we can move forward. Since my claim was that Israel thinks the scientist is an existential thread to its existence. Under such curcumstances, imo, in most cases any country would be willing to commit an act of war to eliminate the thread. The Cuba crisis is an example where US would be willing to start a nuclear war because it felt "uncomfortable" having USSR missiles near its borders. So I was asking when you say "We" who do you refer to?
Nukes are too serious to leave to the supervision of a political mission of scientists.
> Nukes are too serious to leave to the supervision of a political mission of scientists.
I don't care if a country has nukes. I'm much more afraid of what will happen to countries without them: you listed Iraq and we can see the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuc...
It provides more detail and context - the "AI" system was apparently used to properly to compensate for latency and wind when aiming the gun.
"See this report, and the curious lack of media interest:
"According to the U.N. report, Turkish-made Kargu-2 lethal autonomous aircraft launched so-called swarm attacks, likely on behalf of Libya's Government of National Accord, against the warlord Haftar's militias in March last year, marking the first time AI-equipped drones accomplished a successful attack." Jun 7, 2021 VOA
I ask as a half jew. These questions are intensely interesting to me.
Probably "no one knows" is a decent answer, but I can't help but wonder what sort of plans are already in place.
EDIT: I immediately regret asking about politics. Never mind.
Hopefully things will work out.
Nukes would give iran a significant power boost and bargaining chip, but it wouldn't magically make them rulers of the world. Iran's geopolitical enemies would still try to contain them, iran would still try and not be contained.
Similar to what happened when the soviets got nukes, but on a much smaller regional scale.
MAD doesn't seem effective if you don't know who to attack...
A 50 kiloton warhead detonated over Tel Aviv would reduce Israel’s economy to basically nothing.
Their delivery systems are quite limited. Their submarines wouldn’t be able to deliver anything larger than a tactical implosion warhead since even the enlarged torpedo tubes that are capable of launching cruise missiles like the Popeye can’t launch ballistic missiles.
Their ballistic missiles based on the Shavit launcher would be possibly capable of carrying about half a ton which is arguably too small for thermonuclear warheads too, especially ones that Israel would be able to produce since it’s unlikely they would be able to produce something as compact as the W88.
Israel has had nukes (reportedly) since 1967. Thats a 52 years (and counting) before Iran. Anything from delivery to the weapons force will be much better on the Israeli side. Trying to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon hoping somehow Israel has no way to retaliate is simply suicide.
This whole scenario was researched btw and anyone with half a brain could see it would be devastating to both countries, which to me at least sounds unsurprising. https://conflictandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
Isn't this a terrorist's wet dream?
At which point America would step in.
>Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.
>According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the...
"Former Director of the CIA James Woolsey also wrote a strongly negative review, remarking that "... Reading [Walt and Mearsheimer's] version of events is like entering a completely different world." Woolsey contends the authors "are stunningly deceptive", and feature a "commitment to distorting the historical record is the one consistent feature of this book", proceeding with a few examples.[53]"
"Benny Morris, a professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University, prefaced a very detailed analysis with the remark: "Like many pro-Arab propagandists at work today, Mearsheimer and Walt often cite my own books, sometimes quoting directly from them, in apparent corroboration of their arguments. Yet their work is a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades. Their work is riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Fore...
There's a big assumption in this statement. Hopefully stop attacking them if the assumption holds up.
However, you're failing for the great man fallacy. Hitler dying in 1938/1939 wouldn't have changed that much due to well established power of the Nazis by then, and the presence of men with power such as Hess, Himmler and Göring to take control.
Long before that, and who knows . Maybe the NSDAP would have grown as popular even without him; maybe Strasser would have won; maybe Rohm would have launched his revolution and taken personal control.
Even before then, there are sentiments in the general population that allowed the Nazis to gain power in the first place. And while they were particularly genocidal, it's not like any of the other options were "good" in the absolute sense, only perhaps "less bad" in a relative sense (in hindsight).
No one was particular enamoured of the structure of the Weimar Republic, with the (far) left wanting to go to a Communist/Soviet structure, and the (far) right returning to the authoritarian structure which Bismarck created. AIUI, as the 1920s went on, there were fewer and fewer middle ground parties.
The "stabbed-in-the-back" conspiracy theory had mostly established itself as a "fact", and the Treaty of Versailles with its reparation costs was causing a lot of pain. Of course the treaty was violated by the German military as it sent soldiers to train on tanks and planes to the Soviet Union:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_tank_school
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipetsk_fighter-pilot_school
What does this even mean? You've combined 3 completely unrelated terms in Ai, terminator and WW3 to create, well I'm not sure what you mean here....
It doesn't seem unrelated to me.
There could already be critical mass among the dissatisfied they just don't have the resources to get the whole world involved.
Yet.
Army jobs getting automated is one thing I could get behind.
Just keep the drones out of the civilian areas.
I have some bad news for you out of Afghanistan...