India says it accidentally fired missile into Pakistan | Hacker News Reader

India says it accidentally fired missile into Pakistan

reuters.com

62 pointsahiknsr38 comments

I miss the nice relaxing days of March 2020 with the looming threat of covid

The fact that this incident ended without any real damage actually gives me hope. These are two nuclear armed states with a bitter history of armed conflict and yet there was no escalation.

From reddit

"There's a good bit about this in the World War Z book. India and Pakistan have been on the brink of nuclear war for so long that there's tons and tons of tools and deterrents in place to prevent war. There's a nuclear hotline between states, all kinds of spies, well known procedures, etc that exist to prevent accidental or hasty all-out war. That's why in the book there's a nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan instead of Pakistan and India, because that diplomatic infrastructure doesn't exist between those two countries."

https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/tbqmq8/india_s...

I think that's the dangerous part of kicking out diplomats/spies. They offer insight and backchannels between unfriendly states or states with very strained ties.

Somewhat counter intuitively, we do need spies in high enough positions to know what the counter party is thinking (obviously on both sides), so eliminating this kid of spy is counter productive (as opposed to industrial and technology spies who serve a different purpose).

Other news sources

https://www.dawn.com/news/1679361 :

an unarmed Indian supersonic missile had intruded into Pakistani territory, endangering several airliners during the course of its flight, and finally hit a private property near Mian Channu.

“When it fell it damaged some civilian property. Thankfully, no loss or injury to human life was caused,” Gen Babar further said

https://www.trtworld.com/asia/india-s-supersonic-missile-dam...

damaging a wall in a residential area but causing no casualties.

there were no sensitive military installations in the area where the missile landed.

https://dnd.com.pk/indian-supersonic-missile-hits-124-inside...

The Charge d’Affaires (Cd’A) of the Republic of India in Islamabad was summoned to the Foreign Office today and conveyed Pakistan’s strong protest over the unprovoked violation of its airspace

https://southfront.org/india-accidently-fired-supersonic-mis...

India announced that [...] “On 9 March 2022, in the course of a routine maintenance, a technical malfunction led to the accidental firing of a missile. It is learnt that the missile landed in an area of Pakistan. While the incident is deeply regrettable, it is also a matter of relief that there has been no loss of life due to the accident,” the Indian government said in a statement.

> unarmed Indian supersonic missile

What kind of in-flight missile is "unarmed", exactly?

Even if the warhead had its "safety" (hah!) on, that doesn't stop leftover explosive propellant - or even just the kinetic effects - from killing people.

It means the warhead was replaced with an inert equivalent. Often just a lump of concrete.

But you are correct, the impact of the missile could kill someone.

It's the difference between throwing a brick and throwing a similar size and weight grenade.

Monty Python made the joke in the 80s: "It's the Novelty Nuclear Missile! Surprise your friends, amuse your enemies! Start the party with a bang!"

IIRC that was referencing overeager Titans

I think we can count ourselves lucky this wasn't a nuclear armed missile.

How do you accidentally fire a missile into another country? When North Korea does these things, they are on purpose.

In any event, to use a morose term, I hope their postmortem results in making sure it's not possible to fire into another country accidentally.

There was another somewhat similar incident in Europe today: an autonomous plane - presumably coming from Ukraine - crashed into a park in the capital of Croatia.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60709952

> I think we can count ourselves lucky this wasn't a nuclear armed missile.

You can't accidentally fire a nuclear missile and have it go off.

I'm obviously not versed in these things, is that something we can count on to be true?

It's not entirely clear if Indian and Pakistani nukes are secured by something like PAL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link

The Soviet nukes left over in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were protected.

There is a lingering story that the launch code for USAF ICBMs was just all zeroes. This has been refuted by the pentagon but the operator's manual suggests it is normal practice.

https://sgs.princeton.edu/00000000

> You can't accidentally fire a nuclear missile and have it go off.

There are, IIRC, several nuclear weapons related accidents where the warheads were recovered by the reports, to the extent declassified, do not indicate that all safety mechanisms worked as designed. I would not assume from the fact that weapons are typically designed with the intent to prevent accidental nuclear detonation and so far the accidents that have occurred have not resulted in accidental detonation that such is categorically impossible.

The US fired a missile in the 1950s and lost control of it. It was found in the jungles of Brazil in 1983

https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=g5lVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MkAN...

Brazil and the US were not at risk of annihilating each other due to misunderstanding —also technologically were 70 years past that crude period (when atomic this and that were future promises for a world of plenty).

Photographic reports claim its a Brahmos based on the rocket motor's honeycomb inlet. How viable is that this happened by accident?

(Disclaimer: I am an unbiased Indian expat)

People who follow strategic news, as a side interest (inclusive yours truly), are dumbfounded. There has to be some ridiculous reason this happened. Missile systems have a lot of safeguards which need to be interlocked to fire a weapon.

If the weapon is advanced as it is claimed (and not just a rebranded dumb P700 Granit) it needs to have a target coordinate, a flight path, charged launching fuse/initiator, and the TEL upright or fully extended as the configuration permits (Indian Su 30s can launch Brahmos too but none of the news report mention it was air launched. The reports indicate flight originated at Sirsa, a garrison town ~150km from border). Except for the launch programming, every launch sequence involves several mechanical steps.

Striking out possible mischief makers, this was (1) a drill that went terribly wrong, and weapons were 'hot' without a target coordinate (2) flight computer had a malfunction in middle of a routine test (This is however less likely because no NOTAMs were issued in India, and the path could be over populated areas. Also any test would be done on the Pokhran weapons test range or Wheeler Island in Bay of Bengal)

The flight speed & path are pretty consistent with how a BrahMos could operate. The initial estimate of 3 minutes & 130 km puts it in the ~2.5 Mach operating bracket.

The incident was handled with grace and restraint by Pakistan. I give them credit for not escalating militarily. As a side note, Indian defense suffers from several problems that Russia faces, albeit at a smaller scale. The corruption is prevalent not throughout the chain - but near the top. Those interested could look up Bofors Howitzer guns kickback scandal, or more recently the corruption charges in AugustaWestland chopper procurement. Although I have a deeper understanding of IAF (which is riddled with management problems), if the situation is similar with Army - they may not be really prepared for modern warfares with need for training & upgrades.

Military systems tend to have a lot of manual overrides because you don't want your nukes to not be able to fire because the internet is down. In some cases these overrides are what you use to test the equipment.

The military in general tends toward manpower and process where the civilian world tends toward automation and stupid-proofing. Militaries invest a ton in manpower and process so often times it makes sense to leverage that rather than adding tech.

I am not familiar with the specific missile in question.

That is what I angled at in original comment as well.

> Except for the launch programming, every launch sequence involves several mechanical steps.

There are failsafes of course, but strategic assets typically contain safeguards so that your average Joe won't light up the fireworks. That makes it less likely an accidental launch. In modern militaries, the overrides are (most often) distributed across several different people so that one person doesn't have the full capacity to start a war. Re-arming by overrides lies within a chain of command, each doing a single vital link with full agreement of the process (Steps are usually checked & announced TBS). If we go by the version of events from Indian government, that 'misfire' likely never happened. The chances being low i.e a whole team of people collectively made a horrible launch from a weapon geared up to ready-to-fire condition. Unless they were absolutely clueless about their own job. If the tech is that dumb in the unlikely event, this is extremely unfortunate for Indian defense. It is a risk that needs addressing

It is more plausible that scenario 2 happened : the telemetry & control garbled and the missile moved off course. According to Pak. government briefing, missile took a hard turn in its flight before entering their airspace. Being touted as India's top of line weapons platform, admitting this screw-up might have been embarrassing.

Then again, we may never know unless someone speaks up in the back-channels

man... each year after 2020 is worse than the one before.

Repent, for the next year is nigh!

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

> Goddamnit I yelled "Dont fire!"!!

> Sir why ever would you yell "Don't fire!"?

> You looked twitchy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

The doomsday clock is nearing 12. Moving away from population centers is probably the wise thing to do. If I learnt anything from the COVID waves, this is it.

OK doomer.

Or, hear me out, move closer so that one dies instantaneously rather than slowly due to radiation or starvation.

How viable is this reality?

Certainly seems to be getting less viable by the year

Someone's been fired

Worrying that such a state has nuclear weapons.

Oh, please.

> Since 1950, there have been 32 nuclear weapon accidents, known as "Broken Arrows." A Broken Arrow is defined as an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft or loss of the weapon. To date, six nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered.

https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.ht...

That doesn’t have the Barksdale AFB “missing nuke” listed. As a result, I wonder if that’s just a conspiracy theory.

The Barksdale incident isn't listed as broken arrow because it falls into another category.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear...

If only India and Pakistan could de-escalate so they don't need to have so many high-tech weapons on the border. Stuff like this will likely keep happening while there's a war in Ukraine going on. Luckily, it's unlikely to cause a war.

It's a sad state of affairs when India/Pakistan conflicts are considered relatively less likely to cause a nuclear war

It won't happen. Most of the "threat" of nuclear war between India and Pakistan is just western exoticism/racism that thinks that every country other than the "west" is run by religious zealots, crazy people, and/or incompetent people. Also, if you're in India or Pakistan, I'm sure it also feels like the sky may fall at any moment, because politicians love a good us-vs-them story. What could be better for a sabre-rattling "hawk" candidate than the threat of a neighbor who hates your guts? So the story persists, and any border skirmish or accident is extrapolated into "Oh geez oh man, narrowly avoided nuclear annihilation AGAIN, luck sure is on our side".

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