cas@cvl.UUCP (Cliff Shaffer) (09/09/83)
"If a reasonable doubt existed, is shooting down an intruder
a morally defensible act?
Paul Joslin "
Well, I don't want to argue the ethics of shooting down planes, but
it seems to me that talking about it in net.general is NOT a morally
defensible act.
Cliff Shaffer
{seismo,mcnc,we13}!rlgvax!cvl!caspreece@uicsl.UUCP (09/10/83)
#R:ecn-ed:-19500:uicsl:5400019:000:2379 uicsl!preece Sep 9 08:14:00 1983 "One begins to wonder if perhaps we've been conned by the edited transcripts we've been fed." Perhaps, as I for one do not speak Russian and am forced to take the 'official' translation as gospel. [Actually, I was less concerned with the question of translation, since the Russian was available for anyone to hear, than with the question of what we may not have heard at all. The Times mentioned reports that the government has additional tapes of chatter between Soviet ground stations apparently agitated by the possibility that a civilian plane had been shot down. If true, these might shed additional light on what was/was not known at the time.] As for the 'NEARLY irrefutable' evidence that the Soviets should have known that it was a civilian plane- so what? The Soviets are not in a declared state of war. If a reasonable doubt existed, is shooting down an intruder a morally defensible act? Paul Joslin ---------- Well, if you really think an intruder has malevolent purposes and the intruder skulks around long enough and you're unable to communicate with the intruder and the intruder doesn't acknowledge your attempts to communicate, I'd say that shooting down an intruder is morally defensible. In this case I don't know how many of those IFs were met, but I can certainly imagine a course of events in which the Soviets believed they were. The visual recognition conditions are like this: the visual difference between a 747 and an RC135 at 2 km (the nearest distance mentioned in the transcripts) is about the same as that between a sedan and a station wagon at the length of a football field. In the dark, with clouds, with most of the cabin lights off (people are sleeping at that time of night), that's not a big difference. The plane had been close enough to a real American spy plane as to be a single radar response, so the Soviets could not know which plane turned back to Alaska and which entered its airspace. The pilot of the airliner not only didn't follow the interceptors down, it actually climbed, which could reasonably have been an evasive course. In fact, if the Soviets had said at the start what they say now and had apologized, the whole thing would probably have been written off as an unfortunate accident. It's just too bad that the world lives on such a hair trigger. scott preece pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsl!preece