That is not a war crime. First, there is no way to know that a naval vessel is unarmed. Second, even if unarmed, it does not mean it has safe passage. Once it gets back to its base, it can load with munitions and then come and fight. Put it differently: if instead of a naval ship, you see an enemy tank, should you not shoot at it because it is unarmed?
Even if it isn't a war crime, every sailor in the world know what the US did and how US sailors treat shipwreck survivors, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean. Truly shameful.
That said, I will still help any distressed boat, whatever their nationality, because I'm better than them. Just, expect me to be rude and avoid talking to them.
That ship was involved in naval exercises at the invitation of the host navy, India.
That ship was unarmed. Nothing unusual there - that was the original plan for the joint navy drills. A large complement of the crew was A BRASS BAND!
The Indian's (and this has been formally confirmed since) communicated to the Americans that this was an UNARMED ship which was about to leave Indian territorial waters on its way home.
So the Americans KNEW where the ship was (they were told) and KNEW it was completely unarmed.
And they sunk it anyway, and refused to pick up any survivors.
Thats a crystal clear WAR CRIME. The kind which is writ large in western history books for 80 years, condemning the conduct of the Nazi Germany submarine units.
None of that changes that it was an Iranian warship.
Warships of nations involved in armed conflict are always valid targets for the adversary.
Otherwise it would also have been a bunch of war crimes for the Iranian ships destroyed at the pier by cruise missile or bombs.
India was not a party to the conflict so they can't vouch for the unarmedness of a warship on either side one way or another. But even if they could, unarmed warships are valid targets for the reason the other commenter pointed out (they can quickly become armed).
Nor does international law necessarily require a warship to personally pick up all survivors, and in fact gives warships a fair amount of leeway to consider their own security along with their own ability to execute a successful rescue and successfully berth the shipwrecked.
Modern submarines, while not exempt, tend to fall into that proviso more than other classes because they are not equipped to conduct surface rescue (unlike WWII-era submarines they don't even have a keel for surfaced stationkeeping), have no brig facilities, have no sickbay and very little other medical facilities.
Once it was clear that the Sri Lankan navy (the closest ships to the Dena's survivors) was responding, the responsibility of the U.S. to see to rescue had been accomplished.
The U.S. definition balances military necessity against humanity, which in this case is not looking good: no mitigating attempts to reduce the death toll – no warnings, no attempt to disable the ship – and since the ship was trying to get permission to dock in Sri Lanka or India at the time, it’s hard to justify a claim of military necessity for a ship which was either unarmed or very lightly armed and clearly posed absolutely no threat to the much larger and better equipped U.S. navy. It’s unlikely to ever see a formal trial but I think quite a few people will see it as if not an outright war-crime, at least a betrayal of military honor.
I was thinking more like the expectation we used to have that the police didn’t just start shouting in a surprise ambush. For example, the U.S. navy knew that the ship was unarmed and returning from an event hosted by the Indian government which the U.S. had also participated in, that it was attempting to dock rather than attack, and that even fully loaded it posed an insignificant threat, so there’s an argument that the Navy could have one of their thousands of aircraft to give them the opportunity to surrender or evacuate before the boat was sunk. We did that for actual Nazis, who posed far more of a peer-level threat than Iran does.
The ship posed the only plausible threat, not the sailors.
> there’s an argument that the Navy could have one of their thousands of aircraft to give them the opportunity to surrender or evacuate before the boat was sunk. We did that for actual Nazis
I think there is absolutey an argument that good decorum would have provided a nearby surface vessel to assist with rescue. But not being nice in a war isn't the same as a war crime. And expanding the notion of war criminality to cover even breaches of decorum fundamentally waters down a term that has already started being seen as meaningless because people want to make it apply to any act of war.
No, but the U.S. navy has more than a single submarine. Given the vast power differential and the fact that they knew the ship was unarmed having participated in the same International Fleet Review exercise, there’s an argument that, say, an aircraft radio message giving them an opportunity to surrender first.
The “shot across the bow” phrase comes from a relevant naval tradition, such as when the U.S. Navy captured ships from far more serious threats like Nazi Germany:
> Exactly this was one of the charges against Admiral Doenitz at Nuremberg.
Indeed, however despite being convicted of that and other charges, this particular charge was not factored into his sentence, precisely because British and U.S. submarines also engaged in the same practice during the conflict.
And that was with WW2-era submarines which were designed to operate mostly on the surface and could make provision for doing things like picking up downed aviators and engaging in "crash dives" to rapidly submerge.
Modern submarines are designed to operate mostly submerged and have very poor station-keeping while surfaced, and even lack the ability to crash dive (because you're supposed to be submerged long before you get into the danger zone and then stay submerged throughout).
It was proven in court that even the Nazi German submarines made good faith efforts to rescue drowning sailors, and they only stopped when one u-boat was sunk (or damaged?) by a US plane while it was rescuing US sailors (after which, the German navy gave out orders forbiding the practice).
> Everything I said in my previous 2 posts stands.
It was wrong before and still wrong though.
For example, you haven't explained why you feel that a torpedo for an Iranian warship in international waters is a war crime, but sinking Iranian warships at the pier in Iranian waters is not.
The U.S. did even less for shipwrecked survivors in the latter case than in the former. Why are bombs and cruise missiles to sink ships from destroyers 800 nm away not also war crimes in your mind?
Is it also a war crime when Ukraine sinks Russian navy ships at their piers with USVs or cruise missiles with no ability to recover survivors? (Hint: no, it's not)
I have explained why, multiple times. You just don't want to accept it (fine, this will be determined at Nuremberg 2,0, not by you or me, here)
The sub knew it was clear of any Iranian guns, for over 100 miles in every direction, once it had sunk the only (unarmed) Iranian asset within 100 miles of it. Thats not the same as being within (or close to) Iranian territory.
Hence, the lack of threat, as per the established laws of naval warfare, neccesitate some attempt at helping survivors. The sub was in the immediate vicinity of the ship. Not 800 miles away firing a cruise missile.
To still maintain that, even in that situation, there's still some theoretical threat means that you're effectively trying to say that in NO conceivable situation do the established laws of naval warfare apply, in practical terms. For anyone, anywhere, ever.
In any case, this is all an academic exercise. In this world order, no laws - international, military, or common decency - apply to the US or its chosen allies.
Justice will have to be served the old fashioned way.
This is a rare case of an HN discussion on international law where there is something approximating an RFC that we can just go consult on these issues --- it's the San Remo Manual, which is trivially Googlable, and consists of a series of numbered paragraphs. Cite the paragraphs that support the argument you're making about the unacceptability of sinking a flagged enemy warship simply because the attacker knows it to be unarmed.
Are you deliberately trying to misrepresent what I have said across multiple posts? The war crime was not the sinking of the ship.
That was a cowardly act (unarmed vessel), but not strictly a war crime.
The ACTUAL war crime was the immediate refusal to render any aid to the sunken sailors. How many times do I have to repeat that line? Shall I bold it for you? And the fact that the ship was ALONE and UNARMED removed any pretence that the US sub would have been in danger by doing so.
I repeatedly mention the Geneva Convention & the fact that the same principle is written into the official US naval doctrines (so its US law as well), and yet you're still barking up the wrong branch.
If you're going to refute my argument, then please refute my ACTUAL argument, and not the strawman version you've concocted.
> ACTUAL war crime was the immediate refusal to render any aid to the sunken sailors. How many times do I have to repeat that line?
Where possible. That restriction doesn't seem to have applied to submarines since WWII.
Repetition doesn't make right.
> ALONE and UNARMED
Doesn't change that it's a warship. Like, should warships from now on just say they aren't armed, then go off an engage in military operations and complain about war crimes afterwards?
I'll add this: the way you've argued this has taken me from being sceptical about this being a war crime to feeling confident it is not.
The guys on the Iranian warship also knew they were on a warship. I mean come on. What’s the expectation here. This isn’t tag on a kindergarten playground. People are gonna die.
Dönitz's blanket order that no submarine should ever pick up survivors is absolutely not equivilant to any individidual submarine deciding not to pick up survivors because {reasons}.
The first is a blanket order to ignore all survivors all the time,
the second is a specific case of not picking up survivors under a general umbrella of picking up survivors save for when there are other factors.
In this specific instance they can argue, should it ever go before an international tribunal, that they lacked room and that more applicable search and rescue was already en route.
I'm not arguing in defence of Hegseth et al. but I am pointing out that things are not nearly as clear cut and straighforward as you claim.
Declaring "my position is a fact" doesn't make it so. Wanting something to be doesn't make it so either.
Channel your indignation and anger into a more productive avenue, there's hardly a shortage of actual war crimes occuring these days to be pissed about.
The Geneva Convention II hedges a lot wrt submarine warfare - few submarines have the capacity to take on many survivors .. they're already pressed for space.
You could ague they had an obligation to notify search and rescue ... at a time when the nearest search and rescue was already alerted and en route.
and scroll down to Failure to Rescue IRIS Dena’s Shipwrecked Crew
> Exactly this was one of the charges against Admiral Doenitz at Nuremberg.
A charge that didn't stick, a practice engaged in by both the British and U.S. submarines
In the aftermath of World War II, the issue of rescuing survivors following submarine attacks took center stage during the trial of Admiral Karl Dönitz before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
After Allied attacks on a U-boat attempting to rescue survivors of an ocean liner, the RMS Laconia, Dönitz issued the Laconia Order, which instructed: “All attempts at rescuing members of ships that have been sunk, including attempts to pick up persons swimming, or to place them in lifeboats, or attempts to upright capsized boats, or to supply provisions or water are to cease.”
The court held that the order violated the 1936 London Protocol on submarine warfare, which required that the passengers and crew of merchant vessels be placed in safety before a warship could sink them.
Yet, because British and U.S. submarines engaged in the same practice during the conflict, it did not factor the breaches of the law of submarine warfare into Dönitz’s sentence.
Legally, there's much here that's hard to pin down, massive grey areas and a lot of jelly to nail to the wall.
Ethically - the US forces under Hegeseth are behaving like arseholes and absolutely skating a line, the same objective (taking out the ship) could have been achieved in a number of less odious ways.
They didn't have to pick them up. They could have surfaced (remember, it was KNOWN that there was no threat) and tossed out a few inflatable life rafts.
> They could have surfaced (remember, it was KNOWN that there was no threat)
It was by no means "KNOWN" that there was no threat. A modern submarine is inherently in a much more unsafe posture when surfaced, which is precisely why they never do that, especially when it's possible to encounter an enemy.
> tossed out a few inflatable life rafts.
Why do you think submarines randomly carry inflatable life rafts? If they had enough space for those they'd toss them overboard and load additional food stores instead.
Moreover, a surfaced submarine close enough to a floating group of survivors is actually dangerous to those survivors. It has a rotating screw at the back which can seriously injure or kill people and it's not like there's a deck trebuchet equipped to lob life rafts at a distance, even if it carried them.
> Legally, there's much here that's hard to pin down, massive grey areas and a lot of jelly to nail to the wall.
Similar to an earlier comment you made to me, what references do you have that say that GCII Article 18 is 100% not applicable to submarines? Or more broadly that support your assertion that "you've departed any recognizable modern law of naval warfare."
My guess is that both those tankers and the oil they carry belong to owners other than Iran at that point. If the US seizes such a tanker, it could be perceived as sn act of aggression by China, for example, if they are the ones who bought the oil.
You can view it like that, but most people don't. At least the people involved manning those tankers don't.
And why should them? It appears that the Iranian armed forces started acted quite autonomously, by design. They know that communications are not secure, so local commanders have a very high latitude in what actions they deem correct to take. If such a commander deems that asking and collecting $2 MM per vessel is a good idea, they'll do it. But if another commander thinks that sinking a passing vessel is what their standing orders are, they'll do it too, not being aware that the toll was paid. So, if you are the captain of such a vessel, what do you do? Do you complain to Iran for not holding their end of the bargain?
Right, clearly you can always find people to ship oil through the strait. So the whole notion that nobody will use it because it's dangerous is nonsense.
If you read what I said, it was that "most people won't do it", not that nobody will do it. From the point of view of worldwide oil supply, what most tanker captains do matters more than what a few exceptions do.
If you compare the US and the UK regarding the alcoholic beverage servings, then you can reach two conclusions, depending whether you think drinking alcohol is good or bad. If you think it's bad, then the US is better, because the restaurants in the US tend to serve smaller sizes. I am in this camp. In the UK, by comparison, the restaurants are much more generous; wine glasses seem gargantuan compared to wine glasses in the US. I suppose some people like that, but I am not sure that's really something to admire.
What this type of analysis is missing is that it is extraordinarily hard to build the bomb.
North Korea could get the bomb because they had qualms about letting hundreds of thousands or millions of people literally starve to death [1].
But let's say another country, country X, wants to acquire the bomb now. Then what? First thing: the IAEA inspectors discover that. Building a bomb is too massive an operation to be done completely in hiding. Once the IAEA inspectors find you, you either withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty, or you don't, but people know you are lying (just like they knew about Iran). Sooner or later sanctions will follow. You are cut off from all the Western nuclear supply chain. If the unnamed country X is actually Sweden, or some other Nordic country, or Poland, or any country that's part of the "West", you do care if all the nuclear supply chain is legally banned from trading with you. What are you going to do? Go to Russia, or China? Are they going to help you build a bomb that you will then use to deter them? Are you sure they are that stupid?
But let's say you are a country that's not part of the "West". Then you have bigger problems. After what just happened, you know that sooner or later you might have some bunker busters rain down on you. North Korea was lucky, but now the precedent was set. The next nuclear aspirant won't be able to hope that the West will play nice and refrain from bombing you while you are busy enriching uranium.
I know this is not related to the legal merits of the case being discussed, but who runs a red light? In my experience, this is an infarction that occurs very infrequently. Speeding or illegal parking happen all the time, but running a red light? Most people are not suicidal.
Edit: Nevermind, I think crossing on yellow and catching a tenth of a second of red counts as running a red light. If it does, it’s something I did myself a few times (of course, all in the distant past, the statute of limitations has pased now …)
Where I live, it's common to see at least one person run a red at every major intersection and not just for left turns that couldn't be made due to cross-traffic. Quite often these drivers have expired temp tags which means they don't have insurance because you have to show you registered your vehicle to get insurance. Enforcement is awful so people have been trained to realize there's virtually no consequences to their bad habits. And if they do cause an accident, well it's not like the police will show up in time to stop them from driving off.
In fact, it's so bad that parts of the metro are reinstating red light cameras this year despite having decommissioned them years ago for similar legal reasons as what Florida has run into.
Then the state needs to start doing immediate impoundment of these vehicles. Add on massive fines before release of the car for repeat offenders and you'll see this dry up pretty quick.
The city supposedly did an enforcement weekend on it last year. It was so ineffective that the state actually changed registration laws so that you pay the sales tax when you purchase a car at the dealership and then you get your plate in the mail. That doesn't go into effect until late this year and I won't be surprised if it gets pushed back before then.
Fairly common for me to see my light turn green and 2-3 more cars continue turning left in front of me through a red light. And not just yellow-light clippers, but cars that would have fully entered the intersection under a red light.
I'm actually all for impartial enforcement of traffic rules via camera systems, but there are problems that need to be solved.
- There need to be standards for evidence required to assign an infraction to a driver.
- There need to be standards for setting yellow light durations to avoid municipalities reducing them to increase revenue
- There needs to be protection against municipalities outsourcing the whole project to a private entity where there is a combined financial incentive from the private entity and the municipality to issue more tickets without adequate oversight.
My town implemented red light cameras around 15 years ago and then took them back out. Locals noticed shortened yellow lights, and there were multiple issues found with how the private operator issued the tickets and with their contract with the municipality.
I live in Baltimore and straight-up running of reds is pretty common here.
You can often do it pretty safely - stopped at a light with good visibility to see that there is no cross traffic. But also some people are just insane and blast through lights at 45 without stopping.
Cops haven't cared to enforce it for going on a decade.
Running reds is a favorite pastime of Boston area drivers. Enter just after the yellow and buzz the pedestrians waiting, lurk in the middle of the road and make a left turn once oncoming traffic is stopped for the red, or just blow it for the hell of it.
> lurk in the middle of the road and make a left turn once oncoming traffic is stopped for the red
In the jurisdictions I'm familiar with, this is the proper way to make a left-hand turn. Many intersections are designed such that this is the only realistic way to ever turn left (high traffic, no left arrow).
Most red light rules are written against entering the intersection on red. If you're already in the intersection, you're allowed to safely proceed through and out of the intersection on red. That can be challenging, of course, if oncoming traffic is running the red light.
Depending on where you live it is very common. In chicago when they installed the cameras they lowered the yellow duration to like half a second so people were constantly running them for a while. Then running yellows became normalized, and just ignoring lights from bikers which drivers noticed, and now when traffic is low its not uncommon to see people just treat lights as stop signs if they think no one is coming.
Where I live people run them routinely to make left turns. The light timing and spacing are bad, so at some intersections people will keep turning left long past the turn red. There are also several intersections where people cross but get stuck in the middle because another light has to change for traffic to move.
This is a silly example but in Los Angeles, there are hardly any protected left hand turns so the standard behavior is to wait for the light to turn red and two cars proceed before the next traffic group continues. Police even do this.
I mean I’ve run red lights but only because I live in a city and there are times where it would be impossible to turn left due to oncoming traffic. So you poke your nose out a bit so the other directions see you and turn when incoming stops but before new directions start.
In my case, I always use Opus 4.6 in my work, but quite often I get a 504 error, and that's quite annoying. I get errors like that with Gemini too. I can't estimate if I'd get a similar number of errors with ChatGPT, since I use it very infrequently.
But imagine that at some point one of the big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) gets very high availability, while the others have very poor availability. Then people would switch to them, even if their models were a bit worse.
Now, OpenAI has been building like crazy, and contracting for future builds like crazy too. Google has very deep pockets, so they'll probably have enough compute to stay in the game. But I fear that Anthropic will not be able to match OpenAI and Google in terms of datacenter build, so it's only a matter of time (and not a lot of time) until they'll be in a pretty tight spot.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintains a database of advanced reactor designs, ARIS [1]. It lists 119 reactors. A lot of them are small modular reactors, and the IAEA has published a book with details about them [2]. Some of these reactors have applied for NRC approval, and you can find an enormous amount of details at the NRC website [3].
To answer your question: numerous reactor designs are very safe.
Let's start with the most techonogically mature: helium cooled gas reactors. Helium is a noble gas, chemically inert, transparent to neutrons (the only substance in the universe to have zero neutron absorption cross-section), and it has a hard-to-believe high heat capacity by mass. The downside is that helium is somewhat expensive and it can leak. China has been operating 2 such reactors for the last 4 years [4]. In the US, there is a reactor design, Xe-100, that is quite similar to the Chinese design. It is quite difficult to come up with a scenario where something bad can happen with such reactors. The only problem is that they are quite expensive to build and operate, compared to water reactors.
There is one design that is very similar to the design of helium-cooled gas reactors, the only difference is that the coolant is not helium, it is a molten salt. In the US, the company Kairos is pursuing NRC approval for their reactor Hermes. The molten salt has lower heat capacity than helium by mass, but much higher by volume. There is no need for pressurization. The salt used here is a mixture of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride (FLiBe). Fluorine is an extraordinarily corrosive substance, but exactly because it is so, the salts that it forms are extremely stable. Still, stable or not, they can't match the inertness of helium, so such molten salt reactors are a bit more challenging when it comes to the contact between the coolant and the reactor vessel. However, they are extremely far from being a "low grade bomb". These reactors are almost as safe as they can be, albeit a bit below the inherent safety of helium cooled reactors.
No. They have Bill Gates as a founder. Bill Gates understands that nuclear is a long game.
> They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.
I'm not sure what "reverse IPO" means, maybe you mean they'll be acquired by a SPAC, like NuScale was. I doubt it. Bill Gates founded Terrapower in 2008, he is not looking for a quick buck.
Reverse IPO is a way for scammy companies to go public by being acquired by an already public penny stock - precursor to the later SPAC shell games to do the same. Basically all of these companies do it (NuScale, Oklo, Terrestrial Energy, etc) so I’m just waiting for TerraPower to do the same.
I hope you’re right and they stay focused on actual engineering instead of financial engineering but many of Gates’ other investments haven’t been so fortunate and went down the latter path. The billions of dollars in taxpayer funds and constantly shifting tech and demo projects gives me a lot of pause though. (MSR! TWR! Fast Reactor! Fujian! Hebei! Idaho! Hanford! Wyoming! UK!)
> Amodei is the type of person who thinks he can tell the US government what they can and can’t do.
I don't think that's the case. Amodei is worried that AI is extraordinarily capable, and our current system of checks and balances is not adequate yet to set the proper constraints so the law is correctly enforced. Here's an excerpt from his statement [1]:
> Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.
Let's do this thought exercise: how long would it take you, using Claude Code, to write some code to crawl the internet and find all the postings of the HN user nandomrumber under all their names on various social media, and create a profile with the top 10 ways that user can be legally harassed? Of course, Claude would refuse to do this, because of its guardrails, but what if Claude didn't refuse?
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