Word: gulf
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...retrospect, the most frightening part of the tragedy is its seeming inevitability. Rogers may have made the only decision he could, given what he knew and when he knew it. The U.S. rules of engagement are not unreasonable, | considering the situation in the Persian Gulf, and the Aegis system apparently worked as it was supposed to. The tragedy seems to have resulted from a collision of random events (an airliner taking off at the moment a naval battle was beginning, for example) with inflexible technology in a pattern that could conceivably happen again. The Navy immediately began searching for ways...
...much deeper. The central question is whether technology may be pushing the fallible humans who operate it beyond their ability to make wise judgments instantly on the basis of what, with even the most sophisticated systems, will often be ambiguous information. This question applies not only in the Persian Gulf, but wherever there are fingers on buttons that can launch deadly weapons...
...Sunday he was jangled awake in Camp David's Aspen Lodge at 4:52 a.m., even before the birds began to peep, and told that the Navy cruiser Vincennes may have shot down an Iranian F-14 in the Persian Gulf. By 8:11 a.m. he had a written message on reports that the downed plane may have been a civilian airliner. At 9:52 a.m. there was a call suggesting there was something to the story that an Airbus had been blown...
Words may be small balm in the face of pictures showing lifeless children plucked from the Persian Gulf. But there is something disturbing when a great nation finds itself mute in the face of its own complicity in disaster. Corporations are not expected to show soul, yet immediately after the Bhopal disaster the chairman of Union Carbide took the risk of making a symbolic pilgrimage to India. Personal gestures of atonement are commonplace in other cultures: the president of Japan Air Lines resigned because 520 passengers perished in a 1985 plane crash...
...trigger-happy gunslingers; that black-hat role was played by the Soviet Union in 1983 when it brazenly shot down a Korean airliner. Terrorists are supposed to be the ones who cause death in the air -- not the nation upholding the civilized rights of free passage in the Persian Gulf...