The Heart of Deterrence (2012)
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
From their response, killing through a button isn't killing.
Can you agree that sometimes it is morally just and legally permitted to use violence?
Can you also imagine that someone may know that it is the right thing to order this violence, but be put off by physically having to hack someone up themselves?
If so, do you now see the practical problem that the friends in the Pentagon were warning of? With the capsule in the person you are clouding the judgement of the president and making it harder for them to make a cool assessment of the right course of action, not adding some kind of clever moral check. Can't you see that?
If you want to know more about this issue, read up on the 'trolley problem'. It's a more complex moral issue than your snarky comment implies.
Perhaps the butcher knife and the capsule is too extreme, but on the other hand, perhaps just having to issue some codes is too easy.
The situations where a nuclear counter-attack serves any moral purpose are limited enough that such thought experiment are worthwhile means or considering what level of deterrence should be in place.
Why? So that when a new intelligence emerges on this planet they'll know the value of deterrence?
I disagree. The instinct for revenge serves a very important purpose in stabilizing society. If I know you will want revenge should I kill your brother, it makes me less likely to do so, and vice versa. Revenge is also the basis of the justice system, though obviously not its total extent. For example, if you kidnap someone, we do exactly what we condemn and forcibly hold you in a facility for a number of years or life. And yet the moral implications of that are different because of the differing situation.
>You try to appear strong, you tell everyone that you will lunch retaliation strikes, but the leaders of this other country don't give a shit, they really hate you and launch a first strike.
Appearing weak doesn't prevent a first strike by our opponents either. In fact, it increases likelihood of one. So if our options are appear strong or weak, and appearing weak has grave consequences, I will appear strong.
>You really want to nuke the people of that country? You won't hit the leaders and the people didn't do anything to you. Chances are that they hate the leaders as much as you do. So why on earth would you do that?
The people are guilty of allowing a criminal regime to initiate nuclear warfare against another party. No individual or small clique (small enough to fit in a bunker) can launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of a large, representative sample of their nation. They are complicit. They launched a strike. They will suffer and die.
Revenge is not supposed to be the basis of any modern justice system, we don't lock people up to make them suffer, we do in order to change them, to make them not commit crimes again, to make them honor the rules of the society they live in. This necessarily involves an element of force, acting against the will of the criminal, but the motive is not revenge. We actually try to avoid revenge as much as we can, we condemn vigilantism because people act irrationally and are likely to overreact or even go after the wrong one. Revenge is not stabilizing, it is destabilizing.
Appearing weak doesn't prevent a first strike by our opponents either. In fact, it increases likelihood of one. So if our options are appear strong or weak, and appearing weak has grave consequences, I will appear strong.
If you really believe this to be true, you have to conclude that it is irresponsible for any country not to try to obtain nuclear weapons. You would have to support North Korea to obtain nuclear weapons because that will reduce the likelihood of war. Nuclear disarmament would be a stupid idea. You are suggesting that humans are egoistic greedy assholes always wanting to just conquer the entire world, to grab all the resources and the only thing that prevents them from doing this are the expected costs and causalities of the conflicts. It is a bit like suggesting that wearing sexy cloths is a bad thing because it provokes getting raped. Being strong and able to fight an attacker is not the same thing as being able and willing to nuke innocent people. The right thing to do is building missile defense capabilities, that might actually save your people. And you of course don't do that in order to gain first strike capabilities because you no longer have to fear retaliation strikes, you actually do it to have a strong defense against attackers. You don't develop or get rid of you offensive weapons to show that you really do it for defense and not for improving your first strike capabilities.
The people are guilty of allowing a criminal regime to initiate nuclear warfare against another party. No individual or small clique (small enough to fit in a bunker) can launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of a large, representative sample of their nation. They are complicit. They launched a strike. They will suffer and die.
So if a dictator forcefully acquires the power in a country, the people are guilty? It is immoral if they just try to survive instead of resisting and risking getting killed? The people in North Korea really enjoy their liefs and support the regime? Which by the way certainly fits into a bunker. Is a mother guilty in case her child, despite her best effort, becomes a murderer? Should we kill the mother in revenge for unleashing her child onto the world? Just throw her into jail for a decade or two?
That's patently untrue. The very notion of justice is built upon revenge. To say modern justice systems aren't based on it is to say they float in the air, founded upon nothing.
>If you really believe this to be true, you have to conclude that it is irresponsible for any country not to try to obtain nuclear weapons.
Well, yes, it is eminently sensible in many situations to obtain nuclear weapons for your country. That doesn't mean I have to support them doing so, as it is not necessarily in MY interest for them to do so, even if it is in their own interest.
> You are suggesting that humans are egoistic greedy assholes always wanting to just conquer the entire world, to grab all the resources and the only thing that prevents them from doing this are the expected costs and causalities of the conflicts.
Our domination of the planet suggests this is the case.
>It is a bit like suggesting that wearing sexy cloths is a bad thing because it provokes getting raped.
No, it's not.
>So if a dictator forcefully acquires the power in a country, the people are guilty?
A dictator cannot gain power without the support of a large segment of the population.
> It is immoral if they just try to survive instead of resisting and risking getting killed?
Yes. It is immoral not to resist evil.
>Is a mother guilty in case her child, despite her best effort, becomes a murderer?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Citation needed. »Justifications for punishment include retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation.« [1] Note that retribution is not revenge and that retribution is probably the most controversial justification for legal punishment. [2] What good does it do, whom does it help?
Well, yes, it is eminently sensible in many situations to obtain nuclear weapons for your country. That doesn't mean I have to support them doing so, as it is not necessarily in MY interest for them to do so, even if it is in their own interest.
Why would it not be in your interest unless you want to attack that other country? You argued that not having nuclear weapons increases the risk of being attacked, so more nuclear weapons should reduce the likelihood of armed conflicts which in turn means a more stable world which benefits everyone (besides weapons manufacturers and the like).
Our domination of the planet suggests this is the case.
How does that follow? The dominant species on a planet can certainly be benevolent. I grant you that humanity had and probably always will have a fair share of assholes and that they are good at getting into influential positions, but without good additional arguments I wilt not grant you that it is a fundamental aspect of humans that will forever prevent us from living together in peace. We certainly still have to go a long way, but we also have already come a long way.
No, it's not.
If you don't have nuclear weapons you increase the risk of being attacked, you should really consider getting some.
If you wear sexy cloths (not wear non-sexy cloths) you increase the risk of being rapped, you should really consider getting some non-sexy cloths.
A dictator cannot gain power without the support of a large segment of the population.
A coup d'état does neither require the participation nor the support of a large fraction of the population.
Yes. It is immoral not to resist evil.
That is a bold statement. How far does that go? If I see someone pointing a gun at somebody, should I try to intervene even if it is likely that I don't stand a chance? Is it my moral obligation to travel to North Korea and try to topple regime?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
You argued that the people are responsible for the actions of their leaders. It is admittedly not the best analogy but wouldn't it similarly follow that a mother is responsible for the actions of her child?
(The US has never been bombed by any other nation but it has bombed a couple dozens. In the case of nukes, it is the only nation that has used them against another country.)
At the time of their introduction, nuclear weapons were not yet understood as qualitatively different from an equally powerful amount of conventional weapons. The qualitative difference observed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped establish this qualitative difference in the minds of people.
Having the grit and resolution to hack someone open and being able to make a good decision about using weapons are unrelated. Why conflate them?
An alternative might be to have the person carry the suitcase with orders never to surrender it, forcing you to be prepared to shoot him or order him shot if he can't be subdued, or any number of "easier" variants.
Part of the point is forcing people to think about why it is appropriate to order the murder of millions of innocent civilians if you are unwilling to kill a single person face to face.
There may be valid answers, such as if you have reasons to worry about further, more destructive additional strikes and want to try to take out their capabilities. But there are also many digusting reasons, such as being willing to carry out mass murder on innocents out of a desire for vengeance.
Even if one can agree, which I think most of us can, this particular dilemma is specific to weapons of mass destruction, because their use inevitably (and intentionally) causes the death of many, many people who aren't the target but are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, the thinking goes, it makes some sense to force the president to kill someone who isn't the target to ensure that it's a worthwhile sacrifice.
I wonder what else people would be more willing to do by pushing a button rather than doing it themselves.
I mean, it's not surprising that gov higher-ups would incinerate human beings with a button, dump toxic waste on people from a plane with a button, poison water supplies, launch tear-gas from choppers, etc.
They should be forced to open their eyes and WATCH the effects of their buttons. Like Clockwork Orange or something.
I mean, what's the solution to these types of problem where the adversary keeps getting better and better? I feel like Forever War touched on this too, where the Taurans just kept getting more and more advanced, and it was always an arm race to have the better technology and better weapons and better tactics, etc.
The American military fighting in Vietnam dehumanized the Vietnam soldiers in order to justify killing them, but imagine if one of those American soldiers were told by his commanding officer that in order to kill more "Charlies", he'd have to kill his friend he's been fighting with since the beginning. Sure, you'll probably find someone crazy enough to do so, but a lot of people wouldn't do it.
TLDR: It's different when it's someone you work with
Part of the dilemma in this thought experiment is basically about weighing the worth of the lives of unknown numbers of "them", against one of "us".
The President must distinguish "them" or "us", otherwise he has no business leading the country in a war. He must treat the killing of one of "us" with a different judgment.
The other part of this is remote controlled killing versus visceral engagement. Suppose that pushing the button is the right thing to do for the country, but the President has a personal aversion against the bloody engagement form of killing. As President, he's supposed to push, but a personal, psychological reason is preventing him from doing it as a man.
Pressing the button means killing of lot of "us" in the end too, because there's no such thing as one-way nuclear exchanges nowadays, with subs ready to fire from anywhere in the world.
There is never going to be a one-sided nuclear exchange when a substantial number of powerful, ideologically opposed countries have access to ICBMs.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the most destructive bombing runs in WWII.
The March 9th 1945 bombings of Tokyo were far more destructive.
How most nuclear powers would actually react to large-scale non-nuclear aggression is of course a whole different discussion.
In short, there are no realistic circumstances under which the US would launch a first strike with nuclear weapons. The political cost is too high, and the benefits could never outweigh the costs.
The "bad guys", the ones you might actually refer to as "them", are sitting somewhere comfortable, far out of reach of any of this. Their only interaction in this is that they pressed a button.
It's the self justified "us" than do most damage, not some "others".
Any evidence for that?
Because again and again, humans are well-documented to NOT dance on each other's graves. We consistently pull back from the brink of destroying the "other" and not only let them live, but help them rebuild.
I'm not saying that war is not necessary, but pretending that you're fighting zombies thirsting for nothing but your blood is idiotic. The soldiers you're fighting joined their army to protect their people. The people itself most likely just want to passively continue with their life, not understanding what the war is about, knowing nothing but the date of the first bomb. The people that started the war is sitting somewhere cozy, out of reach.
Simply not true in the case of, say, an aggressor who initiates conflict by invading other countries.
Many a times there is definitely a right an wrong in war.
The side which is right has no choice but to respond with aggression. Fight, or else be laughably annihilated for the sake of a pacifist ideology.
And yet you demonstrate it yourself with, "I expect them to do it, but not us in the HN community. We're different here."
This selfishness if of course natural for any human, but that does not make it better.
Also: Baseline human psychology is tribalistic and violent. We need education and culture to behave as modern - and sustenance amd safety.
If you put a gun to my head, I'm certainly not going to care if you're my local baker or a North Korean soldier, just to name a random nation. Hell, I'll probably have sympathies for the soldier, as they are just doing what they were told, like any other soldier would. Getting angry at them would be pointless, although I'd of course do my best to fight for survival, and if I came out the winner, I would be upset that the life I had to take was not the life that was to blame.
For the baker, it would be hard to tell if the hand was forced, or if the idea of slaughter was of their own making.
Starting from the 60's, the concept of MAD and a truly global, total war made this distinction irrelevant. As soon as you push that button, you're not only condemning "them" to death.
This shows just how much 20th c. nationalism still holds sway in many minds when it is as ridiculous as sports fandom.
As if the establishment haven't killed (and allowed the killing) of tons of "us" without flinching an eye...
From this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
to much worse stuff. But suddenly when it becomes matter of open public scrutiny it's some kind of big conundrum...
They just make their general discontent known ("oh, those pesky anti-vietnam protesters" etc), allow for the cultivation of an "us and them" dynamic, and then their people ensure that for years the police is not just allowed to do bad things but even encouraged (with protecting policemen that stepped out of line, giving promotions to their leadership if not directly, then after some such scandal gets forgotten, etc).
From McCarthy and Hoover, to the treatment of the human rights activists, the 68 democratic convention and onwards to this, the Watergate and more, it's not about some "bad apple" or "stressful panicked" actor, but about systematic cultivation of such solutions.
For one thing, "those pesky anti-vietnam protesters" had burned down the ROTC building a couple of days before, there was quite a bit of violent rioting prior to the shooting and the National Guardsmen had already had to use their bayonets to manage it (when bayonets get fixed and bloodied you know things got very serious). Today's "campus protests" are utterly farcical by comparison.
In general, violent civil insurrection was common, and the authorities management was very mild by the international standards of the time, and there was plenty of pressure from the bottom up for much more strenuous measures. Note it's the only major incident of that type in that period, and is a trifle when compared to atrocities like Waco.
McCarthy? Please, if you don't know what the phrase "submit to party discipline" means, and that it resulted in every member of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), back when it was popular and selective in admittance (through the '30s at minimum), was a self-declared traitor, well, read up on what the other side was saying, or things like the Venona decrypts which eventually revealed just how accurate McCarthy's raw information was.
And note how the authorities' flaccid response to GRU and NKVD spying through these traitors like Hiss paved the way for crude men like McCarthy. That's a lesson you'll see from the Weimar Republic to a lot of what's happening today, and there's plenty of history of this sort of thing in pre-modern times.
Hoover was a bad apple, I'll grant you, and the rest of the barrel remains rotten to this day; has the FBI Hostage "Rescue" Team ever actually rescued anyone? Latest is their shooting in the only fatality resulting from the Bundy Oregon mess, and then trying to cover that up.
Please stay!
"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
By the way, have you ever wonder which type of meat you would eat if you had to kill the animals yourself?
I assume that is part of the moral of the tale. The story only makes sense in signalling that you think that nuclear weapons are pointless.
There's a good reason: to make real the human suffering that can be caused in a quick, momentary decision.
Previous forms of warfare took longer amounts of time to cause immense destruction.
Read the story of Ronald Reagan's response to watching the movie The Day After [1] and you will realize that such representations of the suffering can have a great impact.
> The story only makes sense in signalling that you think that nuclear weapons are pointless.
Absolutely not. You can think that nuclear weapons are important, and still take seriously their immense destructive capacity.
Throughout human history human leaders have caused great suffering at little cost to themselves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_polic...
If faced with a symmetric foe that has launched a nuclear holocaust upon my country, it would be absolutely essential to retaliate in kind so as to ensure that they could not mount a second assault and kill even more people. If I were president, I would not hesitate.
If your foe launches a strike that would kill 99% of the population of your country would you retaliate to ensure same level of destruction?
Now suppose you do also decide to retaliate to ensure 99% destruction to your foe. Would your foe's knowledge of that change whether your foe even tries an eliminating strike in the first place?
The same MAD principle? The knowledge that after 6 years, everybody will be exhausted by fighting, and what for exactly? Hitler wasn't rational, and maybe he would use nuclear weapons. Actors in the WWI thought it would last couple months, again, weren't exactly rational about what they are getting into.
It's not nuclear weapons what creates peace. It's the rational ability of humans to (eventually) see the hopelessness of destruction, that creates peace.
Whether the destruction comes from nuclear or normal weapons is irrelevant, however conventional weapons at least give us chance to have that rationalization later. In other words, stronger weapons require more responsible humans, not cause them to be more responsible.
The MAD doctrine is just a false rationalization of irrational fear. It is not a rational principle, it is principle adopted so that humans can feel better having nuclear weapons, although having them objectively makes the world a more dangerous place. If people indeed followed MAD doctrine as rigorously as MAD doctrine itself assumes, WWI and WWII would never have happened either.
In both of these scenarios if you are attacked first (early warning) your only option is to attack their centers of population to either prevent an all out invasion or to retaliate.
This is exactly why MAD sort of works, because it actually ensures mutual destruction of not only the nuclear and military capabilities but also of all national and human infrastructure as the only possible answer to even a limited nuclear first strike is "fire zee missiles!". Or to put it in a more structured manner there is virtually no room for proportionate response when it comes to a nuclear attack. When there was it was the biggest threat to "MAD" since it more or less would ensure that any side that gains sufficient advantage would be prone to launching a first strike. Because of this very fact the nuclear arms treaties between the USA and then the USSR limited fixed launch site while promoting mobile launcher and nuclear missile subs as much as possible as the guaranteed 2nd strike capability of both nations was what MAD was actually built upon.
But MAD is not without it's faults, heck so far i think Norway out all countries was the one that brought us closest to total nuclear war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
Yeah, right. And the Soviets most certainly took advantage of this moral error, for as you note, they're hard pressed to do so with a straight face otherwise.
There is no moral error here, only moral reality.
Also, it's not like our military establishment is separate from our civilian population centers. The SF bay area, New York, San Diego, among others, would be devastated in a counter-force first strike, no matter how precise.
The article says "a team of Norwegian and American scientists". I am not surprised.
OK, and it's the end of the world as we know it. Like, Game Over, the survivors are back to the Stone Age and the civilization can start from scratch with 99% less people. Sounds like a sound decision you'd make.
It is ironic, but by taking a strong "We will strike back" stance, you decrease the chances of ever having to strike.
On the flip side, some of the well-trod ground is now out of date, too. Arguments about how maybe we could try non-proliferation instead become irrelevant as nuclear weapons become relatively speaking easier and easier to acquire due to advancing and dispersing technological sophistication.
Anyhow, upshot, if you're serious about thinking through the issues this turns out to be a really challenging stage to get up and morally preen at people on. It's very easy to end up advocating a strategy that kills billions of people while preening. It may be unpleasant to you, but you do in fact have to think. Hard. With neither rose-tinted glasses nor excessive cynicism. The easy answers don't work. The sweet answers don't work.
Indicating a willingness to use nuclear weapons at all may also make an adversary more willing to believe you may deviate from policy and strike first, which again may lead them to believe an all out first strike is safer than holding back (e.g. I've mentioned Able Archer 83, where the Soviet leadership allegedly considered a first strike because they thought the US was planning one)
Part of the problem is that neither you nor the other side knows whether your opponent will stick to any given strategy, nor if they will behave rationally.
The correct action may be to back down from a full scale launch while saying that you will respond in kind.
PS: South Africa actually gave up nuclear weapons. Which is the extreme end of not shooting back scale.
Advertising to the world that you have a firm policy against nuclear attacks other than in very limited, clearly defined scenarios puts you at risk of the other side decides it is ok to strike you for their own gains, but it also protects you against potential adversaries who have no designs on you but who you might inadvertently scare.
Able Archer 83, and the realisation that it appears to have genuinely terrified the Soviet leadership is often credited with changing Reagans course and making him determined to sit down with the Soviet leadership.
The bigger issue is that they are more likely to initiate the strike if they know about this protocol and believe it will reduce the likelihood of a counter strike.
A while afterwards Reagan wrote that he long thought that the Soviet leadership, like the Americans, did not believe a US first strike was a serious possibility. But he eventually learned that this was a flawed assumption: The Soviet leadership saw the US as a possible - even likely - aggressor, and interpreted US actions accordingly. In that context, posturing was incredibly dangerous, and this realisation made him change tack and become determined to sit down and talk to them.
Here's why, either Russia or China could launch a first strike if they believed USA wouldn't retaliate. Or simpler they would use conventional means more aggressively and if that escalated to conflict with USA then they would simply make first strike. Key point is neither country should ever think USA would definitely NOT use nuclear retaliation on nuclear first strike. In a sense by making a major nuclear weapons power less likely to do use its own weapons increase overall chance of nuclear war. And finally this system also gives additional urgency for aggressive actions for opposing great powers, by forcing them to act and finish all their aggressive plans during term of a president they perceive in capable of ultimate action.
As a thought experiment, let's implant the launch code into, say, a captured enemy spy. Is it still the same story?
The piece that I found particularly interesting about the proposal is the that the person with the implanted codes is a volunteer.
Not only would you need to have a President take hands-on ownership of taking a life (the first of many if the launch proceeds), but you have a martyr who is first to die for a cause that they feel most strongly for.
Stronger forms:
- Pieces of the code in multiple people.
- Inside a loved one.
- In the arm or leg of the president.
Now of course, this model may be wrong (pre-emptive strike on non-nuclear state with no nuclear allies); but I'm somewhat disturbed that the Pentagon employees don't seem to understand this. Maybe they do, and the author only gave the initial reaction rather than their full counterargument.
It was first faced with the reality of the level of Soviet fear of an US attack that appears to have set him on a new course.
In '81, worrying about Reagans antagonistic foreign policy was quite rational.
And I noticed no "new course" on his part, your claim elsewhere in this discussion that it made "him determined to sit down with the Soviet leadership" is not supported by my memory. He was certainly willing to "sit down with" them, he just wasn't willing to surrender even more to them. The accession of Gorbachev to was almost certainly a more significant factor (then again, maybe Gorbachev's hand was strengthed by Able Archer 83 et. al.), and note for example the much hyped "failure" at Reykjavík following the earlier one in Geneva.
No, the increase in tensions and hostility occurred as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred under Jimmy Carter (another Nobel Peace Prize winner).
Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.... So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely..uh..declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
That was in 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_empire
Because it's a fungible commodity in plentiful world supply, and we're better off benefiting from that trade ourselves?
Because it most directly puts the lie to their claims their economic system is superior? "If it's so good, why can't you grow enough food for yourselves but have to buy it from us?"
That's possibly true.
That they need to by grain puts lie to it, the US selling grain to them was merely secondary.
We're actually still formally at war with the DPRK, something they remind us and most especially our ROK allies of all too often.
The rest are sanctions that stop short of using food as a weapon.
As for "Warmonger Reagan", how many shooting wars did he actually get us into?
How many shooting wars are we in right now, under "Nobel Peace Prize Winner" Obama?
And I for one didn't call him that, it was people like those making up such things who called him that and much worse. Although I'll admit I've found "Nobel Peace Prize Winner Obama" to be funny ever since it happened, it will be such forever.
The new article talks about the point of deterrence, and the associated logic, in greater depth.
Here was the original article that had been posted:
http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/proposal-keep-the-nuclear-l...
More likely, I think, that those holding prestigious enough office can find ways to get around very high procedural barriers like this one by assigning the task to a secret service agent or other on-hand staff of a martial trade.
Personally I think we've seen plenty of evidence that those in high office might personally carry out and enable heinous acts of individual violence if the stakes are made to appear grave enough to them.
If you really wanted to be clever about it, have a non-medically trained person begin the operation... and then the surgeon would have to step in to save the patient.
To save the country, he'd have to sacrifice himself.
Should any of his direct reports consider killing him to access the codes, that'd be capital-offence treason ( " levying War against them" ).
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-u...
Alex3917:
I like this idea in theory, but in practice if I see Dick
Cheney coming at me with a butcher's knife I'm getting the
hell out of there.2) Politicians / leaders are orders of magnitude more likely to be psychopaths.
Does everyone promise to do this and have them nowhere else?
He prefers to become your friend over many years, have great experiences together, then shoot you in the face and make you apologize for your role in the incident.
While it's primarily the responsibility of an upland bird hunter (anyone shooting, of course, but in this sort of hunting you move around a lot and flush out birds unexpectedly) to keep track of everyone and not shoot when any of them are down range, everyone in the hunting party also has a responsibility to follow previously agreed upon protocols to make this easier and less error prone. The guy who got shot screwed that up big time.
Of course A)as VP Cheney's life was already a media circus B) Cheney shot the dude in his face and assumed-risk-or-no Cheney bears the responsibility for that.
In ~70 years of it, one of my father's favorite pastimes, he got shot exactly once, although there was no excuse for it like there was in the Chaney accident. Then again, he was both careful in picking his hunting partners and only hunted with some of them once after they demonstrated they didn't have their act together.
As long as you wear glasses and there's some distance, serious injury is unlikely, as happened with him. A tough shirt is also recommenced, that stopped penetration of the shot that hit his chest.
I live in Texas so it would permit certain actions on my behalf.
edit: The difference is that some states have a requirement that the defending party retreat. Got it. For my part, I imagine I'd always retreat if given the chance and if it's reasonable (ie, I'm not going to retreat and leave my family in harm's way, etc). Of course, I can't fault anyone for making a different choice; who knows how one might act in such a situation.
In various parts of e.g. Europe, though, that would get you a prison sentence, very notably the U.K., since you would be using more force than the aggressor. The US principle is that once the threshold of lethal force is reached, other forms of lethal force in response are legitimate.
Of course this is probably untested in court as no one here carries a gun.
It can most certainly come up in home invasions, another article by the BBC mentioned about 11 cases in the recent past.
How about use any politician who has every voted for the use of US military overseas. Or even better, a volunteer from their families. Or any professor who has advocated for such, or their families. Because I think that this would cover a lot of people who smugly accuse others of being drive by an "us vs them" mentality.