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Comment by ipsocannibal | Hacker News Reader

Why not a simple car bomb? This seems way more elaborate than necessary. What message is being sent using this mode of assassination?

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Initial reports were of a car bomb powerful enough to knock out a power line, and gunmen shooting the scientist up after. The only consistent thing I've read is that a Nissan was involved. We'll probably never know what actually happened.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/world/middleeast/iran-ass...

That was the truck self-destructing.

If this setup is actually true, then that remote controlled Nissan could also have served as a VBIED: Unload from the gun until it's empty, then drive the thing into the target zone and explode it to take out whatever survived the gunfire.

Tho if the source is to be trusted that's not how it happened: It exploded 150 m away in the same position it fired from.

So the explosion probably only served to destroy any evidence of the implementation for the remote control.

Also interesting: Earlier reports about this attack did mention suicide/car bomb being part of the attack, but allegedly only as a distraction.

Eliminating risk. Planting a car bomb is a high risk for the attacker. This remote control truck belongs to a person who left the country (Iran) about a month ago.

> Eliminating risk. Planting a car bomb is a high risk for the attacker.

But how did it self-destruct then?

Planting a car bomb on the victim's car is risky. It's safe to outfit the attacker's car with a self-destruct device in a safe garage.

Could have been to eliminate evidence. Security services can glean alot of information from the type of equipment used and it's sophistication or conversely lack of sophistication.

Couldn't you put a bomb on the remote controlled truck?

Crash into the target, then go boom

Doesn't seem like much of a risk. Fly a drone over the roof of the car, drop a block of C4, detonate.

Easier said and done, commercial drones aren’t reliable and quite likely restricted goods in a country like Iran.

I don’t believe this story really it seems like more of a saving face coverup than anything else.

A car bomb/ied to stop the car and a few automatic weapons work just fine.

If you use local assets that may not even know the actual target or don’t care also gives you sufficient plausible deniability.

I think it's "easier said than done"

Regardless. That's all true. Also with a drone you need one that's big enough to carry at least several pounds of explosive...to handle an armored vehicle and the likelihood the detonation would be not directly next to it. You'd need FPV or something so you can guide the drone in close. Also vehicles could be moving at a reasonable place, so the drone would need to be fast enough to keep up/catch up.

Could it be done? Totally. Are there easier/cheaper ways? Totally.

Heck an RC Car ala Call Of Duty games would be more realistic.

But that’s the point it’s not can it be done, but can it be done effectively enough to be selected as a method of assassination.

Too many things can go wrong with a finicky toy, you still need to be in line of sight most of the time and at that point two guys with AKs or an RPG are going to be a safer bet.

If I had to kill someone in a hostile country I rather have to be the one that empties a mag into their car than the one controlling an RC car trying to get under their vehicle in traffic hoping the battery won’t die, the remote won’t crap out and that no small pothole or pebble on the road will send my toy car flying ala rocket league.

Imagine a phalanx of drones, one for each car in the procession, all arriving and detonating simultaneously. Not as incredible as we may imagine. If fact, pretty much the state of the art.

I don't think you understand how reality works, or how explosives work...

Small drones can't carry a large payload, an explosion is extremely hard to actually aim. Shaped charges work because they either have enough kinetic energy from inertia to keep the explosion directed to the target or they fused with the target before exploding usually by also hitting it really fast.

This is what 400g of C4 looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajmIEhK4LKc and this is under good conditions where the forces of the blast are contained because they put them in a hole in the ground.

If you detonate a few 100 grams of military grade explosive mid air you pretty much need to be within slapping distance of someone to guarantee a kill from the concussive blast.

A hellfire missile has about 10 Kg of high explosive in its warhead and you still get people walking off from a direct vehicle hit mainly because if the missile breaks through the roof and through the floor of the car before exploding it's usually sufficient to prevent the occupants from being turned into a brussels pate, and here were talking about a few millimeters of sheet metal protecting you against 10 Kg (if you wonder why - the path of least resistance works on explosions too, and rather well this is exactly why shape chargers work and why they don't need to be made out of adamantium or even anything particularly though in fact what essentially is paper mache is often used to make the lenses that focus the explosion in a shaped charge).

With the payload these drones can carry a fragmentation warhead would do absolutely squat against a vehicle it might be able to devastate a crowd where these can essentially detonate on contact but even unarmored vehicles won't be nearly as damaged as you think they would.

Life is not a video game.

At least 3 other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed by car bomb or similar[0]. And Fakhrizadeh had a security detail. So presumably they were well prepared for such a threat.

Anyway, it sounds like the remote-control-truck story is a pure fabrication.

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...

You could kill from much further away. Car bombs require you to be very close to ensure a kill, unless you've got something like a dump truck or cement mixer filled with explosives.

A car bomb might accidentally kill or injure innocent bystanders.

A surgically precise assassination is its own message: "We kill exactly who we mean to and you cannot stop us."

Pretty scary stuff.

I'd guess that machine gunning another vehicle before self-destructing might also kill or injure innocent bystanders.

I'm not sure if I would call firing a truck-mounted machine gun from 150 meters away from the target and then exploding the truck a "surgically precise assassination".

Particularly when the US has demonstrated the ability to kill only one passenger in a moving vehicle with the bladed Hellfire R9X.

A simple bomb does not have enough certainty that it will destroy its target without exerting exorbitant amounts of explosives.

Yes this strategy is much more complex but I would argue it has more precision and certainty around its efficacy.

I think the opposite is more likely. Put a bomb in a remote controlled car - you're going to need one either way - drive close to your target, detonate. Done.

With a machine gun you have to drive close and then aim extremely accurately.

It sounds implausible - at least not without AI superpowers in the targeting system.

At the very least you'd expect lag to be a significant problem.

Effective blast radius means you need to be close to the target to ensure enough damage to terminate it. The twitter feed mention a motorcade, so the target was likely protected.

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