Issue 377: It's A Bird! It's A Plane! No, It's... Oh, It Was A Plane

[Kingstononia]

The Issue

A military courier, Marleen Lee, rushes into your office in a panic, "Leader, there's been a terrible tragedy! We mistook a civilian aircraft for an attack bomber and launched an anti-aircraft missile at it. There are no survivors. What should we do?"

The Debate

1. "Blame the Bigtopians!" shouts Brian Leach, your most jingoistic advisor. "No one can really prove it was us. Pin it on our foes and prove to the world how monstrous they are. It's the perfect excuse to double-down on our military investments. How else can we possibly defend ourselves against such amoral villains?"

    

2. "What did you expect to happen?" says Pete Broadside, leader of Kingstononians Against Arms. "You can hardly walk down the street without seeing a soldier on their front-porch polishing a surface-to-air missile. With all of these weapons in the government's hands, of course accidents are going to happen. The only way to prevent an awful war is to openly admit our mistake and massively cut back on the number of weapons in circulation. That will keep this tragedy from ever happening again."

    

3. "How do we even know it was a civilian aircraft?" insinuates Chief Spy L------. "We could just quietly let the word out that it was actually a secret military aircraft sent in by the Bigtopians to spy on us, and no one could blame us for shooting it down. Clearly the numerous schoolchildren and nuns were just clever disguises meant to fool us."

    

4. "Deny, deny, deny," explains Matilda Gutenberg, Deputy Minister of Information. "We didn't shoot down a plane because there was no plane. There are no corpses because no one was on the plane - which didn't exist anyway. Anyone who says otherwise is clearly just slandering the Glorious Armed Republic of Kingstononia."