All the weekend’s news wires were abuzz with speculations over a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle potentially downed early Sunday after violating Iranian airspace. Not surprisingly, details of the fall, first reported by the official IRNA news agency, are unclear.

Did Iran bag the stealthy Air Force RQ-170 spy drone “with little damage” after jamming its control signal? Was the surveillance drone, which is built by Lockheed Martin and is reportedly the same model deployed earlier this year to keep tabs on bin Laden’s Pakistan compound as that fateful raid was underway, at all related to a recon aircraft operated by the NATO-led and Afghanistan-based International Security Assistance Force that has been missing since last week?

However, the RQ-170 is likely an autonomous vehicle and thus not as subject to imperfect air-to-ground failsafes. (Remember that Reaper drone that went bonkers in 2009?) So can it even be said with any semblance of certainty that indeed it was a RQ-170 that came tumbling down in eastern Iran?

And beyond the technicalities, will Iran retaliate over what the U.S. says it has no indication the nation-state even pulled off?

RQ-170, or “Beast of Kandahar” (via Defense Aviation)

Who really knows? This isn’t the first time – in fact, it’s the second time this year – that Tehran has maybe bluffed over plucking U.S. spy birds out of the air, anyway.

But this is all beside the point. What’s alarming here is the very real possibility that dropping drones themselves, not bombs, may soon be perfect pretexts for the one country to begin waging war on the other, as the U.S.‘s most hawkish of war-mongering neo-cons – you know, folks like the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka with the most money and actual influence in Washington – are now saying the Iran threat is no longer nuclear. “This admission,” MJ Rosenberg argues in an Al Jazeera op-ed, “that the problem with a nuclear Iran is not that it would attack Israel, but that it would alter the regional balance of power is incredibly significant.”

Indeed it is. It would seem we’ve now entered an age where nukes are for the birds.

Connections:

• The Bad Omen of America’s Falling Drone Syndrome
• Another Sort of Drone War
• Former CIA Drone Chief Says Drones Are Backfiring

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv.