The Commander of the Solar Union Navy:
"...had let the System know that a bombardment of Earth would be regarded as genocide and all officers partaking in it would be punished under Union law." (p. 59)
Lieutenant Robert Crane, knowing that his brother is on the other side, protests on the ground that to execute men who obeyed orders during a war would be even more barbaric. (See Anderson's "High Treason.") Would it? Illegal orders should be disobeyed. Can nuking civilians be anything other than genocide?
Crane accepts a mission that might prevent the bombardment, thus protecting his brother from prosecution for genocide.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But I agree more with Robert Crane's view. And how do you define or decide, in a civil war, whose orders are illegal? Both sides, obviously, claim to be in the right. But I agree it should be reasonably plain, in a civil war, which side might be better than the other.
Also, don't forget, Admiral K'ung's bombardment ultimatum was causing the anti Humanist revolt on Earth to collapse. ARMIES were being raised to restore the Humanists, if that would prevent the bombardment. Admiral K'ung probably thought all he needed to do was wait and the anti-Humanist cause would fail.
Ad astra! Sean
And in any case, nuclear weapons can't kill you deader than dead.
The atomic weapon on Nagasaki killed about 100,000 people.
LeMay's firestorm raid on Tokyo on 10th March, 1945, killed almost exactly the same number on a single night: rivers of melted human fat ran smoking and sputtering down the gutters and even the people in shelters died by the hundreds at a time, choking as the firestorm sucked the oxygen out of the air.
Dead is dead.
For that matter, when Timur the Lame's men (Tamerlane) sacked Delhi in December of 1398, they built (on his orders) a pyramid of 100,000 human heads -- and you can be completely sure that wasn't the total count.
And his ancestor Temujin (Genghis Khan) probably killed off something like 20,000,000 Chinese in his campaigns; by the time the Mongol (Yuan) dynasty was established over all of China, the population of the country had dropped from 120 million to around 60 million.
Shot with an arrow, disembowled with a sword, rendered down into liquid fat by a firestorm, vaporized by a nuclear weapon -- what does it matter?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As you said, dead is dead, no matter the means used. And I recall how in your fifth THE GENERAL book, the Settler Ali massacred the people of the Civil Government's border city of Gurneyca and had THEIR heads piled into pyramids.
Ad astra! Sean
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