tlb wrote:kzt wrote:Sure. Agree, then wipe the core, and abandon ship. Your move, Manticore.
tlb wrote:Interestingly, that was never put to the test.
tlb wrote:Turns out that I was wrong: while skimming though UH there is a mention on page 43 that some ship captains in Filetra's force did purge their computers. As a result they are being kept in punishment quarters.
runsforcelery wrote:No signatory of the Deneb Accords is required to observe every provision of them if their opponent has already violated them, and the Solarian League was in violation of the Accords from the moment that Admiral Byng opened fire on "anchored" Manticoran destroyers without warning or any demand that they surrender and the League refused to acknowledge it. Indeed, under the Accords, Michelle would have been legally justified in treating him — and all of his personnel — as pirates, so she was totally within her rights to demand the surrender of the data cores of Byng's surviving ships.
Sandra Crandall's attack was simply Byng writ large because there'd been no declaration of war and the action for which she was there to "punish" Manticore had been a direct response to an illegal act of mass murder on the part of the senior officer of the League present (which Crandall refused to acknowledge). Again, Michelle was legally justified in demanding the surrender of Crandall's data cores.
Filareta's fleet was guilty of yet another breach of the Deneb Accords in attacking Manticore without a formal declaration of war, and the Solarian League's strategy under Operation Fabius — and, in particular, Parthian Shot — was a total violation of the Accords. Then you add the forty-three million civilian deaths in Beowulf, which were ascribed (not unreasonably) to the League on the basis of actions it had already proven it was prepared to commit and had already committed, and Honor was totally justified in regarding the Solarian League as a whole as an outlaw regime. As such, she was under no obligation at all to observe the Deneb Accords where the SLN was concerned when she arrived in the Sol System. Even her destruction of the heavy cruisers which had struck their wedges in token of surrender would have been legally justifiable. It could not have been morally justifiable, which was the reason that she spared them after Mercedes got through to her, but legally she could have chosen not to.
Thank you, but I do not think most people ascribed the deaths at Beowulf to the actions of the League. Instead I believe that they saw the deaths at Beowulf and the actions of the League as arising from the corrupt influence of the Mesan Alignment. Am I completely wrong and Honor really did believe that the Solarians planted the bombs on Beowulf's orbitals?
Demanding that the data cores be surrendering was not first used against the SLN. The first use mentioned was against the StateSec ships in
Echoes of Honor and then against the surviving ships after the Battle of Manticore.
I have found a definitive statement, where Honor is about to meet Tourville as a POW after the Battle of Manticore, in
Mission of Honor, chapter 2:
Nor did it change the fact that Honor had demanded the surrender of his intact databases as the price for sparing his surviving superdreadnoughts. She'd been within her rights to stipulate whatever terms she chose, under the rules of war, yet she'd known when she issued the demand that she was stepping beyond the customary usages of war. It was traditional—and generally expected—that any officer who surrendered his command would purge his computers first. And, she was forced to concede, she'd had Alistair McKeon do just that with his own data when she'd ordered him to surrender his ship to Tourville.
Okay, I didn't mean to suggest that the Deneb Accords specifically prohibit a demand that surrendered ships
not wipe their data cores. What I meant to point out is that the Deneb Accords themselves did not apply to the SLN in its confrontations with Michelle and with Honor because of the actions of the
Solarian League as a political entity (and of the SLN as a military force).
Even under the Deneb Accords, the party allowing you to surrender is allowed to stipulate the terms of that surrender, which can include a demand that you not destroy sensitive data. If you strike your wedge, they are supposed to give you the
opportunity to surrender, but the
conditions of that surrender are theirs to stipulate.
It is traditionally assumed that you will destroy data, but that assumes that your opponent won't make its non-destruction a condition of permitting you to surrender. Note that you don't have to accept the terms; you can choose to continue to fight or you can choose to defy the terms and accept whatever penalty the victorious party wishes to inflict. In a war between peer competitors who have a modicum of respect for one another, it is pretty much assumed that a CO will go ahead and wipe his data, regardless of his opponent's demands, and face whatever penalty his captors decreed. And we have the example of some SLN captains who went ahead and wiped their computers and spent their time as POWs in less salubrious settings.
Tourville wasn't prepared to take that chance in Manticore, because he wasn't prepared to risk the fact that Honor was bluffing about either her ability or her willingness to destroy his remaining ships if he didn't comply. In fact, Honor probably wouldn't have blown them all out of space, even assuming that she'd had the ability to do that, if he'd defied her. Given the sheer scale of the casualties both sides had already suffered at that point, however, Lester Tourville wasn't prepared to bet the survival of his remaining personnel on that.
Now, the Sollies were a different case by the end of
Uncompromising Honor. By the time Honor got to the Sol System, the penalty for wiping their computers would have been a lot more stringent, because she and the entire Grand Alliance had blood in their eyes.
The intelligence community was divided as to whether or not the Solarian League had (A) planted the bombs, (B) knew about the bombs, or (C) didn't have a clue about the bombs. The more dispassionate analysts leaned towards (C), pointing out that if the League had planted the bombs, they wouldn't have needed to risk suffering serious casualties before they set them off. They had no proof of that, however, nor did they have any way to know whether or not the fleet commander carrying out the attack was privy to all of the possible strings to the League's bow. That is, the fleet CO might not have known about a covert operation designed to put bombs aboard the platforms to be detonated as a plausible "accident" in the course of the attack. (In fact, of course, there
was a covert operation he wasn't aware of; it simply hadn't been instigated by the League . . . in this case.)
What mattered to the Grand Alliance was precisely what Honor voiced in the meeting immediately after the Beowulf atrocity. "It has to end." Whether the Mandarins knew it or not, whether they would admit it or not, they were playing the Alignment's game, and as such they were complicit in the platforms' destruction because that destruction had obviously been intended to coordinate with the Solarian attack on the system. That is, if the war didn't end, the League would continue to provide cover for possible future Alignment attacks of the same sort. Whether or not the League had been
knowingly complicit really didn't matter to the Grand Alliance. And, for that matter, the League's (that is to say, the
Mandarins') actions had already led directly to millions of deaths — admittedly, most of them Solarian — with no end in sight.
Every one of those deaths, including those at Beowulf, was the direct consequence of Solarian actions. So at the strategic decision-making level, there wasn't much question in anyone's mind about the League's war guilt, the fact that it had systematically violated the Deneb Accords, and that it wasn't going to stop unless it was
compelled to stop. Even the Grand Alliance's recognition that Solarian policy was being made and driven by less than a dozen unelected bureaucrats couldn't change the fact that it
was being made and that every sign was that it would continue to be made in a way which would generate still millions more of additional casualties.
The bottom line was that the League had demonstrated its willingness to trample the Deneb Accords and every other canon of existing interstellar law. As such, the Grand Alliance was justified in resorting to a much older principle when it came to forcing the League's compliance: reprisal. If your opponent refuses to abide by the existing "laws of war," you are not obliged to abide by them either and you can use reprisals or the threat of reprisals to compel your opponent to change his behavior.
Under the circumstances that obtained by the time Honor was dispatched to the Sol System, no one was interested in splitting hairs about who got whacked to make it stop. And they were legally justified in that position under the existing interstellar laws of war.
