how are R-Bombs prevented?

JeffEngel wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:Finally, of course, you've got to find enough people to set up the attack who are willing to incinerate billions of defenceless civilians. In spite of what some people on this forum think, I think this could be harder than it sounds.

Granted, and kudos to humanity for being like that. On the other hand, it doesn't take many people, and humanity is really, really extensive in the Honorverse.

That it hasn't happened much since Epsilon Eridani may argue less for fear of retaliation or for timeless human decency than for the examples of an era of far more civilized warfare than we're familiar with here and now.

I was guilty of the same errant thoughts until a knowledgeable friend of mine in Romania brought it to my understanding that it would take a very rare, sadistic son-of-a-beech-head to want to kill billions of innocent people as collateral damage just to get one, or a few, or an entity.

Blind rage can cause one to open fire in a public place killing many. But that is temporary insanity.

If one could simply push a button, in the heat of the moment of insurmountable rage, and destroy an entire planet, then it could, most probably would happen. But in the course of planning, procuring materials, and execution, that kind of hot anger cools.

HB of CJ wrote:We must remember and understand that all of this is fictional and not real. The greater reality is that there will remain all sorts of ways and methods of inflicting mega death upon an entire planet.

Or said another way ... "The more complicated you make the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes". What would happen to a typical G2 STAR stuck by multiple 7 million ton impacts at .8 cee?

Nothing? Would the star just burp and say thank you? Or would such result in a series of nasty solar flares wiping all life from the system out to about 2 AU? Dunno. Yikes. HB of CJ (old coot) Just me.

Well, 7 million ton impacts at .8 c packs 4.2 e26 J; the Sun is putting out 3.8 e26 J each second. I guess having all that released in one place would have some effect -- splashing out gas? -- but I'd think planets would be fine.

cthia wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:Granted, and kudos to humanity for being like that. On the other hand, it doesn't take many people, and humanity is really, really extensive in the Honorverse.

That it hasn't happened much since Epsilon Eridani may argue less for fear of retaliation or for timeless human decency than for the examples of an era of far more civilized warfare than we're familiar with here and now.

I was guilty of the same errant thoughts until a knowledgeable friend of mine in Romania brought it to my understanding that it would take a very rare, sadistic son-of-a-beech-head to want to kill billions of innocent people as collateral damage just to get one, or a few, or an entity.

Blind rage can cause one to open fire in a public place killing many. But that is temporary insanity.

If one could simply push a button, in the heat of the moment of insurmountable rage, and destroy an entire planet, then it could, most probably would happen. But in the course of planning, procuring materials, and execution, that kind of hot anger cools.

Oh, I wasn't and haven't been considering genocide as a crime of passion. But genocide as policy, that's been old hat for humanity. Genocide as our confident expectation as the normal course of war was a "comfortable" assumption for the last decades of the 20th century, and what "peace" we got was largely from the confidence we'd inflict it on one another as a certain, unquestioned response to international politics getting just a bit twitchier.

So it's gone from normal for us to unthinkable in the Honorverse.

The numbers don't represent much of a psychological problem for 21st century humans. When we count people as people, we just shrug and figure "lots" over 150 or so. If you can get people thinking in terms of those people not being people - not being "innocent", for instance - then you quit processing them as moral patients, beings with a claim on your caring. After that, it just takes a sufficient reason - greed, fear, hate, one of our frequent package deals on them - and a sufficiently low cost and available means, and boom - "never again" happens over and over.

I don't think we can assume that people in the Honorverse do not believe they could not get away with an EE violation by never being caught. Certainly the Alignment would feel confident in pulling it off secretly, and they'd almost certainly be right. So if it's not happening more often, either people just don't feel much cause for it or they still have sufficient restraint, every sane one of them, or at least any small group of people who'd have to cooperate for it to happen. Either way, that's cause for supposing they're just a whole lot better than we are on the average.

cthia wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:Granted, and kudos to humanity for being like that. On the other hand, it doesn't take many people, and humanity is really, really extensive in the Honorverse.

That it hasn't happened much since Epsilon Eridani may argue less for fear of retaliation or for timeless human decency than for the examples of an era of far more civilized warfare than we're familiar with here and now.

I was guilty of the same errant thoughts until a knowledgeable friend of mine in Romania brought it to my understanding that it would take a very rare, sadistic son-of-a-beech-head to want to kill billions of innocent people as collateral damage just to get one, or a few, or an entity.

Blind rage can cause one to open fire in a public place killing many. But that is temporary insanity.

If one could simply push a button, in the heat of the moment of insurmountable rage, and destroy an entire planet, then it could, most probably would happen. But in the course of planning, procuring materials, and execution, that kind of hot anger cools.

JeffEngel wrote:Oh, I wasn't and haven't been considering genocide as a crime of passion. But genocide as policy, that's been old hat for humanity. Genocide as our confident expectation as the normal course of war was a "comfortable" assumption for the last decades of the 20th century, and what "peace" we got was largely from the confidence we'd inflict it on one another as a certain, unquestioned response to international politics getting just a bit twitchier.

So it's gone from normal for us to unthinkable in the Honorverse.

The numbers don't represent much of a psychological problem for 21st century humans. When we count people as people, we just shrug and figure "lots" over 150 or so. If you can get people thinking in terms of those people not being people - not being "innocent", for instance - then you quit processing them as moral patients, beings with a claim on your caring. After that, it just takes a sufficient reason - greed, fear, hate, one of our frequent package deals on them - and a sufficiently low cost and available means, and boom - "never again" happens over and over.

I don't think we can assume that people in the Honorverse do not believe they could not get away with an EE violation by never being caught. Certainly the Alignment would feel confident in pulling it off secretly, and they'd almost certainly be right. So if it's not happening more often, either people just don't feel much cause for it or they still have sufficient restraint, every sane one of them, or at least any small group of people who'd have to cooperate for it to happen. Either way, that's cause for supposing they're just a whole lot better than we are on the average.

Well, there is that small detail of learned, preached, taught and imbibed evil for centuries that may not fit any known profile. Institutional malign.

JeffEngel wrote:If you can get people thinking in terms of those people not being people - not being "innocent", for instance - then you quit processing them as moral patients, beings with a claim on your caring. After that, it just takes a sufficient reason - greed, fear, hate, one of our frequent package deals on them - and a sufficiently low cost and available means, and boom - "never again" happens over and over.

They are only a blob of tissue until later.
Those people are infidels They deserve nothing from us.
Everyone knows they are sly, cheating, lying scoundrels.
They are a cursed people. And many other excuses.

Well, there is that small detail of learned, preached, taught and imbibed evil for centuries that may not fit any known profile. Institutional malign.

It has happened over and over, although usually the option of being slaves instead of dead is offered. It is now in parts of the middle east, Myanmar, Africa a few decades back, was in much of Europe in the 1930s, many wars of prejudice on many continents. If there is any large people group which has not been guilty of this at one time or another, I don't know about them.

Jesus Christ prophesied a time so nasty that no one would survive except for God limiting that time. We have only developed weapons capable of doing that during and since WWII. The cost is dropping and the availability increasing.

Believers have hope in the promise that the time will be limited. I see no other hope. I wonder what the loss rate will be

Apart from strongly religious/ideological (and I include North Korea dictatorship-cult situations here a la Warneke) motivations I don't really see the point over demolishing a planet in the first place.

The main reasons to go to war is either conquest or possibly trade. Killing billions just to take out a trade competitor seems so disproportionate that it should be unthinkable. When it comes to conquest why would you want to destroy the prime habitable real estate in the system you intend to conquer?

I think I've also come up with one more reason why the Mesan Alignment would not want to commit any EE violations:
It's got thousands (millions?) of sleeper agents scattered across human space. How would it ensure the loyalty and silence of these agents if it started committing giga-death atrocities? Committing EE violations might create a legion of McBrydes and smash the onion into pulp.

Just for example, take someone like Audrey O'Hanrahan:
If some mysterious EE violation (or a series of them) occurred which benefited the MAlign's goals, who thinks she would not figure out that the MAlign was behind it?
Now I have to wonder how heavily indoctrinated she is and whether or not she would go public with what she knows as a result. My reading of the character is that she does have a conscience and it is unlikely that her conscience would be able to tolerate such direct mass murder.

BobfromSydney wrote:Apart from strongly religious/ideological (and I include North Korea dictatorship-cult situations here a la Warneke) motivations I don't really see the point over demolishing a planet in the first place.

The main reasons to go to war is either conquest or possibly trade. Killing billions just to take out a trade competitor seems so disproportionate that it should be unthinkable. When it comes to conquest why would you want to destroy the prime habitable real estate in the system you intend to conquer?

Multi-stellar empires can lose one planet - especially if it's a smaller or poorer one - and remain few conquests. Even reducing their viability as trade rivals, if we're talking about sufficiently large powers, may be a goal of such value that killing a couple billion people for it may be proportionate in some calculus that has neutralized right and wrong and moral indignation and rage.

There's also the threat of extreme, escalated response to nudge an enemy into limiting their claims. It's that fear of escalation that kept the Cold War from getting even close to a point where nuclear weapons would be a reasonable move for the other party. Apparently either (1) conquest by Haven was not quite so bad as to justify even private cabals from threatening to "go Eridani" against them, or (2) those private cabals worried that their planets would be treated as their sponsors by the SLN, or (3) going Eridani was just not something that would occur to them. (2) doesn't seem perfectly plausible to me, though I wouldn't rule it out entirely. (3) seems unlikely given how many planets Haven conquered, but it may account for some of it. So I figure (1) had to be doing most or all of the work, which means either (i) conquest by Haven was bad but livable, and Haven may have assured that precisely to keep anyone from going Eridani on them, and/or (ii) people in the Haven Quadrant have a far higher regard for life than we do now, bless them.

I think I've also come up with one more reason why the Mesan Alignment would not want to commit any EE violations:
It's got thousands (millions?) of sleeper agents scattered across human space. How would it ensure the loyalty and silence of these agents if it started committing giga-death atrocities? Committing EE violations might create a legion of McBrydes and smash the onion into pulp.

Just for example, take someone like Audrey O'Hanrahan:
If some mysterious EE violation (or a series of them) occurred which benefited the MAlign's goals, who thinks she would not figure out that the MAlign was behind it?
Now I have to wonder how heavily indoctrinated she is and whether or not she would go public with what she knows as a result. My reading of the character is that she does have a conscience and it is unlikely that her conscience would be able to tolerate such direct mass murder.

Yeah. The Alignment isn't really composed of sociopaths. They do have instead varying degrees of ideological blinkers that counter those consciences with dehumanization of likely victims, the sense that the glorious future they are buying is worth the price, and not thinking about some of it too hard or too often. The less you're in the Onion, the less the selective inattention and downplaying of the costs will work for you, and it failed entirely for Jack McBryde.

O'Hanrahan is likely to carry on a lot longer, I think, not for lack of conscience or insulation from the world outside the Onion - I don't think her conscience is at all defective, and she's got no insulation from the world - but because she's got so much less need-to-know about the Alignment's plans and what it will entail. If she figured it all out, she'd be a big security problem for her. I suspect she's got someone ready to assassinate her at need.

For those deepest in the Onion, I think they're not committing Eridani violations (yet) in some small part because there aren't uses for them (yet), but in larger part because they respect a taboo against their use. The actual amount of death and suffering the Plan has caused and will cause vastly outweighs a few billion people destroyed in an instant - funny how people forget 30+ generations of slaves raped constantly through their childhoods, for example, as part of cover - but they'll hesitate to kill a large bunch at a time relatively cleanly.

So even in that worst case of consciences kept in the dark and distracted, able to get along with monstrosities, there's still a big hesitation to do this one particular sort of crime.

JeffEngel wrote:O'Hanrahan is likely to carry on a lot longer, I think, not for lack of conscience or insulation from the world outside the Onion - I don't think her conscience is at all defective, and she's got no insulation from the world - but because she's got so much less need-to-know about the Alignment's plans and what it will entail. If she figured it all out, she'd be a big security problem for her. I suspect she's got someone ready to assassinate her at need.

O'Hanrahan is described as being very deep inside the Onion, and knowing the Alignment's true goals. She certainly doesn't know specific actions the Alignment is taking, but she almost certainly does know in general what it will entail.

That said, the rest of your comments appear accurate to me.

SWM wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:O'Hanrahan is likely to carry on a lot longer, I think, not for lack of conscience or insulation from the world outside the Onion - I don't think her conscience is at all defective, and she's got no insulation from the world - but because she's got so much less need-to-know about the Alignment's plans and what it will entail. If she figured it all out, she'd be a big security problem for her. I suspect she's got someone ready to assassinate her at need.

O'Hanrahan is described as being very deep inside the Onion, and knowing the Alignment's true goals. She certainly doesn't know specific actions the Alignment is taking, but she almost certainly does know in general what it will entail.

That said, the rest of your comments appear accurate to me.

Thanks. So, your read on O'Hanrahan is that she, despite not living in the Alignment echo chamber, really is simply that unmoved by the scale of suffering the Plan embraces and/or puts such a value on the Detweiler Vision that it's worth it?

It does jack up the credit she's due as an actress.

JeffEngel wrote:Thanks. So, your read on O'Hanrahan is that she, despite not living in the Alignment echo chamber, really is simply that unmoved by the scale of suffering the Plan embraces and/or puts such a value on the Detweiler Vision that it's worth it?

It does jack up the credit she's due as an actress.

That's my read, yes. After all, I think she knew the truth about what happened at Monica, New Tuscany, and Green Pines, and didn't seem to have any problems with it. But I am uncertain exactly how many details she knows, so I am open to the possibility that there are some Alignment plans she might be uncomfortable with.

And I wouldn't say that she is outside of the echo chamber. Just being out in the "real world" does not mean being out of the echo chamber. To be outside the echo chamber, she would have to hear someone proposing that the Alignment's plans might fail or that their goal might not be the best future for mankind, or that this or that plan might have flaws. Since there is no one outside the Alignment who knows enough about the Alignment to make such statements, and no one inside the Alignment is making such statements, I would say that O'Hanrahan is just as enclosed in the echo chamber as Detweiler. Possibly more so, since all she knows about the Alignment plans are carefully filtered by her superiors.