Today I learned that the city of Geneva has no civilian purpose at all. Thanks for the lesson.
No, what you are failing to see is the penalty for violating the GC is not a sternly worded letter from the UN.
It is forfeiting all the protections of the Geneva Convention. That is how it is enforced. For example, you are not supposed to bomb hospitals and houses of worship. But conversley what if your enemy put an anti-aircraft missile battery on top of that hospital, or snipers and machine gun nests in the steeple of a church? Should the other side let itself be shot because, "well those are protected structures, we'd be committing warcrimes shooting back at the guys shooting us from them?"
Hell no, and the negotiations for the Geneva Conventions took this into account. Doing what I described above is called "Militarizing a protected structure" in the GCs, and does two things to it.
One, its protected status is forfeited, and it is now a legitimate and legal target.
Two, its damage and destruction is not considered the fault of the side who shot at it. It is the fault of the side who militarized it.
The GC's response to trying to game the system is forfeiture of those protections. Same reason soldiers dressed as civilians aren't considered POWs, but captured spies and sabotures and subject to military tribunal and likely execution, as several SS soldiers were during the Battle of the Bulge for in this case pretending to be Allied soldiers to pull off sabotage and assassination behind Allied lines.
The WOB killed an entire star system effectively with that superbug, Elizabeth probably killed less than a forced invasion and conventional orbital fire support would have done. In part because given WOB actions before this? Them having a final ****** YOU! Nuclear, Chemical, and/or Biological weapon use on Terra is a likely scenario to consider, thus nailing the sites which could order it, and stockpile such, before they can move them is a good move to save lives on both sides.
Yeah... and she chose the most destructive weapon available to her, the one with the most drastic side effects ever.
Do you really believe, even for one moment, that if she had gotten her hands on the superbug that the Word used on Alarion, she would not have it dropped on Earth in order to deny Earth´s toys to Stone?
One, Liz stikes me as smarter than to play around with biowarfare. Not only is their a cringing horror to it beyond nukes? It is far too ease to turn back on you, as her bluff suggestion shows.
Two, IF Elizabeth wanted to destroy Earth? She wouldn't have sent C-Fractional Telephone Poles at targets in largely geologically stable regions. She'd have strapped dropship engines to decent sized rocky or metallic asteroids and smacked them into places like the Yellowstone Super-caldera.
Yes, she DID set out to cause civilian casualties. Little Miss Supergenius knew *exactly* what would happen when a relativistic projectile hits a city. And she ordered it done. There were MANY less destructive ways she could have done this - nukes, orbital bombardment and the like. But no, Relativistic Lizzie had to send a message: "Kids, don´t be the civilian population on a planet that has toys I don´t want anyone else to play with. I will kill you, I will wreck the planet´s climate, and I´ll tell everyone that you had it coming."
Or point out that if the owners cared about their civilian population, they'd place such sites a decent distance from civilian population centers?
There is a good reason the USAF placed so many ICBM silos in Montana and the Dakotas for example.
