kzt does have a point about the need for responsibility. But as was pointed out earlier, the closest this gets to Manticore is the visit by our intrepid operatives to Honor's flagship. And Honor certainly wasn't given a clue that the planned op had anything to do with nukes covering escape from a busted op.
IITC, the op itself was sponsored by Torch with participation from Beowulf, Erewhon, and marginally the Ballroom.
So how do we assign responsibility? First we need to deal with context. Whether official or not, the overall context is war. Official in Torches case. A few hundred kids killed by a nuke is horrible, but it pales in comparison to what Manpower/Mesa has done to its slaves over the centuries. Then, to make the point further, Mesa was the origin of the genecidal attack on Torch that failed only due to Maya's intervention. For that matter OB followed Green Pines only by months. And while we are at it, Manpower/Alignment's actions in Monica and Talbot constituted acts of war against Manticore.
So how do we assign responsibility? You might as well ask who was responsible for the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden? Who decided to drop the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What about all the misery inflicted in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq? All of this stuff was deliberate and we know who the decision makers were for the most part. Who the war criminals in any conflict are is an indentification made by the victors and often has little to do with justice.
Then there is the matter of personal responsibility. The person responsible for setting off that bomb in a park full of kids was that seccy who, upon discovering he could not make his assigned target, set off the bomb and suicided. Had he made his assigned target, damage and loss of life would have been minimal.
So do Anton and Victor bear responsibility for that? They did ask for explosives to be gathered. The members of that cell with whom they associated themselves provided low level nukes instead of the conventional explosives that Anton was expecting. Out of self defense as much as anything else, Anton disables the locators. Then when the time came for the bombs to be used, Anton picks targets that would have provided a very noisy distraction, but few casualties. One of the bombs make to its assigned target. The other does not and the result is that a bomb goes off in a park full of kids.
I would have to say that Anton is responsible for working with that cell who consisted mostly of loosely wrapped kids whom he could not control who were filled with rage toward their oppressors. This is mitigated somewhat by the reality that there didn't seem to be anyone else to work with in that situation.
Anton is responsible in that he provides the impetus for gathering the explosives. That the gathered explosives were nukes was beyond his control and unless he is willing to bring the authorities down on the cell and his own op, he has to disable the locators. In essence his hand is forced.
Anton chose the preferred detonation point of the bombs. But his instructions were not carried out in the case of the Green Pines bomb. No way did he choose that location. He would have killed the individual who actually did the deed had he realized what would actually happen.
We cannot relieve Anton for his responsibility, but it is only fair to note that his choices were severely curtailed as the situation developed which to a certain degree limits his responsibility as well.
Then too, while we are assigning responsibility, it's probably wise not to limit it to this one incident. As I pointed out above, this incident was part of an ongoing war that was currently being waged in which the kids in that park were far from being the only victims. We have a tendency to regard war as being something like chess which is fought according to a clean cut set of rules. It's never like that in reality. It is really ugly, nasty and as messy as hell. It not only involves the soldier on the battlefield, but also the innocents who get caught in the crossfire.
Were those kids in Green Pines murdered? No. Murder implies malice aforethought, an intentionality that was missing. Not even the seccy who actually did the deed actually set out to murder kids. Those children were really casualties of war no less than any soldier on the battlefield... not that it matters to the kids one way or the other. Dead is dead.
So yes, Anton is responsible. But he has lots of company. It would be wrong on a moral basis to isolate this incident from the ongoing conflict and presume that Anton is responsible alone. There is lots of responsibility to go around. Unfortunately in war untangling the strands and doing justice gets so complicated that it almost never happens.
Don
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