Haven Victorious

I think it say something about the Honorverse that I had to look up exactly how Yucel was planning on carrying out her atrocity. I think Sapper is right that Terekhov probably shouldn't have nuked the tower since he was capable of securing the hostages with relative low risk. Yucel might have surrendered after that. If not, it's not like she was going anywhere.

I suspect someone might have a word with Terekhov about the virtues of restraint even when dealing with homicidal madwomen.

noblehunter wrote:I think it say something about the Honorverse that I had to look up exactly how Yucel was planning on carrying out her atrocity. I think Sapper is right that Terekhov probably shouldn't have nuked the tower since he was capable of securing the hostages with relative low risk. Yucel might have surrendered after that. If not, it's not like she was going anywhere.

I suspect someone might have a word with Terekhov about the virtues of restraint even when dealing with homicidal madwomen.

Terekhov hit the tower with a small KEW, the RMN does not use nukes against planetary targets.

tlb wrote:

noblehunter wrote:I think it say something about the Honorverse that I had to look up exactly how Yucel was planning on carrying out her atrocity. I think Sapper is right that Terekhov probably shouldn't have nuked the tower since he was capable of securing the hostages with relative low risk. Yucel might have surrendered after that. If not, it's not like she was going anywhere.

I suspect someone might have a word with Terekhov about the virtues of restraint even when dealing with homicidal madwomen.

Terekhov hit the tower with a small KEW, the RMN does not use nukes against planetary targets.

Also, being less firm with the gendarmes will cause more problems down the road. Using a big hammer early in the conflict gets the message accross and will save gendarme lives down the road.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Just exactly what were Terkerov's options to stop her from carrying out the killings?

The marines he ordered in at the same time he ordered the kinetic strike killed all but a handful of the Gendarms within seconds of the kinetic strike hitting. The two events were nearly simultaneous, and the marine attack could have gone in without the kinetic strike at all.

Undoubtedly Yucel would have still tried to resist after most of her troops were massacred, but all she had was the comm section and (probably) a security detachment in the building itself. Without the troops (mostly dead at this point), she lacked the ability to do anything to the prisoners or really anyone outside the building. Sure she could have held the building's occupants hostage, but Terekhov clearly didn't think those lives were worth saving.

At that point, Terekhov could have done what the Mesans should have done - not a single massive kinetic strike, but multiple smaller strikes in rapid succession. The strike package had six penetrators to use; six strikes in the 3-5 kt range hitting the building dead center on the roof at 10-20 second intervals would crater the roof then progressively blast further and further down the interior of the tower. By the sixth blast the building would be pretty well gutted but the exterior shell would have contained most of the explosions. Some civilians in the lower floors might even have survived; certainly nearly all of the people in the three block radius around the building would have.

A few points.

(1) The EE does not require that the military commander on-planet have the ability to kill whole bunches of your people if they don't surrender. It requires that the military commander surrender when further resistance can inflict nothing but avoidable casualties. (But see my point 3, below.)

(2) The strike Terekhov ordered on the soccer stadium worked perfectly. Of course, he couldn't know it was going to before the fact, could he? Be reasonably confident of that, yes; be certain of it, no.

(3) If Yucel had, indeed, refused to surrender even after her forces at the stadium were taken out, those forces represented only a small percentage of the total forces loyal to her and Lombroso on the planet. In other words, even if Terekhov could have been positive that the strike on the stadium was going to be totally successful, it would affect only a handful of the total forces available to continue committing atrocities elsewhere on the planet at her orders, and he couldn't possibly get individual interception forces to all of them before they did that. (In other words, she did have the means available to continue inflicting casualties despite the fact that her position was hopeless.)

(4) By taking out Yucel and the government lackeys who were supporting/enabling her atrocities against their own population, he gave all of those other forces clear and incontrovertible evidence of what would happen to them if they did continue to slaughter civilians at her orders after she refused to surrender.

(5) In terms of whether or not Terekhov is going to be reprimanded for this, the answer is no. He acted strictly within the letter of the Eridani Edict; arguably (it can never be proven one way or the other) reduced overall casualties significantly; didn't get any of his people killed dealing with a bunch of people who had been carrying out mass-casualty strikes and mass executions (including "executions" of minor children) on the planet well before he ever got there; and executed his strike against an official representative of the Solarian League, with whom the Star Empire of Manticore was currently at war. There may be those (mainly civilians, I suspect), who will argue that he could have used a smaller hammer to crack the egg; no one in the Cabinet or the Admiralty is going to be among them.

In a military situation, where God only knows how many "innocent civilians" have already been slaughtered by the person refusing to surrender, when that individual has forces dispersed over the planet and has already made it clear that she will massacre prisoners rather than surrender, and when that individual is the local commander for a nation with which you are at war, your responsibility is to minimize casualties to your own people and to those she is threatening to massacre, not to minimize casualties for her, her staff, the people supporting her mission, or the so-called "government" which called her in and enabled the atrocities she's committed in the first place. Yes, the strike killed minor children and civilians. The adults among those civilians, however, had self-identified themselves as supporters/enablers of Yucel's policie by locating themselves (and their families) inside her perimeter, and it wasn't a question of whether or not [more] innocent children were going to be killed; it was a question of whose those children were going to be.

I will grant you that Aivars Terekhov is capable of being one ruthless SOB when he believes the mission requires it. In this case, given the menu of choices available to him, no one in the chain of command is going to even try to second-guess him on the decision he actually made.

I do not take the infliction of avoidable civilian casualties and "collateral damage" lightly. I trust that's been made reasonably clear in my books. But there are times when the question, unfortunately, isn't whether or not there will be "collateral damage," but who will suffer the damage. And it is also unfortunately true — and something I also try to deal with — that sometimes even the Good Guys Have to make some pretty ugly decisions. Which is because war itself is utterly vile.

Sometimes it is, indeed, true, to quote William Tecumseh Sherman (who is not the most popular Union commander in my native South) that: "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."

runsforcelery wrote:I do not take the infliction of avoidable civilian casualties and "collateral damage" lightly. I trust that's been made reasonably clear in my books.

For the most part it has. However, it [still] seems to me that this was one instance where you did take it more lightly than you had in the rest of the series.

I suppose it could be an artifact of how little ground combat we've seen between actual military forces. Most of what we've seen was rebels or civilians against military forces whose defining characteristic is their lack of concern for collateral damage (Mesans, Gendarm intervention battalions). Even the Peeps surrendered when they should have; the Good Guys had never really been in that situation before.

Innocent bystanders? hmmm...everyone not actually pointing a weapon at you at the time...in one respect. In reality, a decision has to be made to extend the altercation to avoid innocents from dying...potentially, forever...or make the hard resolution that the opposition must stop NOW. The really hard choice to make is how many of those "innocent" bystanders must be stopped as well. Never easy, nor should it be, but the decision has to be made. That's what the higher ranking military are taught, trained and relied upon to do. How many others will die if they don't?

Galactic Sapper wrote:six strikes in the 3-5 kt range hitting the building dead center on the roof at 10-20 second intervals would crater the roof then progressively blast further and further down the interior of the tower. By the sixth blast the building would be pretty well gutted but the exterior shell would have contained most of the explosions. Some civilians in the lower floors might even have survived; certainly nearly all of the people in the three block radius around the building would have.

You have no idea about what you are talking about. The destruction radius of that size weapon is actually fairly enormous. Hiroshima was pretty much utterly destroyed by a 15 KT airburst.

With a little 5kt groundburst:
Anyone outside at 500 meters will have all their exposed skin 3rd degree burned, and likely have their clothes set on fire. But only briefly, as the blast wave at 500 meters is 10 PSI, or roughly a 300 mph wind. On the good side this puts out the burning clothing, on the bad side it severely damages most reinforced concrete buildings and blows apart any lighter forms of construction. So very few people will actually live long enough to die from the 3rd degree burns.

In Field Artillery Officer Basic School the joke was that "German towns are an average of 3KT apart".

kzt wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:six strikes in the 3-5 kt range hitting the building dead center on the roof at 10-20 second intervals would crater the roof then progressively blast further and further down the interior of the tower. By the sixth blast the building would be pretty well gutted but the exterior shell would have contained most of the explosions. Some civilians in the lower floors might even have survived; certainly nearly all of the people in the three block radius around the building would have.

You have no idea about what you are talking about. The destruction radius of that size weapon is actually fairly enormous. Hiroshima was pretty much utterly destroyed by a 15 KT airburst.

With a little 5kt groundburst:
Anyone outside at 500 meters will have all their exposed skin 3rd degree burned, and likely have their clothes set on fire. But only briefly, as the blast wave at 500 meters is 10 PSI, or roughly a 300 mph wind. On the good side this puts out the burning clothing, on the bad side it severely damages most reinforced concrete buildings and blows apart any lighter forms of construction. So very few people will actually live long enough to die from the 3rd degree burns.

In Field Artillery Officer Basic School the joke was that "German towns are an average of 3KT apart".

Contrast those effects to the 45 KT burst which was actually used.

Many times in canon the ceramacrete construction of "modern towers" withstands blast energies which would pulverize reinforced concrete. Green Pines, for instance, where the building Collin Detweiller was in survived a nuke going off close by with almost no structural damage at all. The windows broke but the structure survived.

One of the other towers was nuked from the inside for Houdini and remained standing. The cell the bomb went off in was destroyed, but nearby parts survived with varying degrees of damage and much of the building was entirely untouched.

Given the (literally) unbelievable toughness of ceramacrete construction and the fact that the "ground burst" would be happening several hundred meters up in the air, there would be a significant optical shadow zone near the base of the tower, and at least some blast wave protection. How much protection exactly would depend on the height and radius of the building, which were never given. It's entirely possible the "ground burst" would be 400-500 meters off the ground, with a ceramacrete lip of 100 meters between ground zero and the edge of the roof. The effect would be like standing at the bottom of a 400-500 meter cliff when a nuke was set off one hundred meters back from the edge. Not the most pleasant of experiences by any means but even most unprotected people should survive it. And with no lingering radiation hazard, those who survive the immediate blast have a good chance of living through the entire ordeal.

Galactic Sapper wrote:Contrast those effects to the 45 KT burst which was actually used.

Many times in canon the ceramacrete construction of "modern towers" withstands blast energies which would pulverize reinforced concrete. Green Pines, for instance, where the building Collin Detweiller was in survived a nuke going off close by with almost no structural damage at all. The windows broke but the structure survived.

One of the other towers was nuked from the inside for Houdini and remained standing. The cell the bomb went off in was destroyed, but nearby parts survived with varying degrees of damage and much of the building was entirely untouched.

Given the (literally) unbelievable toughness of ceramacrete construction and the fact that the "ground burst" would be happening several hundred meters up in the air, there would be a significant optical shadow zone near the base of the tower, and at least some blast wave protection. How much protection exactly would depend on the height and radius of the building, which were never given. It's entirely possible the "ground burst" would be 400-500 meters off the ground, with a ceramacrete lip of 100 meters between ground zero and the edge of the roof. The effect would be like standing at the bottom of a 400-500 meter cliff when a nuke was set off one hundred meters back from the edge. Not the most pleasant of experiences by any means but even most unprotected people should survive it. And with no lingering radiation hazard, those who survive the immediate blast have a good chance of living through the entire ordeal.

I read the book as saying 67 KT.

Although there is a sonic wave from the projectile moving through the air, I do not think there is any "ground burst" until the actual impact with cermacrete roof of the building (which may be what you were saying).

I wonder about your unprotected people when some surrounding buildings were also destroyed.

tlb wrote:I read the book as saying 67 KT.

Although there is a sonic wave from the projectile moving through the air, I do not think there is any "ground burst" until the actual impact with cermacrete roof of the building (which may be what you were saying).

I wonder about your unprotected people when some surrounding buildings were also destroyed.

Reread and you are correct. I don't know where I got 45 from.

Reducing the first, most exposed strike by a factor of 13 isn't going to prevent ALL collateral damage but it will reduce them quite a bit.

Also, many of the bystanders killed would have been in those other buildings and not exposed on the street. Those buildings surviving would mean that many if not most of the people in them would also survive.