From: "Old Man Tom"
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: Re: Worst Case Scenario
> It'll rapidly get harder to get food up here for a start. We'll have to rely on native production. I don't know what stage we're at with that but maybe, just maybe, we could do it. But, right now, it wouldn't take much, if anything, for them to cripple that ability to the point where people start going hungry, and it won't be impossible for them to make getting anything off Earth a lot harder. They won't have to fire a shot to do it, or launch a single battlewagon. They just have to make dealing with us very expensive for the few people that still will. Which means prioritising some settlements over others when there isn't enough to go around. Those will be our weak points.
And their weak point is their inability to prevent us from dropping asteroids on their population centres in retaliation, and if they backed us into a corner like that then that's exactly what would end up happening. And we'd probably have international law on our side if we did, because I cannot see how using famine as a weapon of war could be interpreted as anything but the deliberate targeting of noncombatants. The United Nations takes a bit of a dim view of that...
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: Re: Worst Case Scenario
> It'll rapidly get harder to get food up here for a start. We'll have to rely on native production. I don't know what stage we're at with that but maybe, just maybe, we could do it. But, right now, it wouldn't take much, if anything, for them to cripple that ability to the point where people start going hungry, and it won't be impossible for them to make getting anything off Earth a lot harder. They won't have to fire a shot to do it, or launch a single battlewagon. They just have to make dealing with us very expensive for the few people that still will. Which means prioritising some settlements over others when there isn't enough to go around. Those will be our weak points.
And their weak point is their inability to prevent us from dropping asteroids on their population centres in retaliation, and if they backed us into a corner like that then that's exactly what would end up happening. And we'd probably have international law on our side if we did, because I cannot see how using famine as a weapon of war could be interpreted as anything but the deliberate targeting of noncombatants. The United Nations takes a bit of a dim view of that...