Does General Order 24 exist in TNG?

It's an "anachronism" the same way the ship's auto-destruct is. It exists as a last-ditch fallback for an extreme situation. Starfleet's responsibilities include the safety of the Federation and the hundreds of billions of beings therein.

 

Part of the problem is also it's status as a "General Order." It is probably just a poor choice of words by the writers. A general order is one of that applies to everyone under the issuing commander's jurisdiction (according to Wikipedia). So it does not really make sense to have a General Order to address an obscure situation. I suppose the full order might say, "in these situations, kill everything." But that's not how it was used in the episode.

 

How was it used then? It was used as a threat of Armageddon. The only way to eliminate that threat, was to—wait for it—no longer be threatening.

 

Sisko did not kill anyone with the strike...the poison was only fatal to humans, and lasted only 50 years, and the Humans were evacuated by transport ...and he did it in retaliation for and to force the surrender of a terrorist who was targeting Maquis...edgy stuff!!!

 

PhoenixClass wrote:
Part of the problem is also it's status as a "General Order." It is probably just a poor choice of words by the writers. A general order is one of that applies to everyone under the issuing commander's jurisdiction (according to Wikipedia). So it does not really make sense to have a General Order to address an obscure situation. I suppose the full order might say, "in these situations, kill everything." But that's not how it was used in the episode.
How was it used then? It was used as a threat of Armageddon. The only way to eliminate that threat, was to—wait for it—no longer be threatening.


I don't understand what you mean. Am I confusing the facts of the episode? I thought Kirk ordered Scotty to do it because people were being held hostage.

 

Beeeeeeeeuuuuuuuutiful, Herkimer!!! ...just about to try something similar myself, but you did it better and more effectively!...I think the Warp Core temperatures in here were approaching "Critical"...

 

They're not just hostages. Anan 7 intends to execute all the captured landing parties (including the Ambassador), and then wants the rest of the 430 or so on the Enterprise to surrender themselves for execution as well.

 

As established in the first few minutes of the episode, the Eminians' war had claimed thousands of innocent lives. Their star cluster was a hazard to navigation, because of their war. For whatever reason, avoiding the cluster altogether was not always feasible. There was more at stake than simply the lives of the landing party, or even just the Enterprise. Likely danger to future shipping was also the issue.

 

They are getting the same treatment they give to every ship that comes through their system. General Order 24 works like Gort in 'Day the Earth Stood Still', blow up your planet to your heart's content, involve other worlds and be destroyed. Its not a perfect system, but it works. Had this been the Klingons, assuming the crew didn't die from laughter at the stupidity, it would have been Tuesday clean up the garbage day.

 

Nicely put.

 

+1

 

And another from me...

 

SCOTT

All cities and installations on Eminiar Seven have been located, identified, and fed into our fire-control system.

In one hour and forty five minutes the entire inhabited surface of your planet will be destroyed.

You have that long to surrender your hostages.

*********

Have to admit, not much room for misunderstandings. From reading the posts so far, I no long believe GO 24 is a bluff.

 

Gort would have already leveled the planets or turned them into asteroid belts years ago. The only reason they had hostages was because the Federation was trying to play nice.

 

Space. The final shakedown. These are the voyages of the starship Alonzo Harris. A five-year mission to smoke all that is smokable, mack all that is mackable, and generally howl like a mutha@#!#$in' wolf, son.

 

With "hellburner missiles," if my now-ancient memory of the Blish book is correct.

 

To answer the original question, I don't believe that GO-24 would still exist in the TNG era. I certainly cannot see Jean-Luc Picard ever issuing that kind of order, even if it were an option that was still available to him.

In fact, if A Taste of Armageddon were a TNG episode, Geordi, Data and Wesley would have found some Treknobabble-ish way to rescue the landing party that didn't involve Worf using Eminiar Seven for target practice. The final scene would be of Picard in his ready room, looking out his window at the planet, thoughtfully, while the Eminiar-Vendikar computer war still raged below. Prime directive intact, and no blood on any Federation hands.

 

To bring this back to the original question:

I am going to vote "No," the order does not still exist. As I noted, the circumstances in which destroying all life would be acceptable are so rare that it would not make sense to have a standing order.

I actually like T'Girl's interpretation: that General Order 24 was simply a verbal code among the crew as a tool for bluffing.

I rewatched the episode and even if the code is real, Kirk was clearly using it as a bluff to force a resolution to the situation. A dangerous order, and one I hope Scotty would have ultimately back off from, no matter what happened to the landing party.

 

Too bad that's not an interpretation supported by any evidence in this or any other episode. The other times Kirk and company bluffed (such as "condition green" in "Bread and Circuses") it was revealed on screen that it was a bluff.

 

^ But the bluff was an important plot point in "Bread and Circuses". It wasn't one here.

If General Order 24 is fake, we never find out, because it doesn't matter that it's fake. In "Bread...", "Condition Green" DOES matter.