The Romulan War
- Thread starter Mage
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You'll also want The Good That Men Do, the first of the relaunch novels. There's also another ENT Romulan War novel forthcoming.
Well, Destiny touches on the Romulan War VERY briefly (i.e. Captain Hernandez is angry she'll miss it), and there have also been a few pre-Enterprise (i.e. incompatible) versions of the conflict: The Romulan Way gives a brief historical overview of a very different Earth/Romulan conflict and Starfleet: Year One picks up after the final battle at Cheron.
Well there have been three novels so far and one that is forthcoming. The first two, starting with The Good That Men Do, lead up to the war. The third, The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor’s Wings, deals with the start of and roughly the first year of the war. The forthcoming novel, The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm, continues the saga.
Has anyone heard if the Romulan War series is supposed to continue after To Brave the Storm? Of course, they may wait to see how sales of the second book goes before they decide to proceed.
Anyway, that's it so far as far as the Enterprise series goes.
- Byron
The Good That Men Do
Kobayashi Maru
The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor’s Wings
The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm (Oct. 25, 2011)
You want to read Romulan War before Destiny since the opening of Destiny takes place about half way through it.
Definitely read all 3 Ent relaunch books in order if possible as they build upon the previous book. I would also recommend watching the ENT episodes with telepresence ship first also so you are reminded who the major players are.
Definitely read all 3 Ent relaunch books in order if possible as they build upon the previous book. I would also recommend watching the ENT episodes with telepresence ship first also so you are reminded who the major players are.
Is it ever established anywhere that the Federation wins the Romulan war or was there just a detante? And why wouldn't the Klingons side with the Romulans against us? They weren't enemies back then. What would constitute a victory in an intergalactic war. For instance, why didn't the commander in 'Balance of Terror' take his weapon to Earth to test it instead of some remote outpost that would tip their hand to the threat? Obviously their interest wasn't in destroying Earth or genocide as I don't think that is of interest to any race. Is it?
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^ The original title was In Shariel's Jaws, AFAIK.
And I believe that there is supposed to be one more book.
And I believe that there is supposed to be one more book.
The Federation did not win the war with the Romulans because the Federation did not exist during the war with the Romulans. The war was fought between United Earth and the Romulan Star Empire and their respective allies (with the allies of United Earth -- Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, Alpha Centauri, Draylax, and others -- forming a NATO-esque mutual defense alliance called the Coalition of Planets).
The Earth-Romulan War was fought between 2155 and 2160. The United Federation of Planets was not founded until 2161. Upon its formation, the Federation inherited United Earth's treaty obligations towards the Romulan Star Empire.
Unknown.
There's a suggestion in DS9's "Homefront" that the Earth-Romulan War may have reached Earth itself, when Sisko describes a Jem'Hadar invasion as the sort of war Earth hadn't seen since the founding of the Federation. We know from TNG's "The Defector" that the Earth-Romulan War ended in something called the Battle of Cheron, which was a loss for the Romulans. This may be a reference to Charon, Pluto's moon in real life, but that's just my speculation.
When the war ended, the Romulans retreated behind the Neutral Zone, not to be heard from again for over a hundred years, and United Earth established a number of defensive outposts along its side of the border. These posts were later placed in the hands of the Federation Starfleet, though they retained their original "Earth Outpost" names.
That doesn't mean they were allies, either, or that Qo'noS yet had major designs on conquering this part of the galaxy. The Romulans seemed more keen on conquering the Earth-Vulcan-Andor-Tellar-Alpha Centauri neighborhood than the Klingons, frankly.
Also, we don't know that the Romulans and Klingons weren't enemies, or that they did not have a history of animosity. The nature of Klingon-Romulan relations in the 22nd Century is unestablished.
To Earth itself, the capital of the Federation? Even if he managed to destroy Starfleet Headquarters or the Palais de la Concorde itself, his ship would be destroyed within seconds by orbital defense platforms, orbiting starbases, and/or orbiting Starfleet ships. That's a bit like asking why the Soviet Union didn't test its newest stealth submarines by parking it right on the Potomac River and attacking the United States Capitol, you know?
Besides, the intent was not to start a war, per se, nor even to try to kill all that many people. The real intent was to demonstrate their strength and to gauge how powerful the Federation was, but to do so without killing so many people and/or making such a high-profile attack that the Federation was angered into responding disproportionately or going to war. It was an elaborate mind game, in other words, not a prelude to invasion.
Key leaders in the Romulan Imperial Fleet who had been backing Shinzon in Star Trek: Nemesis -- including ones who had been itching to move more aggressively against the Federation -- turned on him when they realized he intended to commit genocide against the inhabitants of Earth. So it would, indeed, seem that most Romulans probably don't support genocide against Earth, anymore than, say, most Russians supported destroying Washington, D.C., during the Cold War.
That line could be a reference to "Earth" as a political entity, a nation involved in a war, rather than the physical planet itself. (By analogy, America, the nation, was a combatant in WWII, but America, the geographical location, was almost completely unaffected by the war.)
Doubtful. They're pronounced differently. Charon is pronounced either like "Karen" (after the Greek pronunciation) or "shahr-en" (by the preference of its discoverer and most English-speaking astronomers, since it was actually named for its discoverer's wife Charlene). As I recall, "Cheron" is pronounced like "chair-un" or maybe "Sharon."
Intergalactic? That means "between different galaxies." An intergalactic war would be something like, ohh, an invasion by the Kelvans from Andromeda, or if the Dominion attacked the Neyel in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Earth and Romulus are not only in the same galaxy and the same quadrant, but the same galactic neighborhood. Calling an Earth-Romulan conflict "intergalactic" is like referring to a shopping trip to your local mall as international commerce.
Because he'd have to get through the whole of Federation territory to get to Earth while the outposts are right on the border? Those cloaking devices take a lot of power.
Well, no, the dialogue between the Commander and Centurion in BoT makes it clear that the Praetor is testing these new weapons as a prelude to war. Heck, that's the whole basis of the Commander's character arc, the fact that he's obeying orders to provoke a pointless war even though it's the last thing he wants.
But that doesn't mean the goal was to invade Earth. The goal was more likely to expand the Romulans' territory by taking some of the worlds on the Federation border, rather than to defeat the whole Federation in one swoop. The UFP is too big to think of as a single country. It's many different nations/worlds joined together into a close partnership.
Right. Same deal. What Shinzon's co-conspirators wanted was a policy of revanchism (retaking lost territory by force) and expansionism. They wanted to make their own empire bigger, not specifically to destroy a rival nation. Think of it like the difference between the USSR conquering its neighbors in Eastern Europe and the USSR launching a nuclear strike on the United States. The latter would be a far more drastic step than the former, a totally different kind of war with a totally different objective. The former was just about securing the Soviets' own territory; Russia's history made them fearful of invasion, so they wanted to secure a buffer zone to protect their core territory. The latter would've been a far more aggressive move, and the reason they didn't do it is because they knew it would provoke massive retaliation and wouldn't really gain them anything. Both sides in the Cold War knew that a pre-emptive first strike against the enemy would probably destroy both nations, or at least cripple the survivor to a profound degree. So Shinzon's attack on Earth was akin to General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove ordering a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Russia (if I may reverse the political polarity of my analogy). Most everyone else on his side tried to stop him from doing it, because it was too drastic an act, one that they knew would bring ruin to everyone.
I don't think that's the case. The line was specifically in reference to the idea of Earth, the planet itself, being physically attacked. Granted, one could also interpret that line as referring to the Xindi attack of 2153, though. Like I said, it's speculation on my part that the Earth-Romulan War reached Earth.
Hmm. Fair point, that.
It's been a while since I watched "Balance of Terror," but the impression I remember getting was that the Romulans' objective was to gauge Federation strength and freak the Federation out, but not provoke the war just yet -- rather, that the idea was to start a war of expansion into Federation territory once they'd determined their cloaking systems and new weapons were adequately powerful. But I may well be misremembering that episode.
Agreed.
Well, yes and no. In terms of cultural unity, I think that's fair -- certainly, for instance, Vulcan and Earth still retain separate and unique enough cultures even into the 24th Century that you can't just lump them all in under a single "Federation culture" label. But by the same token, the Federation acts with unity, as a single entity, when it comes to things like foreign states invading its territory. And certainly the Federation itself is a state in its own right.
Though I'm afraid I don't see how the issue of Federation unity, one way or the other, relates to the question of whether the Romulans' goal was to conquer the whole Federation or just some of its worlds near the Romulan border.
Exactly!
Great comparison! I like it.
(Now, if only Shinzon's motives for launching that attack had made any sense. But arbitrary characterization is a topic for another thread.)
1. Re: "us." You do realize that you're not actually a citizen of the United Federation of Planets, right?
2. No. We're saying the Romulans didn't want to destroy us.
Specifically, I would contend that Romulan motives changed throughout the centuries. The goal of Romulan government of the 2150s, for instance, seems to have been to dominate the Earth-Vulcan-Andor-Tellar-Alpha Centauri region of space (which I'll call the "core worlds" for the sake of convenience") in some way -- either unofficially, through espionage (placing a Romulan mole as head of government of Vulcan, the regional hegemon), or officially, through direct military conquest and annexation (the tactic to which they switched in the novel The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing).
The goal of the Romulan government(s) of the mid-to-late 23rd Century, by contrast, seems to have been revanchism and regional expansion -- capturing territory along its borders with the Klingons and Federation, and ensuring that it had sufficiently advanced technology that neither the Klingons nor the UFP would be able to take its territory.
We know from the novel The Lost Era: Serpents Among the Ruins that tensions were heating up between the Federation and Romulans after the Khitomer Accords, leading to near-war by the time of the Tomed Incident in 2311. To me, that novel seemed to indicate that the Romulans stepped up tensions with the Federation out of fear of the UFP becoming an unchecked hegemon after the near-collapse of the Klingon Empire and the signing of the Accords. With the Klingon Empire not acting as a check on Federation power anymore, the Romulans grew fearful and distrustful, leading to increased tensions and almost to war. During their second "hiding time" from the rest of the galaxy, they did have a number of conflicts with the Klingons, including the Khitomer massacre (
which they were tricked into by the Cardassians, who fooled them into thinking the Klingons were going to attack them first
The goal of the Romulan government of the 2360s-2370s, on the other hand, mostly seems to have been to maintain a certain balance of power. They did try to install a Romulan-friendly government on Qo'noS during the Klingon Civil War, and apparently Sela did convince the Praetor at the time to launch an attempted invasion of Vulcan in 2368, but those were their most overtly hostile acts. (And since Romulan ships destroyed those invading ships, they got plausible deniability on the latter.) Most of their other actions were basically balance-of-power-esque mindscrews -- testing the Federation here, skirmishing with the Klingons there, but not really trying to stick their neck out for anything. In fact, "don't stick your neck out" probably adequately describes their foreign policy at that time, at least towards the Federation -- it had become very inward-focused, I think, to the point of even allowing a major new power, the Dominion, to appear on the brink of winning a war with the Klingons and Federation before intervening. "In the Pale Moonlight" establishes that there was a significant interventionist faction in the Romulan government which wanted the Star Empire to join the Klingon-Federation alliance, with the non-interventionists just barely hold power until Senator Vreenak's assassination.
Um, no, that's the opposite of what we're saying. We're saying that the Romulans would certainly fear disproportionate retaliation, which is why they didn't, for instance, attack Earth rather than several remote outposts along the Neutral Zone.
"When the Bough Breaks" established quite firmly that the ability to cloak an entire planet is far beyond the technology of even the 24th Century Federation, let along the 23rd Century Romulan Star Empire. And even if they could cloak Romulus, it would be child's play to calculate its position based upon observations of its orbit from previous observations. And cloaking Romulus wouldn't stop the Federation from invading Romulan space in retaliation for their attacking Earth. Attacking Earth would get them nothing -- and, besides, as I've said before, they don't want to destroy Earth. They're not genocidal.
Okay, maybe. I checked the transcript again; I was thinking of Sisko's line "They'll be waging the kind of war that Earth hasn't seen since the founding of the Federation" (when warning Jaresh-Inyo about the prospect of a Jem-Hadar invasion of the Alpha Quadrant), but I guess you're considering it in context of an earlier line in the same speech: "...not as disturbing as the thought of a Jem'Hadar army landing on Earth without opposition." Still, I think there's some ambiguity there.
I guess it's an open question.
Again, let's go to the transcript:
So the plan was to prove that they had the power to beat Starfleet, and if they returned home with that proof, the Praetor would then launch the war he wanted to launch. Indeed, the Commander seems to be saying that destroying the Enterprise would automatically be a declaration of war.
Note also that it's a major plot point in the episode that simply entering the Neutral Zone, in Spock's words, "would constitute an act of war." That's why Kirk has to wrestle with the decision to cross into the Zone -- because it's crossing the Rubicon, committing the Federation to war. So just by crossing the border at all, not to mention destroying the outposts, the BoP was already committing an act of war.
Which, come to think of it, leaves me wondering why there wasn't a war right after this. Both sides violated the Zone and committed acts which constituted declarations of war. So a state of war did legally exist between the two nations as of the end of "Balance of Terror." But then, given the BoP's defeat, I guess the Praetor had no stomach to prosecute the war, and so there was probably some hasty diplomatic maneuvering over subspace to renew the treaty. Maybe the Praetor used the old dodge of claiming the aggressing crew were renegades.
I'm talking from the perspective of the aspiring invader. Regardless of political organization or the Federation's response, the simple fact is that the UFP is not a single place, a single territory. As a potential object of conquest, it makes more sense to perceive it as multiple interrelated territories rather than a single country. I'm saying that drawing an analogy in terms of war between single countries on Earth is probably a bad idea -- that a better analogy, in terms of logistics and tactics and territory, is a war between two empires, where one empire may lose a number of its border territories but continue to exist after the war as a distinct, if smaller, political entity. In short, what I'm saying is that it isn't all-or-nothing.
Look at how many of the Federation's mid-24th-century wars were territorial conflicts over border worlds -- with the Talarians, the Cardassians, and probably the Tzenkethi. Not to mention the Gorn conflict that would've happened if Kirk hadn't shown mercy. It wasn't about the whole ball game, not about conquering or destroying the Federation itself -- the aggressors just wanted to take worlds away from the Federation, or reclaim worlds they felt it had taken from them.
Read my article in Star Trek Magazine #22, the Villains Special, for my take on why Shinzon's motives did make sense.
I don't see it as an attempt to conquer those worlds. Rather, the impression I got from ENT was that the Romulans felt threatened by the growing unity of these worlds that Archer was helping to bring together. They saw it as a potential rival that was too close for comfort, and feared that if these worlds united and formed a government bigger and stronger than their own, it could impede their own expansionism or perhaps threaten their territory. That's why they staged the whole masquerade with the holoship, making the worlds think they were being attacked by one another -- in order to sabotage the peace and prevent that union from forming. As long as Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar were small and divided, they didn't pose a threat to the Romulans' agendas.
True, they did seem to be engaged in more direct infiltration on Vulcan, but I think it's clear that the Romulans would have motives toward Vulcan that they wouldn't have toward other worlds.
Hard to say, really, since we didn't actually see much of the Romulans in that century. We've got:
2266: "Balance of Terror": Praetor tried to start a war, but abandoned it when his secret weapons failed.
2268: "The Deadly Years": Romulan ships are patrolling the Neutral Zone en masse, a pretty serious violation, but the ramifications were ignored. Beyond that, they simply seemed to be fighting off a perceived invader. (I think the writer of TDY got the concept of the Neutral Zone mixed up with the concept of Romulan territory.)
2268: "The Enterprise Incident": The Romulans were using Klingon ship designs (with no canonical explanation) and testing out an improved cloaking device. They wanted to capture and study a Starfleet vessel, but technically they weren't the aggressors in the episode.
2270: "The Survivor": The Romulans use a Vendorian spy to lure the Enterprise into the Zone so they can capture it.
2270: "The Practical Joker": Romulan ships ambush the Enterprise and claim, apparently falsely, that it's in their territory. They attempt to destroy it rather than capture it.
Late 2280s: The Final Frontier: The Romulans have an ambassador on Nimbus III, the Planet of Galactic Peace, a joint project they have participated in for c. two decades.
2293: Romulan Ambassador Nanclus conspires with Klingon and Starfleet personnel to sabotage the UFP-Klingon peace process. The participation of his government is unknown.
We also know from VGR: "Time and Again" that the Romulans signed a treaty banning polaric ion power in 2267, so there must've been some diplomatic contact with the other superpowers at that time (perhaps the same talks that got Nimbus III underway). And there's the generally accepted Saavik backstory that the Romulans abducted Vulcans and raised hybrid children on Hellguard, sometime around the 2260s, but that's never been made canonical.
If there's any unifying theme to Romulan actions from 2268-70, it seems to be a mix of aggressively defending their own borders and trying to capture Starfleet vessels for study and for political gain (by making them look like the aggressors). The only time post-BoT that we see the Romulans venture beyond their own territory, as opposed to luring the Enterprise into it, is "The Practical Joker" -- an episode so incoherent and silly that I discount it as apocryphal anyway. And by the movie era, the Romulans appear to be quite tame, on such good terms with the Federation that Nanclus is actually allowed to sit in on high-level strategic meetings in the Federation President's office.
So I don't see any evidence that the Romulans of the late 23rd century were trying to conquer UFP or Klingon territory. All their aggression seemed to be directed at starships (or rather, one starship over and over) rather than territories.
Not to mention by observing the effect of its gravity on the orbits of the other bodies in the system. This is how we detect most of the exoplanets we've discovered -- we haven't actually seen more than a handful of them, but we've confirmed their existence by the wobbles they induce in their stars.
Quite probably, but I think it also depends on how literally the Commander is speaking when he talks of war. It's not uncommon for people to throw around words like that a bit inaccurately, after all.
But we may be speaking past each other here. The point I was attempting to articulate, and I think I may have been unclear, was that the Romulans weren't trying to provoke the Federation to war per se, but that they wanted to test the Federation and scare them, and that then, later, the Romulans would begin a war at a time of their choosing, firing the first shot.
Thus, the goal with that specific mission was not to get the Federation to start a war, but, to gauge their strength but not go far enough for the UFP to go to war -- and then, after that mission was completed, they would later start a war.
Since that's more or less what you describe, I think we may now just be debating emphasis and language rather than the actual plan per se.
Well, to me, it reads more as him talking about the long-term consequences of his mission than saying that the destruction of the Enterprise will itself instantly be a declaration of war.
Well, I'm no lawyer, but it would seem to me that there is a distinction between an act of war and a declaration of war.
According to the novel Articles of the Federation, only the Federation Council can declare war for the UFP -- and, in real life, only the United States Congress can declare war for the United States, and only the Queen-in-Council can declare war for the United Kingdom, etc. So a declaration of war -- or, to get really pedantic, a declaration of a state of war -- is a decision, something that can only be undertaken by the constitutional entities legally empowered to make that decision.
Whereas, it would seem to me that an act of war would be a casus belli -- that is to say, an action undertaken by parties to a potential conflict which is regarded under prior legal agreement to constitute valid grounds for choosing to declare a state of war in response to such an act.
So, an act of war is something that both sides have agreed would be a valid reason to declare war (such as entering the Neutral Zone) and a declaration of war may or may not subsequently be made in response to that act.
But I really don't think that a state of war can be something that is entered into automatically, with no decision being made by the relevant constitutional authorities.
I wonder if the diplomatic fallout to that might not have resembled, in some respects, the diplomatic fallout from the Hainan Island/U.S. spy plane incident in 2001? Maybe instead of using the "renegades" dodge, the Romulan government issued some vaguely-worded statement of pseduo-apology in order to allow both sides to save face, combined with some form of financial restitution.
Oh, okay, I see what you meant then.
*nods* I'm always surprised when people treat every single conflict or potential conflict as though it's an existential threat for the entire UFP.
Yeah, but by mid-2156, they'd switched to the use of out-and-out military conquest, as seen in numerous sections of Beneath the Raptor's Wing (the conquest of Deneva, for instance). I don't think that conquering the "core worlds" region had been their original goal, but it became their goal after their acts of subterfuge were thwarted and the Earth-Romulan War began.
Maybe. The impression I got more than anything else was that the Romulans wanted to use their secret control of the Vulcan government to establish a sort of hegemony-by-proxy -- Vulcan as the regional hegemon who dominates the region, and Romulus in control of the Vulcan government.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there episodes of TNG that establish a history of Klingon-Romulan skirmishes during the 2260s to 2290s?
I'm inclined to completely disregard this aspect of the film the same way you disregard that TAS episode. I don't buy for one second that the Federation would allow the ambassador of a foreign power with a long history of hostility to view its initial presentation of plans to engage in a major act of war against the Klingon Empire by invading Klingon space to the President, before the decision had even been undertaken by the President to do such a thing. That's the sort of thing which, realistically, would be incredibly classified, and would only be shared with the Romulans after the decision to so invade the Klingon Empire to rescue Kirk had been made. Letting them know the Federation considered violating interstellar law in such a way would make the Federation incredibly diplomatically vulnerable to a foreign government, opening up the Federation to charges of planning to engage in a war of aggression and risking the possibility that the Romulans would leak such plans to the Klingons. It's just an absurd part of the film.
I think it would weaken the impact of the story considerably if there weren't an imminent war at stake. That's a primary source of drama and tension in the episode -- the burden these two commanders must bear, keenly aware that their choices will mean the difference between war and peace. Remember, this was written during the Cold War, a time when any comparable US/Soviet skirmish could've triggered a global holocaust. Those are the stakes that people lived with every day of their real lives back then, so it stands to reason that those are the stakes Paul Schneider intended his script to be about.
Okay, granted. But even so -- why wouldn't the Romulans expect the Federation to declare war in response to their clear, multiple acts of aggression -- violating the Neutral Zone, destroying a string of outposts, and (in the Commander's scenario) destroying a Starfleet capital ship? What possible reason would the Commander have had to expect that these actions would not start a war in and of themselves, since every single one of them is legally an act of war, a casus belli?
DS9 changed things. The Dominion War was supposed to be a unique, unprecedented event, the worst crisis the Federation had ever faced, but it was so influential on fans' thinking that it shaped their view of Star Trek war stories from then on. And let's face it, the books haven't helped by subjecting the UFP to one galaxy-shaking crisis after another after another in the years since, from Gateways to Maximum Warp to The Genesis Wave to Resistance and Before Dishonor and ultimately Destiny. It's gotten people into the habit of expecting all-or-nothing conflicts.
(Checks Memory Alpha and transcript site) According to TNG: "Reunion" (2367), Klingons and Romulans had been "blood enemies for 75 years," i.e. since 2292. And DS9: "Blood Oath" (2370) refers to the Battle of Klach D'Kel Brakt being "a legendary Klingon victory over the Romulans almost a century ago," putting it sometime in the 2270s. For some reason Memory Alpha puts it in 2271, but there's no reason it couldn't have been later in the decade. For that matter, it's possible that both date intervals given were estimates for something that happened in the 2280s -- after all, if the Klingons turned on the Romulans at K D'K B, why would they wait another 21 years to become formal enemies? We're often far too quick to assume that characters aren't rounding off their date estimates, or simply misremembering their history.
However, that doesn't tell us that the Romulans were trying to conquer Klingon territory as you claimed. It just tells us that they were enemies. It could've just as easily been the Klingons that were trying to conquer Romulan territory. I think that's more in character. Or maybe it wasn't about territorial conquest at all.
Regarding the parallels drawn between the Earth/Federation-Romulan conflicts and the US/USSR Cold War, vis-a-vis first strike and MAD, it might interest some of you to know that programs begun during the Reagan Administration and continued through the Bush era reached fruition at the beginning of the Clinton years, culminating in successful testing in October of 1993 of Trident SLBM warhead buses mated with GPS to be able to drop warheads within thirty feet of targets. Such accuracy, combined with sub-kiloton yield warheads, could have enabled the U.S. to truly have a first-strike capability against Russian ICBM silos without excessive residual fallout, providing enough American SLBMs and ICBMs were re-equipped for it and that methodologies were in place to similarly eliminate the few Russian boomers at sea and the few bomber bases that still flew those missions.
It is ironic that just when we discovered how weak the Soviet Union really was, in terms of missile warning radar coverage, nuclear weapons actually launch-ready (START inspectors were surprised to discover that many SS-18 silos were filled with rusted-out Satans, sitting in several feet of polluted groundwater), and just how shitty their military machine really was (quality, that is...quantity has a quality all of its own), the Union had fallen and no such first-strike capacity was any longer really necessary.
It is ironic that just when we discovered how weak the Soviet Union really was, in terms of missile warning radar coverage, nuclear weapons actually launch-ready (START inspectors were surprised to discover that many SS-18 silos were filled with rusted-out Satans, sitting in several feet of polluted groundwater), and just how shitty their military machine really was (quality, that is...quantity has a quality all of its own), the Union had fallen and no such first-strike capacity was any longer really necessary.
^The pathetic tragedy of the Cold War is that both sides considered themselves to be on the defensive against what they imagined to be the other side's plans for conquest, and both sides misinterpreted each other's defensive arms buildups as aggressive buildups. America was built by territorial conquest, so we thought like conquerors and assumed everyone else did. But Russia's history is one of constantly being invaded or conquered, so the Soviets' mentality was one of protecting themselves from the rivals or enemies who surrounded them on all sides. The whole Cold War was just a cultural misunderstanding. It would be risible if it hadn't been so irresponsibly dangerous.
Maybe something similar was going on with the Romulans. They struck out against the future members of the Coalition/Federation because they feared they'd be invaded if those worlds united their forces. They didn't understand that there were no imperialistic designs.
Maybe something similar was going on with the Romulans. They struck out against the future members of the Coalition/Federation because they feared they'd be invaded if those worlds united their forces. They didn't understand that there were no imperialistic designs.
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