Eridani Edict
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The Eridani Edict is a fictional military convention and rule of war featured in the Honor Harrington series of novels by David Weber.
In the Honorverse, the Eridani Edict is one of the most important and respected conventions on interstellar warfare. The Edict is intended to outlaw and penalize indiscriminate orbital bombardment of a human-populated world or any form of bombardment against a planetary population which had not first been requested to surrender, as well as the use of weapons of mass destruction. Under the Eridani Edict, relativistic kill vehicles are considered weapons of mass destruction, and even an accidental and unintended impact on a planetary surface by an anti-ship missile (which in the Honorverse usually travels at relativistic speeds) is considered an Eridani violation.
The Solarian League is the primary enforcer of the Edict, taking into itself the responsibility of dealing with Eridani violations. The usual penalty is unrestricted military intervention and open war by the Solarian League Navy resulting in the destruction of the offending nation or party. In fact, enforcement of the Eridani Edict is the only issue that may not be subject to vote by the Solarian League's Assembly, and the Edict is actually written into the League's Constitution to ensure immediate enforcement.
As the Solarian League is the most powerful star nation in the Honorverse, with a military power so great in comparison with the rest of the nations that any hope of standing up to it is unreasonable, belligerent parties are usually extremely careful of doing anything that may result in even an unintentional violation of the Edict. The Edict is also taken into account in naval engagements which take place in the vicinity of an inhabited world; fleet commanders are usually wary of launching missiles too close to the planet for fear that one of them may go astray and impact the surface.
The Eridani Edict is named after an incident known as the "Epsilon Eridani Massacre". During a military conflict, the Solarian League-member world of Epsilon Eridani suffered a massive planetary bombardment by enemy forces which resulted in the death of over seven billion of its inhabitants. (This is a background event which took place five hundred years before the events depicted on the novels)
