[Cherry_Lover]

Originally Posted by Flinch

Guantanamo doesn't officially have political prisoners, genius.

Yeah, and nor does Cuba, or Iran, or North Korea (probably). They all have people who are imprisoned for 'treason' or 'subversion' or 'insurgancy'.

Additionally, smallpox is no longer a disease, but a BWMD, as NO ONE has any resistance to it. The vaccine cured it, then the disease all but died out, and is primarily produced from samples in labs as a biological weapon.

Well, yes, smallpox no longer exists as a disease, but it's also not a biological weapon, at least not officially. I doubt there are any policies for dealing with it, at least not any that you're privy to.

if there was a smallpox outbreak, there'd be deaths in the millions, if hundreds of millions.

Perhaps. Personally, I'm not so sure.

if you try and treat them, there'd be a mass of outbreaks because there'd be too many to properly quarantine without killing them.

Well, in all honesty that will happen no matter what you do. Diseases aren't that easy to contain, especially when people move around, and a policy of leaving them to die (or even actively murdering them) would lead to panic amongst the people in the infected area.

The most logical thing do do would be to drop a low-yield thermonuclear weapon over the quarantine zone and completely eradicate the disease if it were getting out of hand, which it can do with absurd ease.

It wouldn't work, because people would escape. Particularly since the guards wouldn't sit there and just die. You might get away with it once, but you would be hated forever.

But, anyway, it's still wrong to sacrifce people 'just in case'. Maybe there are some circumstances where it would be justified, but given what Shirou knows in HF (at that time), it's not.

As much as you prepare for something, someone, somewhere, gets scared and messes up.

Yeah, and that will apply equally if you try just nuking the whole lot. Someone has to actually do it, after all, and it wouldn't be popular, not least amongst people who had friends or relatives in the quarantine area.

Oh, the best care you can give is probably 10cc of morpha at regular intervals, keep them out of pain before they die, or just give them a fatal amount to end it faster.

I doubt that's actually true. It's possible to survive almost any disease with proper care and a little luck, even something as nasty as Ebola.

Originally Posted by Flinch

Idealogical thought vs practical thought

that's what this has come down to, which is a focal deciding point through most of the game.

Yeah, although it's somewhat ironic that the original argument is that Shirou went against his ideal when he killed Sakura, whereas what he actually did was go against the practical implementation of that ideal that his father followed (which, by the way, isn't very practical when you take account of human nature...).

Note that, if Shirou kills Sakura at that point, he then has to take on Rin, Ilya, Gil and (probably) Zouken without a servant. However, saving her means he has Ilya and Rin as potential allies. So, even from the 'practical' viewpoint it's arguable that saving Sakura was the better option.