his sort of moral equivocating is at best useless, and at worst liable to get your ass kicked if someone seriously argued this in character. The greatest of GDI's crimes can be attributed to neglect, arrogance, and ignorance. The greatest of NOD's crimes stem from aiding and abetting the worst mass murderer in human history. The Outback Tiberium blast, CABAL, the World Altering Missile, the Sarajevo Tiberium Blast, the Scrin, nuking GDI during the Scrin invasion etc.
Never said that the crimes were equal. Just that both sides did some seriously bad stuff, and that Open Hand believes that people should move past it and forgive. Otherwise, the cycle of hurting continues on for generations. Can't say I disagree with them on that point.
GDI doesn't want inferno gel to incinerate apartments like NOD does. It doesn't want Inferno Gel as a terror weapon. It wants Inferno Gel because incendiaries have proven incredibly effective against vehicles and material ever since the Finns fought the Soviets. Equating GDI's intended use to Blackhand shocktroops spreading terror as they march through a city is going to be incredibly offensive to the vast majority of GDI. Most of whom probably know people who've lost someone to NOD's 'cleansing fire'. Former instigators of terror preaching against it doesn't signal forgiveness even if that's the intent, it signals insincerity.
GDI's use of Inferno Gel will be less immoral than Nod's. That's pretty much a given. However, that by no means makes it right. To say otherwise is morally dubious
at best. It'd be like saying that the war crimes committed by the Allies during WW2 don't count because the Axis committed worse ones.
NOD already used automated weapon carriers in the Mantis AA drone by TW3. With further drone tech development, population losses, and Scrin tech they're almost certainly going to use more automation.
Let me rephrase, unless Nod suddenly goes for the vast majority of their tanks and other military vehicles being automated, we'll still be building weapons to (far more horrifically than usual) kill enemy soldiers.
And in the scenario where a tank does get hit by incendiaries, it's more likely for them to suffocate from the air being consumed by the fire than they are to just cook. Yes, it's a poor way to go, so is radiation poisoning from braking radiation from an ion cannon going off or a plasma warhead. So is being crippled and blinded because there's so many lasers in the battle space (I'm pretty sure blinding lasers.
The question isn't simply whether or not slowly suffocating/burning enemies to death would fit with the other horrifying fates war offers. It's also whether or not we have alternative methods of anti-tank and/or anti-material that work without the ethical issues. In my opinion, the answer to that particular question is very much "yes".
Let me be fully blunt, we've taken the time after the war to develop weapons like zrbite sonic equipment, and they've tended to pivot towards biologically engineered potentially sapient slave races to fight and die for them. Every single warlord is essentially a war criminal if the highest order profiting off the industrialized misery of engineered sapients who possibly don't even have the context to conceive of freedom, peace, and a long and happy life.
On this instance, I think that you have gone too far. We have zero evidence that the Gana are sapient. In fact I see two very solid reasons why they wouldn't be. First, from what we've seen they're extremely moral by Nod standards (fairly moral by non-Nod standards). They didn't interfere with the GDI evacuations, and treat their citizens better than just about everyone else in Nod. What's more, even if they are that morally bankrupt, I don't see why they would make sapient Gana. I'm pretty sure adding sapience would add a lot more complexity and risk of rebellion. What could sapient Gana offer over more animalistic models worth the added risks and costs?
I don't care about the inferno gel on its own, I dislike the controversy blinding us to the far greater moral perils of some of our other choices, like pretty much anything we do to work with the twins. As far as I'm concerned, Open Hand deciding to make an issue out of this doesn't really speak well of this as NOD literally invents new crimes against humanity in the background.
While I don't agree with you on how bad the twins are, I will admit that in an ideal world we probably wouldn't do business with them, given the GDI casualties inflicted by their creation. However, this is not an ideal world. The twins have massive popular support on the Indian Subcontinent, and rightly so. If we try to invade, we most certainly won't be greeted as liberators. It'd be such a bloody, horrific slog that doing so becomes wildly impractical. We can't afford to kill them, so we'll have to figure out a way to live with them. Doing business with them is part of that. The fact that "cooperation with GDI" makes an excellent wedge issue between the moderates and extremists in Nod is just an added bonus.
I really don't see the point in deciding whether or not to use Inferno Gel based on whether it makes you icky or not. Because, well, what's the difference between burned to death and killed in seconds at most from the many Ion, Laser, and other Incendiary weapons we have? For all of them it kills at the same speed, the effects are similar enough if different in method, and the person they are used on is dead all the same. All of those weapons are illegal and using them a war crime in the real world (Treaties about not militarizing space and general Incendiary weapons and while lasers like NOD and GDI use aren't directly mentioned afaik would still be banned from other treaties) but because the real world doesn't have Sci-Fi laser weapons or Ion cannons using them is fine here? Why bother moralizing the Inferno Gel but not the others?
I wouldn't lump Inferno Gel in with the laser and ion weapons just because both burn.the latter kill quickly, or at least as quickly as more conventional equivalents. Inferno Gel, however, is another matter. Imagine you're a Nod soldier trapped in a vehicle hit by Inferno Gel. All of a sudden your vehicle is dead, and the cabin is filling up with smoke. If you're lucky, you can't escape and slowly suffocate. If you aren't, you escape and are burned alive. That's a far more horrific fate than the other weapons you mentioned, thus the added controversy.