its cheap to send a James Bond to go check things out and cause so!e sabotage. It is likely he is already on his way anyway in case Victoria ducks things up had enough. Better the asset already be in place if he needs it there than for Blackwell to choke and suddenly there is nothing left to oppose us. Diverting that asset to burn the declaration won't be too much effort since he is already in the region anyway.
If we keep it secret and the agent burns it its our word vs theirs. If we wave it around and then it explodes, everyone is going to glare daggers at Russia for an act of 'pointless cruelty and destruction'. He will have to run around putting out fires and molify people that he isn't going to come after their old carp next.
Assuming he hasn't already dispatched an agent is a dangerous assumption.
No see, the problem is that
one agent does not have a reliable realistic way of keeping track of a specific object we don't want found and that can potentially be stored in just about any arbitrary climate-controlled building*. They'd either need a highly-placed mole in our government (possible but far from a certain proposition), or a large number of agents capable of casting a wide net.
I'm morally certain the Russians are spying on us, but that doesn't confer the ability to automatically find everything about us and everything we want to hide. The primitive state of our technology means that HUMINT is very much a requirement for that, and the Russians, however good their intelligence organs are, can't automatically create new HUMINT networks instantly on demand.
________________________________
*(yes, it's going to degrade over time, but the key word is
over time; it won't be much worse off for spending another 2-3 years in storage if we can keep the air conditioning and dehumidifier on and so on)
I think there's a might bit of a difference between deciding to invade shithole's on the other side of the world on dubious strategic reasoning and our current situation.
Yes. Namely, this time the big guns are NOT on our side.
Being crazy-bold is risky enough when you have overwhelming firepower and your nation is physically immune to enemy retaliation on any meaningful scale. Much riskier when the opposite is true- when
they have overwhelming firepower and are immune to
you.
The main contention is that we were initially presented with effectively two options: either we announce that we have the DoI, or don't and keep it secret. Questers being questers, decided they wanted to try to have their cake and eat it two, and thus asked if we could tell our ally without telling the whole world. PoptartProdigy agreed that was a valid option. The thing to keep in mind about PoptartProdigy is that they don't offer trap options, but they are fully willing to let voter write-ins have worse results than any they would be willing to present themselves.
We know IC that the FCNY only survives by the grace and support of European powers. It is reasonable to surmise that one of the requirements of that support is that they liaise heavily with said powers, which implies that the European advisors will come with significant amounts of intelligence agents. Anything that we tell the FCNY is likely to be revealed to the Europeans. And in this setting, Russia is a hyperpower with a deeply capable and practiced intelligence agency. Even if they don't learn about the DoI directly from the FCNY, they will amost certainly learn it from on of the European intelligence agencies that they have infiltrated.
If we want to keep the DoI secret, we should vote to keep it secret. Not "I'll keep it secret by only telling my buddy".
Again, there's a big difference between "the Russians find out a thirdhand report (New York to Europe to Russian spy) that we have the Declaration of Independence" and "the Russians find out we have the Declaration of Independence when Alexander IV turns on the TV and watches Russia Today over breakfast."
In the former case, the Declaration is, well, functionally just a piece of paper. Not especially valuable or signifcant
except when actively wielded as a symbol. The worst the Russians are likely to do is to try to send spies to work out its location and see if they can go all Reverse National Treasure on its location.
In the latter case, the Declaration is
still just a piece of paper... but the Commonwealth of Free Cities is now a major threat to Alexander's plans in North America. And has deliberately appointed itself as such. They probably don't bother to target the Declaration specifically because why would they care, but they WILL start hitting us with airstrikes and carving up our military capabilities and remaining infrastructure, or something simliarly devastating to us but relatively cheap and easy for them.
