I guess they should be glad that we're the Federation. I imagine the other 3 big players would just start glassing planets or something at this point.
After the terrorist attacks on senior members of our government a few years ago, most likely.
If we go off the old Technical Manuel numbers a photon torpedo has a yield of 64.4 megatons. If that is the case here then Lironh is gone along with anyone who lived in a roughly 20km radius.
"Photon torpedo" like "nuclear warhead" can mean almost anything. The lowest-yield nuclear warheads ever devised have a yield around 10-20 tons of TNT, the highest yield ever designed and tested was fifty
million tons with an option on twice that.
We've seen photon torpedo blasts that are totally inconsistent with a sixty-megaton explosion in terms of their effects, and blasts that are fully consistent with sixty megatons or even more. The torpedo in question was almost certainly not a Federation standard munition, further complicating the issue. So the exact magnitude of the damage could be anything from "everyone within a twenty kilometer radius is injured and all the buildings not hardened against 5 psi blast overpressure fall down, plus a fallout plume" to 'only' something like Hiroshima. Plus a fallout plume, because it was a groundburst.
"Most of downtown" in a preeminent city on a technologically advanced planet suggests something towards the upper end of the scale, with a multi-megaton warhead. But a death toll that isn't
obviously in the millions to the point where news reporters would say "perhaps hundreds of thousands" tends to suggest the lower end of the scale.
[EDIT: Alternate explanation, Amarki large buildings tend to be designed to withstand significant blast overpressure that would cause 20th century skyscrapers to collapse, because they built their capital in the expectation that someone would be throwing around kiloton-range explosions. If so, the high-end blast estimates could be compatible with the low-end casualty figures, because much of the destructive energy gets absorbed by the first rounds of populated buildings around the courthouse and/or reflected into space by various shielded structures.]
I mean the 32 cost in the sense that there were probably important things destroyed in the 20 cost bomb.
In addition to the million or so innocent people.
Don't want to think about that.
But I mean, only 20 cost? I mean the attack on Duaba was 12 cost (and 5), and no member world suffered anything really significant in it, but a major terrorist attack in the heart of a member state is only 20?
Cost is a measure of how much
disruption of the Council's political will to do what Starfleet asks we've suffered- that's why it hits our political points. The attack on Duaba causes high cost because it makes Councillors wonder if the Orions are going berserk.
Now, the attack on the Amarki capital causes high cost because it makes another, different set of Councillors very angry and most likely blaming Starfleet for not fixing everything really fast and thus preventing the attack.
The Amarkians are a martial people. This hurts, but it's probably not as big a deal as doing it to, say, Earth would be.
There are a lot of ways that Cost can screw us up. Not all of them involve
reducing the Federation's will to fight. Don't make assumptions about how bad it is until we've seen the (literal) fallout settle.
You'd think so, but since this event gave us Cost and not pp, it seems like the Federation isn't big on responding to crimes against sapientity.
We get pp if something
increases our political leverage in the Council. We get Cost (and lose pp) if something decreases that political leverage. We don't automatically get more leverage every time Federation members feel more belligerent. Because it's very likely that the Amarki councillors will do something like demand that Starfleet start smashing things, causing chaos in the Council that
reduces Sousa's freedom to suggest courses of action and negotiate for Starfleet projects not directly related to the Syndicate.
just about everyone ins a position of leadership got droned, and the only reason there successors could take over like they did was because of a near comically inept handling of the situation. This may not end well for the federation, but it is certainly going to end badly for the syndicate.
The flip side is that the real organizations in question "went viral-" they have a cell structure, so while blowing up the leadership gets rid of it, the whole thing scatters like droplets of mercury smashed with a hammer. Only more toxic.