I suppose it could just be too darned expensive. Interstellar space travel ain’t cheap, so if the economics of mining the unobtanium were already marginal, having to pay for a fleet of planet killers might tip the balance. Granted, the survivors of the expedition might want to nuke the planet, but the bean counters at home are looking at the bottom line.
:smack:
The fact that a few hundred years later the Indians were mostly gone doesn’t change the fact that one group of Europeans could massacre and enslave one group of Indians, while hundreds of miles away another group of Europeans could live peacefully next to another group of Indians, and the second Indians didn’t know about the first group, and wouldn’t have cared if they did.
There was no such thing as “Indian-ness”, the idea that all American Indians had a common interest against all Europeans. If there’s a neighboring tribe that you’re at war with (or at peace with), what does it matter if that tribe came from another part of America, or from Europe?