R I D D I N G T H E W O R L D O F D O O M S D AY M A C H I N E S

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst1

ARE DOOMSDAY MACHINES UTILITARIAN & NECESSARY?

Could doomsday machines be a rational response to short-term economic drivers? Is
it profitable to build them? Is it institutionally profitable to keep them in place? Do
economies maintain perverse economic incentives to keep developing and, once de-
veloped, to maintain the doomsday machines that have been built?

The development and institutionalization of doomsday machines may rest on belief

in an unprovable doctrine such as nuclear deterrence or purely on ignorance, conven-
ience, economic utility, or sloth (e.g. once in place, it stays in place). 2

Fundamental and structural inefficiencies enable global and national markets to mis-
price inputs and outputs from productive and consumptive activities in the global
economy by either: (a) deferring known economic costs to the future or; (b) failing to
account for known economic costs and pushing these private costs to public taxpay-
ers or to other nations to pay. Are these market inefficiencies enabled by doomsday
machines? Primarily to the benefit of states possessing them?

Perverse economic incentives to build and maintain doomsday machines will deter
compliance to any accords to eliminate them: e.g. the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT)
to limit and someday to eliminate nuclear weapons, Climate Change accords.

The care and feeding of doomsday machines has little long-term utility. Longer-term
systemic risk costs might include global GDP by 2050, instead of increasing from $60
to $240 trillion, declining to $6 trillion. Worst case might be eliminating a large por-
tion of the world’s human population either, directly or indirectly, by altering the
earth’s biologic capacity to support life. Some necessary accords to counter the prolif-
eration of doomsday machines:

Ban all doomsday machines, not just nuclear weapons;

Alter the rules of the global economic landscape (these rules are not laws of
physics but of human invention, so can be altered) so as to eliminate perverse
economic incentives to build and maintain doomsday machines for short-term
economic gain. Include the price for insuring longer-term systemic risk of
doomsday machines in market transactions;

Build systemic economic rewards for those nations who refrain from building or
maintaining doomsday machines, and institute penalties for those states who
build and maintain doomsday machines. 3

1 Italio Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) in William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Di-
lemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 53.

2 See Negotiating Nonproliferation & Disarmament http://www.scribd.com/doc/19622983/.

3 Costing Systemic Risk from Doomsday Machines http://www.scribd.com/doc/19772476/.

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 2.3 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH --- Friday, October 9, 2009 Page 1 of 1