The Right to Bear Nuclear Arms

In my younger years when I had a utilitarian belief framework I had hostile feelings towards the second amendment. Three fifths of the roughly 40,000 gun deaths in the U.S. each year are suicides. In fact if you buy a gun and store it in your home for self defense, you are far more likely to kill yourself with it than any intruder. The realization that more people are using guns to kill themselves than defend themselves shocked me. It led me to believe we should sacrifice a constitutional right to benefit a majority of gun death victims, the suicides. I have since become an individualist, all beliefs I have are now reasoned up from the rights of the individual.

I don’t think we should ban driving because some people speed. I don’t think we should ban cell phones because criminals use them. I don’t think we should ban having children because some people abuse their children. The idea that we should sacrifice one man’s right because another has misused that right is abhorrent.

Today I think the right to bear arms as guaranteed by the second ammendment doesn’t go far enough. When the constitution was written an individual could possess the same level of military technology as the state. Everyone could buy the best muskets. There was no laws against individuals owning cannon either. Large cannon was expensive so very few could afford it. The market would self select, through the pricing mechanism, who got such weapons. Mentally ill homeless people can rarely afford a nice cannon.

I want to recreate this state of affairs today. For people to be as sovereign as possible they must be able to defend and deter the way nation states do. They need the right to bear nuclear arms. Only this can place them on an equal playing field with those who would oppress them.

Furthermore, I support an initiative that connects my personal nuke to my brain and monitors my brain activity. If my brain waves should cease in the event of a homicide then my personal nuke would detonate and take my killer along with me. Imagine how kindly we would treat strangers if we all had such a self destruct setting. I would be the nicest guy in the world.

Unfortunately the procurement of nukes is made difficult by the cartel of nine countries that currently own nukes. It is in this small group of countries interest to maintain tight control over who has nuclear capability. They can use their superior technological prowess to bully other nations into accepting inferior trade deals or directly threaten them with armageddon to get what they want.

But any good bitcoin citadel can scrape together the money to pick up a few decommissioned soviet nukes. A handful is all you will need. Nukes, like cryptography, are technological advancements that allow small groups or even single individuals to replicate the rights and status of a major state.

With nuclear capability bitcoin citadels will be respected and able to defend themselves from far larger belligerents. Like how Israel, a country of less than 10 million, has been able to defend itself against a billion Muslims for half a century. They are fully autonomous despite being surrounded by 100x as many people who want them destroyed. They have done this by achieving technological and tactical superiority over their enemies. Along with a little help from the almighty. This has kept the barbarians at the gates and allowed them to thrive.

As far as providing for the common defense in our citadel goes I think we can do it well on a budget. A 1% tax rate on income going to defense. Obviously not coercive taxes in the traditional sense as you will agree to them before signing up for the citadel. If you have 100,000 people, the size of a classic Greek city state, and each person makes on average $100,000 (apologies for the fiat denomination) a year, that gives you 100k*100k*.01=100 million dollars just to spend on defense every year.

This is enough for 5–10 old Soviet nukes, link to alphabay darknet market. Maintenance will be a couple million a year as we’ll need a small team of nuclear engineers to keep them functioning safely. We can grow our arsenal slowly over time if needed. We won’t have much of a need for conventional weapons, being focused primarily on defense. We likely won’t have any tanks and planes. They are a waste of taxpayer money for our needs anyway. Sure we’ll snag some drones for perimeter defense and scouting. If we’re an island citadel, which we probably will be, as those are the easiest spots to buy some excess land from a traditional country. We may even buy some navy ships for defense and to patrol our shipping lanes.

We can streamline our military in a way that the US has been unable to do. As in the case of rural US towns refusing to shutter their tank manufacturing facilities even though we have army generals complaining we have far more tanks than we could ever need. Of course, we’ll have plenty of firearms with limited or no restrictions on them. We aren’t trying to police the world, just our citadel.

With these measures we can ensure a much more minimalistic government and therefore a better life for our citizens. I don’t think we can completely eschew governance and go fully anarchist. But a good goal would be keeping taxes at no more than 2% of income. This should be enough to provide a safe environment for humans to conduct business and live their lives. 1% on spent on defense and 1% on infrastructure. Capital and labor will flow into our citadel due to simple regulations and low taxes.

Many people will find these ideas laughable and terrifying. They think we can’t trust any new entities with nuclear power and that we have too many nuclear powers already. I will respond with a utilitarian argument and then a deontological one.

Firstly, deaths from conflict have fallen sharply since the advent of nuclear weapons. Look at the body count from the first half of the 20th century compared to the second half. Nukes and the accompanying mutually assured destruction have saved millions of lives by singlehandedly ending large scale open warfare between major powers.

Secondly, many types of individual rights seemed extreme at certain times in history. Giving black people the vote or giving gay people the right to marry were considered lunacy by many at the time. Now they seem obvious. I envisage a future where the right to protect yourself against any oppressive entity is a basic right. If not on an individual level, the self destructing brain nuke may be a little over the top, then at least through the citadel in which you choose to reside.

I intend to publish more on how contract law, immigration, regulation, and other things could work in a bitcoin citadel. We need to be thinking about the future we want to build. It seemed logical to start with defense. How to protect our tribe from other tribes stealing our stuff and killing us is important. Defense is one part of government spending that both sides of the aisle agree we need. The question is how much, and where will it be spent.