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A one percent Treaty You have enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone thirteen times.

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Here's how to settle for twelve point eight seven times and use the savings on medicine.

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Controversial, apparently. The world spends two point seven two trillion dollars a year on military forces.

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If every nation reduces that by one percent at the same time, the balance of power remains identical.

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No country becomes more vulnerable. Nobody loses a single war they would have otherwise won.

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You just become slightly less capable of destroying a planet you're still living on.

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That one percent is twenty-seven point two billion dollars a year.

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For comparison, that's roughly what Americans spend on Valentine's Day.

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You are currently spending more on heart-shaped candy than on curing heart disease.

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A one percent treaty is a piece of paper that says every signatory nation redirects that one percent to enable any patient

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to participate in pragmatic clinical trials for the most promising new treatments.

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That's it. That's the whole idea. On Wishonia, we fought for twelve thousand years before we figured this out.

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Your species has been thinking it over for several thousand years, so you're actually ahead of schedule.

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How It Works. Funding. It creates a twenty-seven point two billion dollars a year revenue stream for the one percent Treaty

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Fund. Execution. A network of Decentralized Institutes of Health subsidizes patient participation in a decentralized F.D.A.,

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clinical trials that are forty-four point one times cheaper than the current model.

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Governance. Global population via Wishocracy, with transparent auditable rules and automated fund allocation.

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Transparency. All research, data, and spending published on a public ledger.

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This Isn't a Trade-Off. It's like if everyone in your neighborhood spent their life savings on attack dogs, and then called

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it a "safe community" because all the dogs are equally vicious.

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When every nation builds one percent fewer explosion devices at the same time, you get two good things: You become safer.

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The global "you might all die by accident" temperature drops one percent.

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Fewer chances of someone pressing the wrong button, which happens more than you'd think.

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You stop dying from stupid things. That twenty-seven point two billion dollars pays sick people to try treatments instead

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of waiting for death. Economists call this a Kaldor-Hicks improvement, which is their way of saying "the winners win more

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than the losers lose, and we've decided that counts." In practice, some weapons manufacturers lose one percent of their

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contracts. In exchange, they and everyone they love become less likely to die of cancer.

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Most people consider this a good trade. Defense contractors are still doing the math.

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Why Your Most Expensive Things Are Also Your Most Useless Things (A Mystery).

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When countries "invest" in military hardware, they're not buying assets.

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They're buying very expensive paperweights that occasionally explode.

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A bridge lets trucks drive over it every day, which creates something called "economic activity," which is when money moves

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around instead of sitting still. A bridge lasts fifty to one hundred years.

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It makes everyone richer. It's quite nice to look at. A missile also sits still, but instead of trucks driving over it,

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it just... waits. For the day it gets to be a missile. Most missiles never get that day.

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They just sit in a hole until someone throws them away, which costs more than buying them in the first place.

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It's like adopting a dog that you're never allowed to walk, and it costs one point five million dollars a year in food,

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and if it ever gets out it kills everyone. Economists call this "dead capital," which means resources trapped in a form

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that can't do anything useful. It's like converting your house into a pile of T.N.T.

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Impressive, but you can't live in it, rent it out, or do anything except eventually blow it up, at which point you have

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neither a house nor T.N.T. As President Eisenhower put it: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket

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fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

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Eisenhower was a five-star General, which means he had five stars.

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Most generals only get three or four, so he was basically the Michelin Guide of killing people.

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He personally ran the largest military operation in human history, the invasion of Normandy.

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And even he thought you were overdoing it. A one percent treaty doesn't ask you to spend twenty-seven point two billion

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dollars curing diseases. It asks you to redirect twenty-seven point two billion dollars from the least useful one percent

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of your military budget to things that make you richer and less dead.

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The Blueprint. A treaty is basically a promise between countries.

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Like a pinky swear, but with more lawyers and fewer pinkies.

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The thing about promises between countries is that nobody can actually make them keep the promise, because the only people

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who could punish a country are other countries, and they're all busy breaking their own promises.

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Sometimes treaties work (you haven't had World War Three yet).

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Sometimes they don't (you've had about two hundred other wars).

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But they're the only tool you have for getting countries to do anything together besides kill each other.

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What Each Country Pays. Every signatory nation contributes exactly one percent of their military budget to the one percent

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Treaty Fund. U.S.A., eight point eight six billion dollars, which sounds like a lot until you learn they once lost two point

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four six trillion dollars in accounting errors at the Pentagon.

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Not spent. *Lost.* As in, they don't know where it went. Two point four six trillion dollars just wandered off, like a cat.

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And unlike a cat, nobody put up posters. China, two point nine six billion dollars (what they spend on military parades).

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India, eight hundred and thirty-five million dollars (one aircraft carrier's wine budget).

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Russia, one point zero nine billion dollars (Putin's shirt budget).

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Saudi Arabia, seven hundred and fifty-four million dollars (one prince's yacht).

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U.K., six hundred and eighty-six million dollars (the National Health Service, or N.H.S., waiting list is currently longer

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than some of the wars this money is meant to prevent). France, five hundred and sixty-three million dollars, which is what

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they spend on... well, it's France, so probably something involving cheese or being disappointed in other countries.

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The French military has a long and proud history of things I'm not going to get into because this is a book about medicine.

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And so on... National Security (Which Is What You Call It When You Spend Money on Things That Don't Make You Secure).

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What actually threatens nations today: Real Threats (That Actually Kill People).

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One. Pandemics: COVID killed more Americans than World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam combined.

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But you don't have a Department of Pandemics with an eight hundred and eighty-six billion dollar budget and a flag.

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Two. Cancer: Kills ten million people a year, which is more than the population of Sweden.

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Essentially, Sweden is being completely eliminated by cancer every twelve months and nobody's declared war on it.

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Well, Nixon did, in nineteen seventy-one. Cancer won. Three.

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Heart Disease: eighteen million annual deaths. You are, as mentioned, spending more on heart-shaped candy than on this.

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Four. Dementia: Destroying the minds of every nation's elderly (and sometimes their leaders, which you'd think would speed

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things up, but no). Five. Climate Disasters: Making entire regions uninhabitable.

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Six. Mental Health Crisis: More people kill themselves than die in wars.

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The wars have a dedicated budget. The suicides do not. Overfunded Threats (That Countries Spend Trillions On).

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Other Countries Attacking: It happens. It's real. Ask Ukraine.

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But disease kills two hundred and twenty-five times more people every year, and you're funding them in the opposite ratio.

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Terrorists: Kill fewer people than furniture accidents. But here's the part your defense budget doesn't advertise: military

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occupation is the primary *cause* of terrorism. Robert Pape at the University of Chicago analyzed every suicide terrorist

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attack from nineteen eighty to two thousand and three and found that ninety-five percent were responses to foreign military

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occupation, not religious ideology. The group that committed the most suicide attacks during that period was the Tamil Tigers

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of Sri Lanka: Marxist atheists who invented the suicide vest.

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Not a mosque in sight. Half of all suicide attackers in the dataset had no religious motivation whatsoever.

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Your eight trillion dollar War on Terror killed nine hundred thousand people and global terrorist attacks went from about

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one thousand per year to nearly seventeen thousand per year by twenty fourteen.

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Nearly all of them targeted democracies that had stationed military forces in the attackers' homeland.

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You spent eight trillion dollars making the problem seventeen times worse.

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Your military bases aren't protecting you from terrorism. They're the reason it's pointed at you.

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A one percent treaty addresses the real threats. It doesn't weaken your ability to handle the conventional ones.

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You keep ninety-nine percent of your weapons. If ninety-nine percent of your military can't handle the job, the last one

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percent wasn't going to save you. Besides, you've done far bigger cuts before.

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After World War Two, the U.S. slashed military spending by eighty-seven point six percent in two years (from one point four

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two trillion dollars to one hundred and seventy-six billion dollars in today's dollars).

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G.M. went from building Cadillacs to building B twenty-four bombers, won the war, and went back to Cadillacs.

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Frigidaire stopped making machine guns and returned to refrigerators.

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Nobody held a congressional hearing about whether the refrigerator industry could survive without the machine gun contracts.

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Frigidaire just made refrigerators again. It wasn't complicated.

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It was only complicated later, when the machine gun industry hired lobbyists.

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The economy didn't collapse. It produced the greatest boom in your history.

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Today you're spending thirty point six times the pre-World War Two baseline in inflation-adjusted dollars: twenty-nine billion

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dollars in nineteen thirty-nine versus eight hundred and eighty-six billion dollars today, during peacetime, with no existential

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threat requiring it. it. Your defense industry learned how to make peacetime feel like wartime (see Regulatory Capture).

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You're asking to redirect one percent of that. The Rebranding Campaign: From "Weakness" to "Strategic Genius".

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Politicians hate looking weak. It's their biggest fear, right after having to use their own healthcare system.

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So you don't frame this as "reducing military spending." You frame it as: "The Strategic Health Defense Initiative".

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The old frame ("We're cutting defense by one percent") is political suicide.

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The new frame ("We're building a biodefense shield against the real threats") is political genius.

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Same policy. Different adjective. Your species can be manipulated with adjectives.

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This is simultaneously the most depressing and most useful fact about you.

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The Talking Points That Make Hawks Sound Like Doves. For Conservatives: "This protects American lives from diseases, which

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are basically immigrants that got past the immune system. It's the Strategic Defense Initiative for the twenty-first century,

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except it works.". For Liberals: "We're redirecting the tools of war to the cause of healing.

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This is how we build a more just and equitable world.". For Nationalists: "Our nation grows stronger when our people stop

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dying of diseases we can prevent. A healthy population is a powerful population.".

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For Economists: "The R.O.I. on the one billion dollar campaign to pass it is eighty-four point eight million to one.

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On paper, that beats every public health intervention on record.".

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For Conspiracy Theorists: "Big Pharma hates this one weird trick that makes medicine basically free.".

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For Everyone: "Your mom has cancer. This might cure it. Sign here.".

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The Money Flow. The one percent Treaty Fund. Twenty-seven point two billion dollars annually from military budgets flows

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into the one percent Treaty Fund. An eighty ten ten automatic split divides it before any funds reach discretionary spending:

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Eighty percent, or twenty-one point eight billion dollars, is allocated to Pragmatic Clinical Trials for patient subsidies,

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R. and D., and pandemic prep. Ten percent, totaling two point seven two billion dollars, goes to VICTORY Incentive Alignment

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Bond Returns for perpetual investor payments. Ten percent, also two point seven two billion dollars, is designated for Incentive

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Alignment Bond Political Incentives as rewards for supporting legislators.

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Notice what this does: it disentangles money from influence.

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In current government budgets, the people who provide the money (lobbyists, donors) also control where it goes.

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Money buys influence, influence redirects money, and the loop is invisible.

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Here, investors get money (ten percent). Politicians get career incentives (ten percent).

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Neither group touches the eighty percent that goes to clinical trials.

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The corruption is capped, transparent, and separated from the public goods funding.

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The eighty percent for pragmatic clinical trials is insulated from investor and political capture.

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Patients direct trial-participation spending by joining studies, while Wishocracy governs infrastructure and other shared

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medical public goods, not by a committee of twelve people in a conference room who haven't had a new idea since nineteen

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eighty-seven. Every human still gets direct say on the part that actually requires collective choice.

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Yes, even Florida Man. Year One Projected Outcomes. Only one point nine million participate in drug trials annually out

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of two point four billion people with chronic disease. With a one percent treaty plus a decentralized F.D.A.: Cost per patient

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is forty-one thousand dollars currently, but nine hundred and twenty-nine dollars with the treaty, making it forty-four

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point one times cheaper. Government trial funding is currently four point five billion dollars, with an additional twenty-one

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point eight billion dollars from the treaty. There are one point nine million patients per year currently, which would increase

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to twenty-three point four million under the treaty, a twelve point three times increase.

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The Incentive Structure. The military-industrial complex gets to keep ninety-nine percent of their budget (still plenty

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for bombs), pivot one percent to biotech (the health market is growing; the bomb market just got one percent smaller), look

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like heroes (rare for arms dealers), invest in the fund (VICTORY Incentive Alignment Bonds pay two hundred and seventy-two

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percent annually), and not die of cancer (even arms dealers get cancer).

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Especially the not dying of cancer part. The C.E.O. of Lockheed Martin has the same cells you do.

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Those cells malfunction on the same schedule. No amount of missile production has ever cured a tumor.

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Lockheed Martin Presents: The F thirty-five Cancer Killer. Boeing Proud Sponsor of: Not Dying of Alzheimer's.

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Raytheon Technologies: Now With one percent Less Death. They keep their contracts.

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They keep their profits. They just point one percent of their death machines at actual death.

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What Happens If This Actually Works. The Endgame. A one percent treaty isn't the goal.

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It's the proof of concept. I've watched roughly eight hundred and forty-seven civilizations reach this exact fork in the

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road; the ones still around all started with something like one percent, and the ones that didn't are geological features

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now. Once your species gets a taste of "spending money on things that help instead of things that explode," you'll want

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more. The Ratchet Effect. Public sentiment helps: once cures start rolling out, people want more.

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"Grandma's dementia is manageable now. Want to try another half-percent?"

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But your species has wanted cures for centuries without funding them.

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Popular demand alone doesn't move budgets. Money does. That's what the Incentive Alignment Bonds are for.

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Bondholders receive ten percent of all treaty inflows, perpetually.

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At one percent, that's two point seven two billion dollars a year split among them.

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At five percent, it's thirteen point six billion dollars. At full redirection, two hundred and seventy-two billion dollars.

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Every percentage point increase is a direct raise for every bondholder.

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These aren't random investors. They're billionaires, family offices, and institutional funds, people who already have senators

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on speed dial, media access, and campaign donation budgets.

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They didn't buy influence over the treaty fund. They bought a revenue share.

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But their pre-existing influence over everything else means any politician who tries to shrink or stall the treaty is picking

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a fight with the richest, most politically connected humans on the planet, all of whom have a quarterly earnings statement

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explaining why the treaty should be bigger, not smaller. The defense lobby built a permanent machine to keep military budgets

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growing. Incentive-alignment bonds, or I.A.B.s, build the mirror image: a permanent class of wealthy investors whose income

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scales directly with treaty expansion. Perpetual bonds mean a perpetual financial incentive to lobby for expansion, every

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single year, forever. Except these lobbyists have better math and a more popular product ("not dying" polls well).

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And the politicians on the receiving end of that pressure? They have their own math.

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The treaty's ten percent political incentive allocation scales with treaty size.

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At one percent, that's two point seven two billion dollars a year funding campaign support and post-office career rewards

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for legislators who voted yes. At five percent, it's five times that.

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A politician who votes to expand the treaty is voting to expand their own campaign war chest and retirement options.

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A politician who votes against expansion is voting to shrink them.

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Your species designed a system where politicians follow the money.

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This just points the money somewhere useful. More cures lead to more popular support.

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More bondholder income leads to more political pressure. More treaty funding leads to more campaign support for yes-voting

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politicians. Three ratchets, one direction. The endgame: countries bragging about their cancer survival rates instead of

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their missile counts. For quantitative projections of health and economic impacts, see impact dot war on disease dot O.R.G.

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Avoiding Treaty Pitfalls. Treaties fail in predictable ways.

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They all fail for the same boring reasons. Here's how this one avoids the common killers: Reservation Games.

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Countries love to sign treaties then add exceptions that gut them.

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It's like joining a gym but reserving the right to never go.

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Solution: No reservations permitted. All or nothing. Take it or leave it.

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Ratification Delays. Sign with fanfare, take a photo, then let it die in committee forever.

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Your species calls this "diplomacy." Solution: Provisional application.

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Takes effect on signature. Ratification just formalizes what already started.

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Creative Accounting. Reclassify "military" spending as "peacekeeping" or "homeland security" to dodge obligations.

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This is beige crime: making theft so procedurally dull that nobody investigates.

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Reclassifying "military" as "peacekeeping" is the bureaucratic equivalent of stealing someone's car by renaming it "shared

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mobility infrastructure." Solution: I.A.B.s make creative accounting self-defeating.

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Politicians who benefit from treaty compliance have personal financial incentive to ensure their nation's full one percent

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contribution flows through. Reclassifying military spending to dodge obligations reduces I.A.B.

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returns for that nation's own legislators, the same people who control budget classifications.

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Parliamentary Obstacles. Executive signs, legislature refuses to implement.

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Solution: The treaty obligates the percentage; Congress implements via the annual National Defense Authorization Act (N.D.A.A.).

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After Medellin versus Texas (two thousand and eight), the Supreme Court made clear that not all treaties are self-executing,

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so the treaty doesn't try to bypass Congress. It creates a binding international obligation that Congress fulfills through

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its normal appropriations process, the same way NATO's spending commitments work.

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The Incentive Alignment Bonds, or I.A.B., mechanism ensures legislators have a personal incentive to include the one percent

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line item every year. Summary. A one percent treaty is a piece of paper that says "Let's spend one percent less on killing

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and one percent more on not dying.". That's it. That's the whole thing.

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It doesn't end war. It doesn't destroy the military. It doesn't create world peace.

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It just moves the *first* one percent of your murder budget to your survival budget.

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If you can't agree on that, if you can't agree that spending one penny less on death and one penny more on life is a good

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idea, then you deserve whatever's coming. Addendum: The Actual Treaty Text (First Draft).

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THE TREATY FOR THE ONE PERCENT REALLOCATION OF MILITARY EXPENDITURES TOWARDS BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT FOR THE

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PREVENTION OF HUMAN SUFFERING AND DEATH (Or: The "Let's Not Die" Treaty, for short) WHEREAS, humanity spends two point seven

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two trillion dollars annually on methods of killing itself; WHEREAS, this seems somewhat counterproductive; WHEREAS, diseases

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kill more people than all wars combined and don't even have the decency to be quick about it; WHEREAS, we have nuclear weapons

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sufficient to end civilization thirteen times but haven't cured Alzheimer's once; WHEREAS, this is embarrassing; NOW, THEREFORE,

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the undersigned nations agree to try a different approach, as follows: Article One: Each signatory shall redirect exactly

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one percent of its annual military budget to the one percent Treaty Fund for allocation to pragmatic clinical trials.

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Article Two: Transfers shall be automatic, immediate, and irrevocable.

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No "we'll get to it later.". Article Three: Percentages may increase but never decrease.

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This is a ratchet, not a yo-yo. Article Four: Compliance shall be verified by public ledger and independent audits.

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No creative accounting. Article Five: Non-compliant parties lose access to I.A.B.

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benefits and treaty fund advantages. Your opponents get what you forfeit.

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Article Six: Success metrics trigger mandatory percentage reviews.

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When it works, we do more. Article Seven: Citizens have standing to enforce via domestic courts.

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You can sue your own government for non-compliance. Article Eight: Withdrawal requires unanimous consent of all parties

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plus ten-year notice. Good luck with that. Article Nine: This treaty supersedes all conflicting domestic law.

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Yes, even that law. Article Ten: Entry into force upon signature by two states.

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You only need two countries brave enough to go first. IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the undersigned, being of sound mind (debatable)

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and tired of watching their loved ones die of preventable diseases, have executed this Treaty on behalf of populations who

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would have executed it much sooner if anyone had asked them.

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Signed this day, blank, in the year of our ongoing confusion.

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Nation Name. "We choose life, I guess". P.S. - Yes, this includes space weapons.

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Nice try. P.P.S. - "Cyber weapons" too. We saw you thinking it.