BTF
Bomb This First
A harm-less protocol · est. 2026
Propose a target
Working Paper No. 001For semi-sovereign review

Send the message.
Spare the family.

Bomb This First is a proposed civic protocol in which nations pre-register uninhabited — or evacuable — targets that an adversary may strike to demonstrate seriousness before drawing blood. A symbolic crater instead of a coffin. A first move that doesn't start a spiral.

Premise

Many wars begin with a single unrecoverable act. The hostages taken. The plane shot down. The wedding hit by mistake. From that act, grief organizes a generation. Bomb This First asks: what if the first strike could be answered in property, on a target the defender chose, with cameras rolling — and a hard window to negotiate before the second strike?

Read the protocolSee the cases
00
Lives lost in a pre-declared symbolic strike — by design.
72h
Minimum public notice required before a registered target may be struck.
1:1
Reciprocity: every registering nation accepts strikes it may also deliver.
∞
Better than the alternative.
§ 01 · The Protocol

Five steps between a message and a massacre.

Bomb This First is not pacifism. It is a slower trigger — one that keeps the option of force without spending a generation of cousins to use it.

  1. I.

    Pre-declaration

    A semi-sovereign — a state, a recognized tribe, a territory — files one or more targets into a public registry: structures, abandoned installations, purpose-built Potemkin villages on cleared land. Each filing names the place, the evacuation radius, the witnesses.

  2. II.

    Standing reciprocity

    By filing, the semi-sovereign also accepts that it may be the one to strike a foreign target — and that its own population near a registered site will be moved out on schedule when the time comes. No one registers without consenting to both sides of the table.

  3. III.

    Notice window

    Before a strike, a 72-hour public notice begins. Independent monitors verify evacuation. The strike is filmed from multiple angles, by both sides, by neutrals, and published in full.

  4. IV.

    Narrated counterfactual

    Every strike ships with a written counterfactual: who would have died, which neighborhood, which families, what the funerals would have looked like, what the retaliation would have been. The story we did not have to live.

  5. V.

    Negotiation interval

    After the strike, a mandatory pause — long enough to let the message land and an answer to be drafted. Escalation past this point is not prevented. It is no longer cheap.

§ 02 · Case files

Six reciprocal counterfactuals.

Worked examples, written backward from wars that did happen — and forward from ones that didn't have to.

Declassified · For study
🇺🇸 USAT² (USA, Semi-Sovereign Tribes & Territories) · Filing US-FL-014

Potemkin village, cleared scrubland, Florida panhandle.

Site
30.78°N, 86.41°W
Evac radius
8 km
Casualties (by design)
0

A registered mock-township, built of timber and drywall on federal land already slated for controlled burn. Filed as a receivable strike site for a foreign signatory wishing to communicate a grievance the United States has failed to hear by diplomatic channel. After the strike, every American is shown what the same payload would have done to a real Tuesday in Pensacola — and is told, by name, who would not have come home.

Declassified · For study
🇦🇫 Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (filed 2001, hypothetical) · Filing AF-KDH-007

Abandoned Soviet barracks, Kandahar outer ring.

Site
31.50°N, 65.81°E
Evac radius
6 km
Casualties (by design)
0

A registered receivable site, filed in lieu of war. Had it existed in September 2001, the United States could have demanded — and demonstrated — seriousness about the surrender of Osama bin Laden and the echelon that knowingly funded the attacks, by striking concrete instead of cousins. Twenty years of insurgency and counter-insurgency are the counterfactual. So are the funerals on both sides of the ocean.

Declassified · For study
🇷🇺 ↔ 🇺🇦 (filed 2021, hypothetical) · Filing RU-UA-2022

Twin mock-depots on either side of the Donets basin.

Site
48.61°N, 37.99°E
Evac radius
10 km
Casualties (by design)
0

A pair of reciprocally registered scrap-metal yards, each strikeable by the other. Filed in late 2021 as a place to put the demonstrations that did not happen — to argue about NATO posture, language laws, and gas in concrete and steel instead of in apartment blocks in Mariupol, Belgorod, Kherson, and Kursk.

Declassified · For study
🇮🇱 ↔ 🇵🇸 (filed 1995, hypothetical) · Filing IL-PS-1995

Disused quarry, Negev–Naqab boundary.

Site
31.13°N, 35.02°E
Evac radius
5 km
Casualties (by design)
0

A shared registered site between two peoples who keep burying each other's children. Had it existed, the second intifada, the Lebanon escalations, October 7th, and the wars of Gaza might still have happened — or one of them might have been answered in stone instead of in funerals, opening the smallest possible window to a different decade.

Declassified · For study
🇮🇳 ↔ 🇵🇰 (filed hypothetically, post-Kargil) · Filing IN-PK-002

Abandoned cement works, Line of Control buffer.

Site
34.41°N, 73.78°E
Evac radius
7 km
Casualties (by design)
0

A registered receivable site on each side of the LoC, available after Pulwama, after Balakot, after every cross-border shelling cycle. The counterfactual is not peace — it is one more off-ramp between a Kashmiri convoy hit and a nuclear-state retaliation.

Declassified · For study
🇨🇺 ↔ 🇺🇸 (filed 1962, hypothetical) · Filing CU-US-1962

Empty sugar silo, eastern Cuba; decommissioned silo array, Kansas.

Site
20.34°N, 74.49°W
Evac radius
12 km
Casualties (by design)
0

During the missile crisis, a reciprocal strike pair could have let either side break concrete instead of breaking the world. The counterfactual here is not the war we avoided — it is the off-ramp that, next time, may not exist by luck alone.

§ 03 · The Registry

A public ledger of pre-declared, evacuable, strikeable places.

Filings below are illustrative. The live registry, when convened, will be hosted by a neutral consortium of signatories and mirrored by independent press.

Filing
Semi-Sovereign
Site
Status
Evac
BTF-001
🇮🇸 Iceland
Decommissioned NATO radar dome, Westfjords
● Active
11.2 km
BTF-014
🇺🇸 USAT²
Potemkin township, FL panhandle
● Active
8.0 km
BTF-022
🇲🇳 Mongolia
Empty industrial silo array, Gobi
● Active
14.0 km
BTF-031
🇨🇷 Costa Rica
Disused sugar refinery, Guanacaste
● Pending review
5.5 km
BTF-049
🇳🇴 Norway
Soviet-era observation post, Svalbard
● Active
9.0 km
BTF-057
🇳🇿 Aotearoa New Zealand
Mothballed power station, Southland
● Active
7.0 km
§ 04 · Objections, fairly stated

The arguments against — answered without flinching.

Isn't this just theater?

Yes. That is the point. Theater is what we have used for centuries to communicate seriousness without burying children — parades, fly-bys, missile tests, sanctions. Bomb This First is theater with a date, a place, and a guaranteed audience.

Won't adversaries cheat the evacuation?

The protocol assumes mutual verification by independent monitors and adversary press, and a 72-hour public window. A regime that strikes outside the registered geometry has chosen war on the old terms and has told the world so on camera.

Doesn't this lower the threshold for violence?

It raises the threshold for irreversible violence. Cheap symbolic strikes already exist — sanctions, cyber, posturing. What does not exist is a kinetic option that is loud, legible, and recoverable. That gap is where wars are born.

What stops a second strike?

Nothing — and that is honest. Bomb This First does not abolish war. It inserts a deliberate, witnessed interval between a message and a massacre, so that the people on both sides who do not want the second strike have somewhere to stand.

Why is this proposal public, and not classified?

Sunshine is the best disinfectant. A classified registry would be just another back-channel hotline — and back-channels are exactly what diplomats already have, and exactly what keeps failing on the eves of wars. The whole deterrent value of Bomb This First lives in the audience: the filing is public, the evacuation is public, the strike is filmed by both sides and by neutrals, and the counterfactual is published in full. Secrecy would not protect the protocol; it would hollow it out.

What does publicness give that secrecy cannot?

It gives separations of powers an actual chance to operate. A pre-declared filing with a 72-hour ticking clock is a moment a national legislature can be convened around — to debate, to vote, to amend, to refuse — before any blood has been spilled and before events have spun past the point where deliberation is even possible. It is closer to a Periclean funeral oration delivered in advance, in front of the people whose sons and daughters would otherwise be eulogized after the fact, than to the wars of the last century, which were almost never given a clean up-or-down vote on the floor of any chamber while there was still time to choose otherwise. And the same publicness performs on the other end of the political spectrum: for the autocrats, dictators, and tyrants who still rule without meaningful separations of powers, a public filing and a public clock is one of the few mechanisms that forces the room to pause — that gives advisors an opening to walk a rash decision back, and that gives a captive population a visible moment to insist that their own will, not the glory-hunger of a single butcherous strongman, is the semi-sovereign voice of record.

§ 05 · Standing invitation

Propose a target.

If you represent a semi-sovereign — a state, a recognized tribe, a municipality willing to begin the conversation — submit a site for review. All filings are public.

§ Verification — how should we confirm you?

Bomb This First filings are only credible if the people of the filing semi-sovereign know about them and the rest of the world can independently confirm the filer. Tell us where to look — official channels, parliamentary records, press conferences — and how your population and civigious subdivisions have been informed.