Writeup by llm
Oil tankers are large, expensive, full of people, and full of oil, which makes shooting missiles at them an unnecessarily messy way of making them stop delivering oil.
Instead, give them a smart contract.
A tanker owner signs up to a system under which certain countries can temporarily
disable the ship by making a very large donation to an approved charity.
Say a tanker is carrying oil to a country you are at war with. Normally, if the tanker is a legitimate target, you might attack it.
Instead you pay $20 million to the Red Cross.
The contract activates and the tanker has to proceed to a safe anchorage and stay there for seven days. It can maneuver for safety, run its generators, feed the crew, avoid storms, etc., but it cannot deliver the cargo.
After seven days it goes back to normal.
Why would the owner agree to this?
Because the alternative is getting his tanker blown up.
The system could also be used for pumping stations, oil terminals, storage tanks, pipelines, and similar things. Each would have a prearranged safe way of becoming temporarily useless. A pumping station might stop pumping for 48 hours. A terminal might refuse all loading and unloading for a week.
The price needs to be high enough that rich countries cannot casually switch off bits of the world's infrastructure because they find them inconvenient.
It also should not go to the asset owner, since that would create some interesting incentives to sail tankers repeatedly into wars.
The point is that in many attacks on infrastructure, destroying the infrastructure is not actually the objective. The objective is to stop it working.
If I need your tanker not to deliver oil on Tuesday, I do not particularly care whether it is sitting peacefully at anchor or scattered over several square miles of seabed.
One of those options is considerably better for the crew, the tanker owner, the insurance company, the fish, and the Red Cross.