When states delegate exception-decisions to autonomous systems operating under latency constraints that preclude real-time human ratification, the sovereign position becomes formally unoccupiable. This paper derives the result from three independent impossibility constraints: Rice's theorem on behavioral verification (the Verification Wall), FLP impossibility on distributed consensus (the Ratification Wall), and complexity-theoretic limits on adversarial attestation (the Attestation Wall). Unlike prior accounts in political theory, which treat sovereignty failure as political and therefore corrigible, this result is mathematical. The void is not a failure of institutional imagination. It is a theorem. The paper assembles three logically independent impossibility results into a joint exhaustion argument against any ratification mechanism for autonomous exception-decisions: Verification Wall (Rice 1953): Correct implementation of an exception-decision rule is a non-trivial semantic property of the agent's program. Rice's theorem makes it undecidable. Pre-delegation cannot cover what cannot be verified. Ratification Wall (FLP 1985): Post-hoc ratification requires distributed consensus across an asynchronous C2 architecture under adversarial conditions. FLP shows no deterministic protocol can guarantee termination within a hard-bounded decision window. Randomized and partial-synchrony extensions do not close the gap. Attestation Wall (Regime 3, Bilar 2026a): Runtime authentication of the exception-executing agent against an adversarially chosen agent class is computationally intractable. No adaptive verifier making polynomially many queries can distinguish cooperative from defecting agents with non-negligible advantage if the agent class has PRF-embeddability. The three walls close different levels of the decision architecture (semantic, distributed-systems, cryptographic), and are logically independent. No sovereignty architecture defeats all three simultaneously.
sovereignty · autonomous systems · Rice's theorem · FLP impossibility · capability attestation · political theory · Schmitt · exception-decision · MMIE · latency governance · computability · distributed consensus