IIRC that decision comes back to bite him on the Latverian rear no?
I'm pretty sure that it's also somewhere in the Evil Overlord list. "If I have relied on lackeys to complete my empowerment machine, and they have no vested interest in my survival, make sure to test the end result with them as the subject first"
Or as Megatron put it so well "When expecting a booby-trap, always send a boob in first"