A hypothetical hack

Suppose I had a really big database. Suppose it's about 1.5 TB. Now suppose that it's got all standard ASCII in it, with no internationalization, and no NCHAR or NVARCHAR fields. Now suppose it's currently set up with the default en_US.819 locale. Got it? Good. Now suppose a new requirement came up for internationalized data. And suppose we wanted to use UTF8 for this internationalization. Further, suppose we don't have an extra 1.5 TB laying around to do a huge migration. I understand that this is the sort of suggestion that gives IBM engineers nightmares, but what would be the problem with just magically changing some flags somewhere so that the database thinks its locale is en_US.UTF8 and that it has been that locale all along? Sure seems to beat a protracted migration, and I don't see what the problem would be, since there's no internationalized data right now... Thoughts? Lectures? Doomsday predictions? Thanks, - TJG