The effective Lagrangian for production of massless, spin-zero charged particles by an external electric field $\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\mathcal{E}}=\mathcal{E}_{0}\stackrel{^}{z}\mathrm{sin}\ensuremath{\omega}t$ is calculated in a one-loop, WKB approximation. Tunneling contributions are calculated; but the dominant classical path is a nontunneling path, such that the particle sits at rest on an extremum of the potential. This path contributes an ${(e\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\mathcal{E}})}^{2}$ term to the imaginary part of the effective Lagrangian. It is conjectured that production of massless graviton pairs may dampen the runaway solutions encountered by Fischetti, Hartle, and Hu and Anderson in their study of early universe cosmology. The present calculation is designed as a warmup for the gravitational one. The gravitational analog of the ${(e\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\mathcal{E}})}^{2}$ term would be a ${(\mathrm{Riemann}\mathrm{tensor})}^{2}$ term. This term cannot dampen the runaway de Sitter solutions found by Anderson (and by Starobinsky); those solutions must be damped by tunneling contributions (or by higher-order WKB corrections). The WKB form for the tunneling contributions is useful for initial orientation, but is unlikely to be useful for a detailed numerical calculation.