That’s how the Royal Navy (and, despite what Hollywood tells you, definitely not the US Navy) captured Kreigsmarine Enigma machines and codebooks during WW2.
No, I’ve seen the movie dozens of times, it’s the detail from the book (that I have not read) that’s bothering me.
CMC fnord!
Despite what the US-haters tell you, the US also captured a U-Boat and enigma machine. Just not until later.
I worked with a defense contractor doing Avionics. They did have a small explosive to destroy some of the computer equipment to protect sensitive data. The idea was they couldn’t wait for, or trust, FLASH memory to erase.
And we still have it.
I don’t have the book handy, but I’ve read it a few times. And I don’t remember the whole “sucking the air out of the facility” bit. That would be redundant (why suffocate someone to just disintegrate them in a nuclear fireball 30 seconds later?) and impractical (as you say, where are they putting the air?). Not to mention, irrelevant in the actual case: with Andromeda mutating to eat anything you could use to make a sealed air system, the vacuum mechanism would have been been leakier than my kids’ usual alibis.
If it’s in the book that way, it’s facepalmingly silly (even by the standards of Michael Crichton not paying attention). But I just don’t remember it, and the few lookups I could do with Google books doesn’t find it either.
If I remember (and it’s been a long time since I read the book, so I might have it wrong) it was to make the nuclear explosion more efficient or something like that.
The people who built the lab could not foresee the specifics properties of the organisms they might be studying there. There’s lots of things wrong with the book, but that’s not one of them.
I’m pretty sure it’s in an epilog/windup section of the book, that is, after Hall disables the bomb. He’d managed to disable it with 30-some seconds to go, IIRC, and says something like “plenty of time”. Someone else then points out the air evacuation starting at 30 seconds.
Wikipedia backs me up:
Here’s a real-world example. Equipment of Strategic Air Command - Wikipedia
Well, in that case, my point about Andromeda destroying the pumps stands: there would be no air evacuation, because all the seals in the air evac system (and any non-metallic plumbing therein) are destroyed. The only threat would have been the nuke, as if any more were needed.
I suppose a related not-yet-asked (as far as I know) question: did mutated Andromeda not develop a taste for plastic insulation? There should have been short-circuits all over the place. Maybe the nuke wouldn’t have gone off at all, given those things are electrically triggered.
An even bigger example. Think of it as a self-destruct system for human civilization.
Sure, I’m not advocating it - just sprang to mind as a fairly well-qualifying example of what the OP was looking for (not least because I remember the decommissioning of the bombs at Daedalus, which is only a few miles away from me).
Rumour has it that there are still similar pipe mines somewhere under the runway at Southampton Airport (where the Spitfire first flew) - some of them were discovered and removed during maintenance work in recent years, but (according to same rumour) the placement of the mines was not properly mapped or recorded when they were installed - or the records were lost afterwards.
I think the stealth helicopter’s “self destruct” was a SEAL tossing a thermite bomb into it.
As does sticking a rock down the barrel and firing it!