You know the scene. The clock’s ticking down, and the bomb will go off. our sweaty hero has to decide whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire. Or is it the green wire? Close-up on the block of C4 with the detonator sticking into it…
Why bother with cutting wires? Why not just remove the detonator?
Because it’s a movie time bomb (we know this because it has a visible countdown timer). Movie time bombs can only be stopped by cutting a wire.
Even given that it’s a movie, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character just pull the detonator out of the explosive. It should have occurred to someone.
And it has to be the right wire. Because if you cut the wrong wire it will explode, because… that’s just the way bombs work! If you watched enough movies you would know that. And the colors of the wires must be very important for some reason, otherwise any half competent bad guy would use the same color wires in order to foil the good guy.
There must be a Standard Movie Bomb Bad-guy Wiring Table somewhere. Sort of like the color code for resistors.
I liked how in Lethal Weapon 3, Riggs cut the wrong wire.
“Roger… GRAB THE CAT!”
The Peacemaker was one of the most blatant offenders. Besides having Nicole Kidman portray a nuclear specialist, neither she nor Clooney can remember that a fusion bomb has to work perfectly to work at all. They have 5 minutes or so to defuse a Russian suitcase nuke, and neither of them thinks to clip the wires leading to the initiating explosives, which are wrong as well. Hell, they could have just beat on the thing with a crowbar for 5 minutes and it would have been reduced to junk without detonating.
I’m not disputing the overall inaccuracy of the movie (which I don’t think I’ve even seen) but don’t fusion bombs have fission triggers and wouldn’t just the trigger going off be bad enough?
Presumably it might be designed to go off if you do that.
Well in real life, it might explode because the wire was put there as a decoy.
The fission component also requires precision to work properly. Damaging the conventional explosives will prevent a nuclear explosion - but it won’t prevent the conventional explosives from blasting everything and everyone nearby with shrapnel and radioactive material. If you disable a nuke that way, you’d best do so from far away.
Also, we can here it beep as it counts down.
Here you go. *Castle *may not have been the smartest show on TV, not by a long shot, but it had its moments.
He’s right, but slightly wrong. I thought it was a purely fission bomb.
Here is the best image I can find from the movie:
Le Bombe
The soccer-ball looking thing is supposed to be the physics package. A sphere of plutonium surrounded by high explosive shaped charges. At this point in the movie, they had access to the core. There were no more security devices. All they had to do was cut even one wire to the explosives, and the bomb would never create a complete fission reaction. You might (might!) get some local fissioning, but the yield would be low. I still wouldn’t want to stand near it!
The problem is, the high energy explosives would blow plutonium all over, rendering that area of Manhattan uninhabitable for quite some time. They forgot that fact.
IN an episode of CSI:NY, Mac finds a small block of C4 with a blasting cap and a cell phone detonator. Instead of calmly removing the detonator from the C4 , rendering the bomb harmless, he runs like a panicked schoolgirl and gets caught in the explosion. That one really pissed me off for inaccuracy.
Does anyone in real life even use time bombs? I would think that they’d mostly use cellphone detonators, or maybe motion detectors or proximity switches.
I hope to God the Russians can’t fit fusion bombs in suitcases!
I recall an earlier example, an episode of Knight Rider where, I believe, Devon and the female guest of the week were chained to something, across the room from a ticking time bomb. Michael enters with seconds to go, runs over and pulls the detonator out of the clump of C4. Easy-peasy. In the Castle example, one can see wires running to packets of what is likely supposed to be plastic explosive. I’d have immediately started by pulling those loose.
There’s a reason why bomb disposal experts, given the opportunity, don’t defuse bombs–they just blow them up.
Don’t real bomb teams have robots on tracks with TV cameras and shotguns? The first time I saw one was thirty years ago! You aim for the electronics and shoot. Might work better if the robot has a water hose. Wet electronics no worked.
Wet electronics eventually no work because it causes short circuits. Do you really want to cause a short across the timing mechanism connecting the detonator directly to the power source?
Ah, but do you remove the red detonator, the blue detonator or the green detonator?
Depending on how sophisticated a bomb-making henchman we are talking about, the bomb would, presumably, as Der Trihs says, be designed in such a way as to defeat attempts at defusing it. Probably designed to go off, in fact, specifically if anyone tries to defuse it and only the bomb-maker knows the special way to neutralize it.
