Dude, they DID beat it with a crowbar. Your point is illustrated in the film itself, to dramatic effect. Unless we’re thinking of a different The Peacemaker with a different George Clooney. Either that or we have different ideas about what sort of beating should have been delivered.
I mean immediately. It’s been years since I saw that stupid movie, but didn’t they waste a whole bunch of time trying to figure out some way for Nicole Kidman to earn her keep? When all they had to do was whack it a bunch of times?
It’s been so long, and I’ve been so altered, it’s hard to keep it all straight. 
You’ll likely find yourself on a list or get a visit for googling that. 
Interesting. This puts a new angle on some family lore. My dad knew a guy who died when a handful of blasting caps detonated…in his pants pocket. The assumption had always been that he fell, and the impact set them off. But a pants pocket is a decent place to work up a static electrical charge, and that may be the actual explanation.
Seeing the blasting cap doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re home free. A bomb could well have multiple caps in it. It could even have a dummy cap, that’s actually just a loop of wire attached to a continuity tester.
Blasting caps are set off by shock, not electricity. The impact from falling angle sounds reasonable. Someone will find a Darwin Award to prove me wrong, it’s doubtful that anyone who had access to blasting caps would be ignorant enough to carry them around in his pocket, much less fall upon them with sufficient energy to detonate them.
A much simpler (but less foolproof) method than overpresduring a package is to simply put the bomb in a light-proof container with a photocell attached to a trigger. Unless you open the package in the dark, it blows as soon as you open it.
This premise is used in the aforementioned MacGyver triple-bomb episode. The trigger that kills the acquaintance is that the chamber is a vacuum, and breaking the seal makes some powder blow around inside, which somehow sets it off, but not before he yells to Mac, “It’s a vacuum!!” Boom.
This clip of that episode is after the commercial break that followed the part I just described. Apparently, the powder is phosphorous. Color me dubious about the physics involved in getting the powder out of the chamber. Feel free to explain how he’s actually right about popping the cork to get a suction in a vacuum.
Damn, that was great. And the reactions afterward were pretty realistic (and in character).
I love it when a cliche gets lampshaded, but my standards are really high. So thanks for posting that.
Not to worry. The baggage handlers a LaGuardia would toss it around and render it inoperable.
Most of those movie bombs don’t have anything on this one:
Even with over 24 hours of planning - they were unable to successfully disable it.
It was extremely well designed;
try to unscrew it - it would go off
Drill a hole in it - there were layers of foil and non metallic elements that would make contact and it would go off
Fill it with water - it would go off
Use a shape charge - which is what they tried - and well - it went off and took five stories of the hotel with it
It was the largest domestic bombing before the first WTC attack - and to my knowledge is the most advanced bomb (by countermeasure complexity) ever encountered by law enforcement - certainly in the US
Director James Cameron is known for being very intelligent and a stickler for detail and avoiding movie cliches. When he had to present the classic ‘red wire/green wire’ bomb defusing scene in The Abyss he did at least add a little something extra by having the Navy SEAL who is giving the disarming instructions say, “You must cut the ground wire, *not *the lead wire”. Probably still doesn’t matter, but hay, it was something at least.
Plus he added the great (and realistic) twist that right before the scene Ed Harris’ character (who’s defusing the bomb underwater) lost his electric light and was now using a cyalume chemical glowstick. They give off greenish light, so when the SEAL told him, “Cut the black wire with the yellow stripe, not the blue wire with the white stripe” it presented him with a real problem*!*
psssst… see the link from beowulff in post #25 for a very long in-depth read of this story.
I often wonder if modern kinetic attacks that use water would have succeeded. They tried to decapitate the bomb using a shaped charge, which likely set off the explosive without need of the other bomb parts. If this were done with these various devices that slice bits off with explosive-driven water instead, perhaps they might have been successful.
But it sure was a diabolical device. So many different tripwires built in.
Few bombers are that thorough, and of the ones who try to get fancy, a certain number blow themselves up.
In the season open of Sherlock, season 3, John and Sherlock are trapped in an Underground car loaded with explosives. right under Parliament. John’s freaking out, begging Sherlock to disarm the thing. Sherlock reaches over and flips off a switch. “There’s an “Off” switch. There’s always an Off switch. Terrorist can get in all sorts of problems unless there’s an Off switch.”
StG
I, as a Junior Pyrotechnician, was inspired by the ads during Cubs Rainout Theater to find the blasting caps I was told were everywhere in the suburban construction sites around me. I was disappointed.
I have a friend who as a child was deafened by hitting a blasting cap with a hammer. His dad was working on a tunnel and brought him down one day.
StG
Bolding mine. There are all kinds of blasting caps: Electric, non-electric, with delays, with booster charges and without. A google for “types of blasting caps” will suffice.
I always laugh at bomb wire cutting scenes - anyone with electronics knowledge could quickly determine which wire to cut, then cut it.
And wire colors MEAN NOTHING in the real world with something like this. People building these could choose to use any particular wire colors they wanted - there would not be a “standard” as such!
And the opposite for movie alarm system “jumper wire to bypass” scenes. They are just NOT going to be able to do that on many alarm systems. Also many alarm company employees do not understand how the electronics work in alarms, let alone a burglar.
For some complex alarm systems, there may be only one or two employees at an alarm company who would have the knowledge to fix it when it breaks. Most of the employees don’t have a clue.
Yeah, it would make sense for a bomb-maker to use different wire colors, for the same reason it makes sense for anyone else: It makes it easier to keep track of what you’re doing. But there’s no reason for the bomb-maker to use the same wire colors as anyone else. Maybe, just maybe, if you find enough bombs that you suspect were all made by the same person, you might be able to assume the coloring is consistent… but that’s a pretty big if.
Or it’s a mass produced bomb. Most bombs in the world are made for either the military, and as such, are pretty standardized. The scene upthread from The Abyss was like that - the bomb was an American warhead, and they had a military guy who’d been sent specifically to secure it, so of course he knew all the technical details on disarming it.