How much nuclear physics will be in the next James Bond movie?

The 23rd official James Bond movie has a release date: 9 November 2012. Daniel Craig will play Bond; Sam Mendes, who won an Oscar in 2000 for American Beauty, will direct the as-yet-untitled movie; Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan will write the screenplay. As far as I know, no Bond villains or Bond girls have been cast.

Launched in 1962 with Dr No, the Bond movies constitute the most financially successful series in history. One estimate put its total box-office gross in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars at $11.7 billion, which is about the same as Armenia’s GDP. Some of that success arises from the series’ reflection of contemporary geopolitical tensions and technological threats, including one of the scariest threats of all: nuclear energy.

Along with space-based weaponry, nuclear energy has been one of the most frequently occurring plot elements. The eponymous villain in Dr No ran a nuclear reactor in his lair on Crab Key, a small island off the Jamaican coast. He used the nuclear-generated electricity to power transmitters that interfered with the guidance systems of US rockets launched from Cape Canaveral.

Nuclear energy was also the energy source of the space weapon in GoldenEye (1995). But for Bond’s—literally—last-minute intervention, the weapon would have zapped London with a data-destroying electromagnetic pulse and sent the UK back into an information Stone Age.

In Thunderball (1965), the international crime syndicate SPECTRE captured two nuclear warheads from an RAF bomber and threatened to detonate them in the waters off Miami. A captured nuclear warhead also featured in Octopussy (1983). Nuclear submarines were hijacked in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and in The World Is Not Enough (1999), which also featured Bond pretending to be a nuclear inspector and Denise Richards, who played one of the Bond girls, pretending to be a nuclear physicist.

Auric Goldfinger’s use of nuclear energy was perhaps the most imaginative. In Goldfinger (1964), the villain planned to irradiate, and therefore render useless, the US gold reserves in Fort Knox by detonating a dirty bomb inside the fort’s vault.

A nuclear Bond 23?

Nukes haven’t appeared in a Bond movie since 1999. Given the both the current nuclear crisis at the Fukushima I power station in northeastern Japan and the continuing fear that terrorists might acquire a nuclear warhead, is the time ripe for a nuclear revival in the Bond oeuvre?

Possibly. But my hunch is that the screenwriters have opted to scare us with a new and different threat: rampaging nanobots. Although the tiny machines would be challenging to depict on the big screen with dramatic menace, they could cause a graphically disfiguring disease.

And if nanobots are the new nukes, the villain could well be a physicist.

For my take on the role of computers in the James Bond movies, see the column I wrote for Computing in Science and Engineering entitled “Compute? No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You To Die.”