Ian Fleming’s third James Bond novel, Moonraker (1955), centers on a plot by Sir Hugo Drax, a British aerospace tycoon with a secret Nazi past, to bomb London with a missile armed with a Soviet nuclear warhead.
As usual, Fleming made his fanciful tale seem plausible by incorporating details drawn from real life. At the start of the book, Drax’s company is ostensibly developing a medium-range nuclear missile for the UK as part of the country’s nuclear deterrent. The UK had in fact embarked on just such a program, Blue Streak, in 1954. Drax’s missile is an updated version of the V-2, which Germany used to bomb Antwerp, Liège, and London in World War II and which the US used after the war to jump-start its space program.
The movie version of Moonraker, which came out in 1979, follows the novel’s theme of death dealt from the skies—but little else. As is the case in the novel, Drax’s movie spacecraft is a real one, the space shuttle. But whereas Fleming’s WMD, the nuclear-armed missile, was already in service when he wrote the novel, the movie’s WMD, a metal sphere containing nerve gas and launched from low-Earth orbit, is just silly. Why deal with the technical challenge of aiming and firing the spheres from space when they could be deployed remotely and more effectively on the ground? The fight aboard Drax’s space station was conducted, implausibly, with handheld laser weapons. Deadly laser weapons exist, but they’re hardly compact.
Indeed, most—but not all—of the James Bond movies that incorporate space weaponry stretch plausibility to the breaking point. The shining exception is GoldenEye (1995), whose villain, Alec Trevelyan, gains control of two Soviet satellites. By detonating an onboard nuclear weapon, each satellite can set off an electromagnetic pulse of such power that it would fry circuitry on Earth. Although the movie doesn’t mention it, Earth’s own magnetic field lines can direct the pulse to its target. In 1962 the Soviet Union tested the concept over Kazakhstan. From what we know of the test, the damage was extensive.
The makers of You Only Live Twice (1967) expect the audience to believe that a spacecraft can launch, chase down, and capture another spacecraft, then return to Earth—all without being detected. Here’s what Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg have to say about the feat in their book The Science of James Bond (2006):
The You Only Live Twice gobbling spaceship must travel much faster than the ship it eats, and it must possess extraordinary navigation. How could the gobbling spaceship maneuver so cleverly and precisely in outer space to find speeding rockets, get exactly on the right track for interception, and gobble them up without a major explosion? The answer is simple: It couldn’t.
Perhaps the most preposterous space weapon is the one in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Having taken over billionaire Willard Whyte’s business empire, villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld intends to hold Earth’s superpowers for ransom by threatening to destroy their ICMBs with a heat ray fired from a satellite.* The weapon is powered by mirrors that collect, store, and concentrate sunlight. Even if Blofeld knew where China, the Soviet Union, and the US hid their weapons, the spacecraft’s mirrors—made for no clear scientific reason from diamonds—are far too small for the job.
Judging by the size of its solar panels, the spacecraft in Diamonds Are Forever is tens of meters in size—too small to harvest enough of the Sun’s energy to zap targets on Earth.
How small? The idea of collecting sunlight and beaming it down to Earth to generate electricity predates Diamonds Are Forever by three years (or 30 years, if you count Isaac Asimov’s 1941 short story “Reason”). In most schemes, including the latest by Japan’s space agency JAXA, the mirrors are kilometers in size. And by the time the beam reaches Earth’s surface, it’s even wider.
Does it matter that Bond movies get space science so wrong? After all, until the release of GoldenEye, Moonraker was the highest-grossing movie of the series. And why worry about far-fetched space travel when the central premise of the books and movies—that a single secret agent is assigned to thwart global evil—is itself far-fetched?
It matters, in my view, for two reasons. First, there’s the moviemakers’ implicit presumption that their audience will swallow bad science. Maybe that patronizing presumption is valid, but as the books and some of the movies demonstrate, it’s possible to thrill an audience with plausible science, too.
The second reason is that the Bond movies are set in the present day and purport to deal with real, present-day threats. That grounding in reality would be strengthened by plausible science; Bond’s battles with his adversaries would be more believable and therefore even more thrilling.
*Historian of science Alex Wellerstein discusses the vulnerability of nuclear weapons in his recent blog post, “The final switch: Goldsboro, 1961.”
Unusual Arctic fire activity in 2019–21 was driven by, among other factors, earlier snowmelt and varying atmospheric conditions brought about by rising temperatures.
January 06, 2023 12:00 AM
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The Week in Physics" is likely a reference to the regular updates or summaries of new physics research, such as those found in publications like Physics Today from AIP Publishing or on news aggregators like Phys.org.
