Special Bulletin (1983 TV Movie)

[1srelluc]

Oddly enough it still holds-up given the scores of terrorists slipping across our southern border with gawd knows what.

Special Bulletin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[odanny]

Steven Levitt is a hero, and I hope he is okay.

 

[22lcidw]

Tens of millions of Americans would let people detonate WMD's today if they knew of it.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

Oddly enough it still holds-up given the scores of terrorists slipping across our southern border with gawd knows what.

Special Bulletin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

My wife has told me that when this show aired, she came in at some point in the middle, without seeing the disclaimers, and thought it was really happening.

For my part, I knew of this show ahead of time, knew what it was that I was going to watch, so I knew that it was fiction.

I also spotted what I considered to be a huge plot hole, a huge vulnerability to the terrorists.

Perhaps the producers of this show didn't know, or they were counting on the audience not to know, but implosion-type atomic bombs are very fussy. They have a core of fissionable material, surrounded by a precise array of explosives that have to be set off at precisely the same time in order to set off a nuclear explosion. The terrorists had their bomb on a boat. It seemed to me that the Navy could sneak a submarine in close enough to get a good shot, and send a torpedo at that boat. A strong explosion, close to the bomb, would destroy it, without setting off an atomic reaction. There'd then be concerns about pollution from the bomb's nuclear materials, but it'd be nothing near as bad as the results of the bomb going off as it was meant to.