MovieChat Forums > The Man in the High Castle (2015) Discussion > They know nukes are radioactive, right?

They know nukes are radioactive, right?

posted 8 years ago by ehaas-3
6 replies | jump to latest

When the Nazis were planning their big attack, the guy in charge was wildly rattling off names of cities to be hit with nuclear bombs and the others were happy about it.

He even goes back and adds Tokyo when he realizes that it had been left off the list even though the Japanese home islands alone were already targeted in about ten other places. Himmler of all people is the only one who seems concerned.

I'd expect them not to care about the massive loss of human life, but since they hate birth defects and incurable illnesses so much, I thought someone would object. It's not like they're planning to stay out of the effected areas, either. Their sending the army right in--young men whom they would want fathering more children.

[–] smithjgs 8 years ago

Why would they need to go right in?

What they want is a complete surrender so they can pillage what they want.

If I were you, I'd wanna be me too. 

[–] ehaas-3 8 years ago

One of the film reels shows Joe in uniform killing Frank in what looks like the aftermath of a nuclear war. The orders to the military in the timeline of the show were to move toward the Neutral Zone in anticipation of an invasion.

Using nuclear weapons to force a surrender would make sense, but the new Chancellor seemed to want total extermination. The board showing how nearly nearly every large or mid-sized city in the Empire would be hit wasn't just showing potential targets.

It was the actual plan to attack all these cities as soon as the missiles could be launched.

[–] Lancer01 8 years ago

i stated that question too and nobody had a good answer. Unless the Nazi's had solved nuclear fallout.

[–] ehaas-3 8 years ago

I don't even think it was a weakness in the story so much as a horrible decision by Heussmann. I don't know much about the real man, but in this, he was characterized as a perfectionist who wanted to remake the world in his image and didn't seem to care about the consequences.

His plan to alter the Mediterranean was apparently unpopular in some circles because of it's harm to the environment, so maybe that was telling us that he wasn't all that concerned with environmental issues or assumed that science could provide an easy solution on demand.

In other words, he was the ultimate technocrat as well as intolerant of dealing with realities he didn't like--the area between Europe and Africa MUST be the way he imagines it should, the Japanese Empire MUST cease to exist immediately.

Even in our own Cold War, there were people with much less concern with the dangers of nuclear war than they should have had--it will somehow all work out and the survivors will rebuild, concerns raised by scientists are Soviet propaganda, etc. Now it's the same mentality with climate change.

[–] pam43525-1 8 years ago

Here's my guess. Do you remember when the Nazis were watching the film with the Bikini Atoll bomb? If I recall, one of the Nazis said it was 1,000 times more powerful than the one they dropped in SF. So my guess is they did not drop a nuclear bomb in SF and would probably have no idea about radiation. Even we (US) didn't know the affects the fallout would have on the survivors. Most of that was learned after the A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[–] ehaas-3 8 years ago

That's an interesting point. Their original bombs were probably roughly the equivalent of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

The only known example of use in this timeline is Washington DC and presumably some tests. Without competition, they wouldn't have had a motive to keep improving them much.