In James Bond movies, it's accepted that the end justifies the means -- we're fine with Bond killing supervillains' workers, lab technicians and janitors left and right because he needs to fulfill his mission at all costs, and also those guys are dicks. The end of Dr. No, however, is one of those times when he might have gone a little overboard.
As part of a plan to sabotage U.S. missile and space launches, the evil terrorist organization SPECTRE employs atomic poindexter Dr. No to build a nuclear-powered toppling ray on the Caribbean island of Crab Key, near Jamaica. Bond successfully dicks up these plans by forcing the island's atomic reactor into a catastrophic overload, resulting in Dr. No's ironic demise ...
... while Bond and the sexy companion he acquired at some point triumphantly run from the resulting explosion, presumably (definitely) to have sex behind the nearest shrub.
But shockingly, causing a nuclear explosion in the middle of the Caribbean isn't as harmless as the movie depicts it -- let's just say that by now, instead of being known for their reggae music and dreadlocks, Jamaica would be famous as the land of impoverished five-eyed babies.
Let's look at what was in Dr. No's lair (since Bond obviously didn't): a pool-type reactor from this era should have around 56 kilograms of uranium. Considering that Dr. No was running an entire island out there, including a bauxite mine, a million-dollar aquarium and a goddamn rocket toppling ray, it would be safe to assume that he was using at least three times the normal amount of radioactive material -- so that's 168 kilograms (370 pounds) of uranium blown into the Caribbean sky.
That's nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl, but that's not saying a whole lot. If we take a fallout map of the Chernobyl disaster, adjust it to the scale of this explosion based on what we know and superimpose it on a Google Maps image of the Caribbean, it would look like this:
See that patch of land under the lower red cloud? That's the entirety of Jamaica. The city of Kingston and its more than half a million laid-back citizens would receive the brunt of the radioactive fallout, making the city uninhabitable for a century. Not that anyone would be coming back: A quarter of the country's jobs and a good chunk of its earnings come from tourism, and nobody wants a Jamaican glow that actually glows.
Depending on prevailing winds, large swaths of Cuba and Haiti (and Bond himself) could have been fatally irradiated ... simply because Bond wanted to make a cool exit.
Read more: 5 Light-Hearted Movies With Dark Moral Implications | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19853_5- ... z1x15Z337P
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