I feel like giving the permission to fire an atomic bomb on American soil should take more authority than a single general saying, "fire" on his walkie talkie.
Especially since the movie showed how fucking easy it to just snatch said talkie out of someone's hands.
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You're neglecting to consider they had already consulted the president and gotten his approval, and the general was the man on the scene to make the final determination based on the circumstances present.
Could he not have a secret confirmation word only a handful know alongside saying fire? Could it not take the permission of two generals simultaneously on the scene?
It was written by some Hollywood liberal, not someone with an expert knowledge of 1950's military procedure. Yeah it's a fuck up but it doesn't matter because it helps tell a good story.
It's a cartoon, they're not going to spend twenty minutes of screen time showing proper protocol because that would be fucking boring
Where's the giant Mansley
I think when a giant death robot is involved procedure goes out the window just a little bit.
Everyone involved probably went into that situation fully expecting it to be launched anyway
>it was written by somebody without autism that wouldn't ruin a story for some irrelevant technicality
ftfy
>We have to reverse the polarities on the mainframe!
>Ha-ha it's just silly Hollywood films, who cares??
Iron Giant's A-Bomb works because the whole story is crafted around the Cold War era, but don't deny the government making the decision to launch a nuke NYC on a whim's notice is anything but lazy writing.
He probably got tactical nuclear authority from the President. The President basically gave the authorization to use nukes, and the General gets to decided where to drop them as the tactical situation changes (giant's in town, no wait giant's heading for the battleships)
This would have happened off screen of course because to include it would be a fucking waste of valuable screen time
The guys firing the nuke see the giant death robot on their monitors. If someone tells them to drop the nuke on it, they're sure as hell going to drop the nuke on it.
This was during Ike's presidency right? Eisenhower gave his generals advanced authority to launch nukes under specific emergency conditions (like a Soviet invasion).
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So issues with this part of the ending, but not with a giant alien space robot, huh?
Right here sir
>giant alien soviet robot attacking the country
>a whim
You're really grasping at straws here.
>NYC
Dude, it's just Maine.
>NYC
confirmed for not watching the movie
Reminder that the general is now dead.
Thanks user, I needed an excuse to post this.
Meh, it's just an atom bomb. Back in those days, an atomic detonation in the US was a tourist attraction.
nigga
Why do people post about shit they don't actually know anything about?
Your problem here is that you are skeptical of certain organizational policies during an apparent giant alien robot attack. The actual problem with that course of events is that the Nautilus didn't carry nuclear missiles. But does that matter, really? Not a whole lot. There were other options available around the time the movie is set, including missiles launched from other subs. It was also a cool part that worked as a setup to another cool part, and that counts for a lot.
for ages the military was so terrified of losing the war that people in congress were growing increasingly paranoid someone like Mansley would trigger nuclear armageddon. So measures were put in place, primarily a 4 digit passcode that you'd have to solve to fire the missiles alongside everything else.
the military hated this idea and set every single pass code to 0000 so that if the commies fired their rockets we could kill them.
frankly its surprising we survived those years at all.
Reminder that up until that point, Mansley did nothing wrong
Friendly reminder in 1983 one of the SU satellite detection systems malfunctioned and announced a false alarm and the commander refused to tell his superiors since he was suspicious why'd the Americans start attacking now and knowing full well if he did they wouldn't even think twice about immediately using nukes back.
WHERE'S THE GIANT MANSLEY?!
Mansley was right though.
Well gee wizz user, I guess they just didn't expect some full grown autist, that's apparently never even seen the movie, complain about some trivial detail their 10 yr old target audience wouldn't think of or give a shit about almost 20 years later on some random anonymous posting board. Who'd have thunk it, right?
Kent Mansley was acting alone in that scene. The beauty of Iron Giant is that the character shamed himself by launching a nuke and ruined his career by undermining a respected military general. I'm pretty sure the military general pretty much chewed him out for wasting taxpayer money on a wild goose chase for a harmless robot.
Lol I don't think that user was talking about Iron Giant, I think he was talking about the trope of, "We're gonna nuke the city", ala Avengers.
I'm pretty sure what Mansley did did more than just ruined his career. He's getting prison at the very least.
What are the chances of Mansley getting the death penalty? He pretty much-committed treason and an act of terrorism by launching a nuke at a small town in Maine.
In the 50s?
Seems pretty damn likely, though of course the movie itself wouldn't spend any time on that.
Insubordination carries the death penalty even in modern day. So likely.
You get told to do something in the army, you do it, or they lock you up for life _at best._ They can sentence you to death in a military court Marshall. The only exception is when they give you unlawful orders.
This
Getting to the point of having the go authority is the big thing and was doubtless handled off screen. Worse yet they were specifically waiting till they pulled the giant into a given position so even if things had gone as planned they were specifically waiting for the General to give the word to fire and would need to do so imidiately since the success of the whole operation hinged on fireing at the right time. There's a point at which you can't protect against human error, especially since things escalated so quickly that the flag officer had been literally shooting at the enemy with his sidearm ten minutes prior.
Also if they didn't have a sub launch missile the battleships also likely had MK23 Nuclear shells on them. If Hogarth didn't make the Giant miss when he shot at one of them I'd imagine the other one would have loaded those up next as well. So even without the Submarine Launch missile they still would have had Nukes. Just not ones that go up first so the Giant can save the town.
We're also talking about 1950s nuclear weapons, mighty, yes. But vastly inferior to the ones we think about these days. It'd level Rockport, but depending on wind direction even the battleships in the harbor and their crews could probably survive.
I think Mansley was actually a civilian contractor rather than a member of any of the armed services so he'd probably be tried in a civilian court. Even so he'd still end up facing a lot of prison time at the very least, though the death penalty is certainly not something we can rule out.
WHERE'S THE MANSLEY GIANT?
If you use nukemap, set to 20 kilotons (average for the time), and center the burst on Rockland, ME (the town in the movie doesn't actually exist but there's a host of other seaside towns that could fit the bill) the initiation is powerful enough to level the town and the 1psi air blast radius would shatter the windows on the battleships, but the towns about three or four clicks away would survive unscathed.
Which is total bullshit because Truman and Eisenhower are the last people on earth to give that level of authority away. They would want to make the determination themselves.
IT
ATE
MY CAR
BIG things happen in BIG cities
big if true
Sure he did, just look at him.
It's a kids movie, user, you have to have some suspension of disbelief, and I doubt something as trivial as this breaks that.
>wasting taxpayer money on a wild goose chase for priceless and dangerous alien tech, that ate an electric powerplant earlier.
Mansley did many things wrong, but the investigation isn't one of them.
The 50s were pretty cavalier with their nukes, honestly. Fear of nuclear annihilation is more an 80's thing
50s didn't give a shit
It's a giant killer robot from outer space. Not exactly an standard emergency.
Who's going to believe Mansley that a giant robot from outer space ate an electric power plant?
You mean the giant robot from outer space currently lobbing plasmoids at US battleships?
OP utterly btfo
Some user brought up an interesting point about if the Giant had not turned good Mansley calling down a nuke on himself to kill the monster would be an act of valor
just food for thought
Well Mansley's motive for doing everything was hardly heroic. He wasn't out to protect his country, he was out to rise the ranks and get power and prestige. And then his acts at the end of the movie were out of cowardice, not heroism.
So yeah, until the end, Mansley technically did nothing wrong. But his reasons for doing what he did were not altruistic.
I know issuing an alert is a very different thing from actually firing a missile, but my point is this is the same government we’re talking about here.
Well sure because we can assume that he did what he w=had to do to save people, sacrifice the few for the many and what not. But the entire point of the film was that Mansely was a paranoid xenophobe that would've gone to use the extreme from the very start.
Evidently the employee seriously believed a nuclear missile was heading toward Hawaii.
Someone lost their virginity to their sister because of this, something good came out of it
Some guys have all the luck
By '57 we had hydrogen bombs in the multimegaton range that were bigger than anything the US has today. IIRC Castle Bravo was in 1954.
Granted, they probably wouldn't have fired anything near that size at the IG unless it survived a smaller blast first. And, as I think another user pointed out already, the Polaris missile didn't actually go into service until 1960 so in """reality""" it would have been an airdrop anyways.
If he wouldn't have overreacted he would have gotten a promotion, since he actually found out something very fucking important to know.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if the government let him go entirely to try and sweep the whole 'we launched a nuclear missile at a US town' thing under the rug.
Granted, it was basically fault in the first place, but the US government doesn't exactly cone out looking great either.
Was that his last wish or hers?
Dude the army is very loose with nukes, hell they once left 4 nukes unattended on a random runway because the paperwork got mixed up and they were accidentally labeled as toiletries...
We are actually insanely lucky we haven't had an accidental nuclear incident.
Yeah the giant alien robot isn’t that crazy once you consider it’s just an extremely advanced alien super weapon built by who knows what
Fuck we are really lucky that the earth isn’t a nuclear wasteland
Reminder that General MacArthur wanted to end the Korean war basically by glassing most of North Korea and China. When Truman fired him over it, the public actually sided against him for it. Hell, a lot of generals and higher ups in the military from the fifties right up until the eighties were outright indignant that the president had any say at all in the use of nuclear weapons, believing that civilian leaders shouldn't have the final word on military matters.
Friendly addendum that ths false alarm was caused by sunlight reclecting off clouds.
I know the missile used in the film was modeled on the Polaris but IRL it would probably have been a Regulus I, which could carry in the 40-50 kiloton range (or 1-2 megaton but the likelihood of them launching a weapon that size on American soil is very low)
However the damage wouldn't be THAT much greater even with a 50kt warhead. The town (again using Rockland, ME as a model) would still be destroyed, and the windows in the neighboring towns would be blown out by the air blast, but the thermal radiation radius wouldn't be that much larger and the battleships still theoretically could survive
I don't think I will ever be able to truly wrap my head around the way 1950s Americans treated the atom bomb as just another problem to be overcome with a clean haircut and a can-do attitude. I get that every non-black person in that era thought they were living in a Norman Rockwell painting but that level of casual is from another planet.
Seriously, this is what the government was telling people a nuclear war would look like:
>multiple nuclear detonations in town
>"Ha ha, your dad is sure going to be busy at work!"
So what did Kent get charged for? Insubordination and deserting his post?
A few thousand counts of reckless endangerment?
Watch The Atomic Cafe sometime; it's a documentary about attitudes to the bomb in the United States in the '40s through the '60s that uses a lot of old newsreel footage.
Just bear in mind that this was brand-spanking new military tech at the time. Modern sensibilities regarding nukes are the direct end-result of 70+ years of the bomb being ingrained in public consciousness, with all the negative experiences involved. At the time it was just a new type of weapon that the public had to be prepared for. It wasn't really until the sixties where real-life incidents like the Bay of Pigs nearly brought the world to nuclear war that America began to collectively snap out of it.
That and 'Trinity and Beyond' are both ones I've been meaning to get around to.
It's interesting, I was recently reading an opinion piece thay was fairly critical of 'Atomic Cafe' for being overly political and misrepresenting (in their opinion) the level of threat from nuclear warfare. In particular the author felt that is was misleading and dangerous that they mocked Duck and Cover as being pretty much useless when in fact in can greatly increase survivability in certain circumstances. I know in the UK there has been similar criticism of stuff like 'When the Wind Blows' which was in turn a criticism of Britain's 'Protect and Survive' program.
That's a fair point. I was born the same year the Soviet Union collapsed so for me and even for my parents the idea of nuclear weapons being something 'new' is an alien concept.
This is the iron Giant right.
I need to watch that someday.
Hers iirc.
Someone post it, I promise to save it this time
We're all missing the important thing here.
I am Superman.
The Iron Vin Diesel was really fucking durable to survive a direct hit with a nuclear weapon. It would have been one thing to reassemble itself if it had just been blown apart by the shockwave, but that thing somehow survived the ten thousand degree atomic fireball as well.
Those aliens make good shit.
>drugging a child
>stalking a child
>taking a shit all across town
>nothing wrong
Here you go user.
So what would've happened if the Iron Giant hadnt gotten that dent in his head?
Iron giant 2 where Iron giant 1 fights the army of Iron giants when?
This is not like my Japanese animes.
can I find the rest of this thread?
Considering that he was eating metal, he was probably building up energy to go on a planet-destroying rampage.
I'd rather see him fight the Space Bat-Angel-Dragon from the book.
Sorry I can't help you; I got it from another thread somewhere else.
thats a tiny dick
Did some digging and found the thing.
Enjoy the trainwreck.
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Mansley was a creepy McCarthy fuck. The whole movie reeked of anti-gun movement. The only thing I didn't hate was the inspiration to change who you've been; which the giant probably wouldn't have without amnesia.
Watch the deleted scene. He's a monster.
Theres a book?
Yeah, it's original title was The Iron Man. It even has a rock opera based on it by Pete Townshend.
He's a big robot
But not for Slavs.
>The whole movie reeked of anti-gun movement.
I thought he was CIA
...
I mean the movie was very anti-gun. Appparently Brad Bird did it because his sister was killed a gunpoint like a few years earlier.
That seems like a really unprofessional way to organize the alert systems. It's like having a jar full of rat poison next to a jar full of aspirin in your medicine cabinet.
>General MacArthur wanted to end the Korean war basically by glassing most of North Korea and China
We'd probably be better off today if he did
not for him