Slim Pickens Does the Right Thing and He Rides The Bomb to Hell
Poor Slim.
shareWell ... he did the right thing, the wrong thing, the good thing and the bad thing - all together, which gives this film its ironic, satiric edge.
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MovieChat Forums > Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) Discussion > Slim Pickens Does the Right Thing and He...
I don't know if he intended to be dropped along with the bomb since he was trying to fix the doors, but he certainly didn't seem unhappy about doing his duty.
That's why it's one of the best scenes in the movie. Slim's plane was the one that the U.S. and the Soviets weren't able to stop which subsequently caused the end of the world, yet Slim and his crew were the only ones doing their jobs the way they were supposed to, unlike all the leadership depicted in the film.
Can't be too careful with all those weirdos running around.
Just drop the weapon through the closed doors, they are mostly sheet metal and will give easily under the weight of a H-bomb.
Such a thing has happened before by accident.
Chuck Hansen, “The Swords of Armageddon,” (1995, 2007) Version 2, Volume VII, p.242.
May 22, 1957 / B-36 / Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, New Mexico
The aircraft was ferrying an unarmed MK 17 weapon and its nuclear capsule from Biggs AFB, near El Paso, Texas, to Kirtland AFB. At 11:50 AM MST, while approaching Kirtland at an altitude of 1,700 feet, the weapon was accidentally dropped from the aircraft, taking the bomb bay doors with it. The release mechanism locking pin was being removed at the time of release. It was standard procedure at that time to remove the locking pin during takeoff and landing to permit emergency jettison of the weapon, if necessary.
Weapon parachutes were partially deployed but did not fully retard the fall of the bomb because of the low altitude. The bomb fell onto land owned by the University of New Mexico, approximately 4.5 miles south of the Kirtland AFB control tower and 0.3 miles west of the AEC's Sandia Reservation. HE in the bomb's primary detonated when the massive secondary slid forward on weapon impact, completely destroying the bomb and making a crater approximately 25 feet in diameter and 12 feet deep, and raising a cloud of dust and smoke 1,500 feet high. Debris consisting of case sections was scattered over the surrounding mesa up to a mile from the impact point.
Recovery and cleanup were conducted by Field Command, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (FCAFSWP). The weapon's secondary was recovered essentially intact after being found buried just beneath the floor of the crater, its lower half embedded in hardpan. Radiological survey at the of the area disclosed no radioactivity beyond the lip of the crater at which point the level was 0.5 milliroentgens. There were no health or safety problems. The nuclear capsule was recovered from the aircraft.
"I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it." - Groucho Marx share
In toe to toe nuclear combat with the Rooskies, a man's got to do what he has to do.
He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator.
Well, we don't know that Major Kong went to Hell; all we do know is, he quickly assessed the situation and decided that, since he couldn't do anything about it, he might as well go out with a bang - in a way that no other man has done before.
If you think about it, he got the best end of the deal - an exciting, unique, painless death; his crew, however, probably made it to Weathership Tango, ditched, and were picked up; a bit later, they had to have been told the news - that their bombing set off the Doomsday Machine, and almost everyone in the world was going to die a painful death of radiation poisoning (after all the riots on who gets to go underground into the mineshafts, etc).
I doubt they would be chosen to go down, and in fact, they may have felt so terrible (even thought it really wasn't their fault as there was no way they could have known) that they just shot themselves (still better than the agonizing deaths that awaited the vast majority of the human race).