Damnation Alley is a fun sci-fi, post-apocalypse movie, but

DAMNATION ALLEY is a fun and entertaining science fiction, post-apocalypse, post-nuclear war movie, if you don't mind some scientific inconsistencies.

The Mad Max social theme is there, too. Decent human beings struggle to maintain their humanity and dignity. Other humans opt for a descent into a savage predatory existence. The resulting conflicts are metaphors for good versus evil.

1) The guard post shack is inconceivable just yards away from the main buildings leading down into the missile silo headquarters and control room. On a real U.S. Air Force missile silo base, the front gate access shack might be miles away.

2) Only a year after the nuclear war, mutant bugs like giant desert scorpians and carnivorous armored cockroaches stalk the landscape. Such mutations would take far longer to emerge in Nature.

3) Giant scorpians depicted in the desert are a biological impossibility. Due
to the weight of the massive exoskeleton, the giant scorpian would be immobile. Scorpians originated in the oceans during the prehistoric Cambrian Period where these creatures reached nine feet in length, largely because of the buoyancy of the salt water allowed greater size.

4) There is no evidence that a nuclear war would have enough force to tilt the earth further on its axis or upset its magnetic poles, or such. The nuclear explosions are scattered around the globe and are not coordinated to explode at the same time. You would have to coordinate a large number of nuclear explosions at key spots on the globe to have any hope of altering the planet's position. There would however, be the 'nuclear winter' much discussed and feared. All the debris, dust, and smoke thrown up far into the stratosphere would block out the sun and cause cool temperatures for the next two years at least.

5) Is the United States Air Forces' fire prevention measures that incredibly inadequate inside a missile silo complex so that a dropped, lighted cigarette onto a Playboy magazine can start such a massive conflagration to destroy the entire underground missile silo headuarters complex? Doubtful. To destroy the entire underground missile headquarters, control, barracks and logistics complex from within would have to result from massive sabotage. There's a lot of failsafes and safety measures and fire prevention measures the military would take inside a place like that. And no, I've never been in a missile silo but I've seen military installations before and there are strict measures to prevent fires, explosions, theft, sabotage, et al. By the nature of its business, the military has to be far more cautious.