Mistakes and unrealistic things about Jericho

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My biggest beef.. looking past the obvious lack of firepire on the nuke side (the us infrastructure would still remain.. for sure) is the filming location and their sorry SORRY attempt at winter when it comes around. The endless montage of scenes with mountains and steep hilly areas is pretty silly... and the winter eps are just ridiculous.

The biggest question I had was about planes. They talked about Jake learning to fly on a crop-duster. With all those farms wouldn't there be a crop-duster or other plane somewhere near them that a pilot could use to scout out the area? Could have been a good episode having Jake flying around and getting shot down.

"if the rain from the fallout was really radioactive, so must have been the crops, the earth and everything else the rain came into contact with. The rain of course must not have been (highly) radioactive because Stanley survived beeing exposed for about 20 minutes. But IF IT WAS, all plants, crops, the top layer of earth and clay and, in the worst case, even the ground water would have been polluted.
This is not that bad, as you can just wash the dirt away from the buildings (with radioactive water :D) and carry of the polluted earth. They just should not eat the crops. Oh well..."

Actually, they studied fallout a lot before they banned atmospheric tests, and fallout where rain falls is strange. Some areas will get heavily radioactive rain while others will get harmless rain. Rain falling through fallout tends to sort of "clean" the fallout, concentrating it in some places and removing it from others.

The fact that the EMP burst was never explained was one of the most annoying loose ends of the whole series, for me. I didn't care in the first season, because it just added to the overall mystery, but in the second season, when everything was revealed, they just left out that part of the story. To cause EMP disruption on that scale, you need a missile that can get a (very large - more than 20 kt certainly) warhead into space, so if the terrorists were shuttling their bombs in trucks, it implies that they didn't have any ICBMs stashed somewhere. Also, if an EMP was part of the attack plan, why wait until several days after the attack on the cities?

It seems there are only two semi-plausible explanations. The first is that the rogue elements within the U.S. government working with J&R somehow launched the missile. However, since only the President has the power (and the codes) to order the use of nuclear weapons, and the President at the exact moment of the EMP was preparing to go on live TV, it seems doubtful that he was responsible. It is theoretically possible, especially given the destruction of Washington D.C., that someone managed to bypass the President's authority, but even then, Russia, China, the UK, etc. - all the nations which have satellite monitoring - would have seen that the missile was launched from the U.S. itself. You would think that they would have informed the American government: "Hey guys, do you realize that your electrical grid was just fried by one of your own missiles?" This would have tipped off the surviving U.S. government in the East that there were traitors in their midst, which they clearly didn't know until the end of season 2.

The second possibility is that another nuclear power detonated the EMP, perhaps trying to prevent the American counterstrike on North Korea and Iran. Iran has no nukes yet and although North Korea has a few, they have no missiles capable of reaching the U.S. So it would have been Russia or China, most likely. This still seems rather implausible, since it would mean that Russia or China were risking sparking a nuclear conflict with the U.S. for the sake of other nations - a bit too altruistic, methinks.

In the end, I guess we just have to remember: it's just a TV show.

As far as the candles go, I seem to remember a scene in one episode where people are shown making candles, but I could be wrong. I guess it would give everyone something to do now that they can't watch TV. :^)

A very entertaining show but it is extremely unrealistic and riddled with plot holes.
I'd like to see a show with the same premise but with a lot of effort put into realism.

The atomic bomb that exploded 580 meters above Hiroshima was powered by the splitting of 855 grams of uranium. The energy released was equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT.
The splitting of uranium nuclei generated both initial radiation (gamma rays and neutrons) and residual radiation. The neutron radiation lasted a brief instant. The initial gamma rays remained at a dangerous levels for approximately 20 seconds.

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