The entire James Bond franchise is available on Amazon Prime Video, and I recently re-watched Dr. No. One of the few benefits of having a poor memory is one can enjoy a spoiler free existence. I think I have said this before - in another podcast. I am not sure.
As soon as the Caribbean fixer Quarrel mentions the presence of a 'dragon' on Crab Key - Dr. No's lair/island; I knew there was going to be a nuclear angle to the story.
Dragons as a metaphor for nuclear threats is tempting. The folks at "Bulletin for Atomic Scientists" - the non-profit that maintains the famous doomsday clock - published an article in 2019 comparing Daenerys Targaryen's dragons from Game of Thrones to nuclear weapons. The analogy does not work completely as several nations have nuclear capabilities, while in the GoT universe only one party has dragons.
I encountered dragons in the nuclear context again in Derek Muller documentary ' Uranium -- Twisting the Dragon's Tail'. In the last section, Derek talks about a creation spirit in Australian mythology that sleeps underground and must not be disturbed. Derek draws a connection between the presence of large Uranium and Thorium reserves in Australia and this myth. As I said - the metaphor is very tempting.
Any ways as it turns out, the dragon in Dr. No is only a large truck like vehicle with an attachment on the front that spews flames. All created by the evil Dr. No to keep people off the island. James Bond somehow saves the day again.
Nuclear threats in the James Bond stories are also not new. Almost a quarter of all the films have some sort of nuclear threat. The Ian Fleming stories don't have as many nuclear plotlines. It is very easy to draw conclusions about Cold-war era anxieties and nuclear threats in plotline, but as my totally overkill chart below shows, this is not true.
James Bond - Nuclear Threat Analysis
Anyways, Dr. No is surprisingly watchable, Sean Connery is cooler than I thought possible. They don't make films like these anymore - which ultimately is a good thing I guess.
Images:
Rob Bogaerts / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons
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