My first thought was of the Szilard Petition, the attempt by some of the Manhattan Project scientists to first demonstrate the bomb to the Japanese high command and scare them into surrender before using the bomb against a civilian population. It was headed by Leo Szilard, the first person to come up with the idea of the nuclear chain reaction, and incidentally the man who drove Einstein to his meeting with Roosevelt which eventually lead to the Manhattan Project. After the Nazis were defeated, there was no longer the fear that the Germans would have the weapon first – instead, General Groves just wanted an excuse to whip out the weapon.

My second thought was, “Hey, maybe scientists should have taken control over the nuclear arsenal” – most of the top dogs on the Manhattan Project declined to take part in developing hydrogen weapons.

So Stark’s refusal to hand over the Iron Man at the beginning of the movie makes sense as his own version of Szilard’s Petition – he’s seen what the military’s done with his weapons, and he doesn’t want to be part of that. But the events of the movie prove to him – and to us – that he can’t handle this entire burden of responsibility that he’s assumed. So he lets Rhodey take a suit. Which means that the military has the suit after all. But at least it’s being held by General Eisenhower instead of General Groves.

Having some personal experience working with a lot of Russian scientists who emigrated in the mid 90s, I actually think the movie’s depiction of Russia isn’t as silly as you might think. Moscow and St Petersburg are both very nice places now, being the center of most of Russian life currently, but the rest of the country suffers from a lot of Post Communism Syndrome… most towns are built around a single bloated, inefficient industry, and the economy is held up by oil/metal exports. Russian science is in poor straights too, since all the professional people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s left for the West as soon as they could. So all thats left are students and very old scientists in their 70s. This is just the sort of environment, with lots of loose high tech equipment from failed businesses, an aging scientific establishment that would not grasp or fund ideas, and a fairly corrupt political culture, that could lead to someone like Vanko.

But yeah, strategic wonkers noticed pretty quickly after the dawn of the nuclear age that nukes wouldn’t make conflict impossible as Nobel had hoped, but would just make unconventional warfare proliferate. This is exactly what has since happened and we can be said to be well into the post-nuclear age.

The whole US v. Russia/nuclear thing is so 20th century. Add to that the absurd cliches of Russian life depicted in the 1st act and the whole show seemed dated and irrelevant. The Gates/Jobs/Hammer/Stark thing just seemed like a pathetic attempt to be current.

For some real juicy updating of Iron Man check out Matt Fraction’s work on the comic series. Stane’s son builds an open-source repulsor suit out of Stark tech scavenged on the black market. Corporate dinosaur Stark has to take on lithe nimble startup Stane Jr. Good stuff.

To make the argument that Iron Man represents a transition to a new age, you’d probably need to focus on the arc reactor technology and it’s strategic use, instead of powered battle suits.

A more-compelling stinger along these lines may have been to show packages from Vanko containing small arc reactors and detailed plans being posthumously delivered to all the “bad guys” (Iran, North Korea, etc.) referenced at the beginning.

One thing that I forgot to work into this piece is the concept of a singularity, a moment when culture has changed so much that the world and its technology become incomprehensible to people who came before. It seems that in Iron Man 2, Tony Stark is that singularity. Both in terms of the technology and the fact that he’s the first public superhero, he seems to have completely changed the game.

The example at http://io9.com/5534848/what-is-the-singularity-and-will-you-live-to-see-it is “imagine explaining the internet to somebody living in the year 1200. Your frames of reference would be so different that it would be almost impossible to convey how the internet works, let alone what it means to our society.”

Frankly, I don’t believe that a singularity can exist. The men who smelted bronze would have understood iron. My grandfather grew up in a town without electricity, but understood the internet before he passed. His frame of reference wouldn’t have been too different than that of his mother, which wasn’t that different from that of her mother, etc…

The technology may change quickly, but human evolution is a slow process. We interact with the internet through sight, sound, touch, and, soon god willing, smell and taste. We created language to be able to convey and transmit the things we see, hear, feel and smell. We did a good job of it, and there’s nothing that does or can appeal to one of those senses that can’t be conveyed in speech.

Still, an interesting concept. Thoughts?