Headscratchers / Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

• If Superman is willing to disarm the world's nukes, why would he have a problem wrecking all conventional weapons to prevent a non-nuclear war?
  • For one, it would be a lot harder to do, since there are a lot more of them and they are much easier to make. Plus, a nuclear weapon is far, far more destructive than any conventional one.
• How is catching missiles mid-flight and throwing them into the sun going to get rid of all the world's weapons? Are they launching them just for Superman to catch?
  • That seems to be the idea, yes. Remember, both the US and the USSR seem pretty happy with Superman's plan, bar a few rogue generals.
• If the Daily Planet really was a loss-making concern such that Warfield saw fit to turn it from a 'quality' newspaper to a down-market tabloid, how is it in the banks' interest to invest in order to return it to the way it was before? Good PR?

• Clark and the landowner come across a crib with a hole through it, which according to the landowner was baby Clark's. When the Kents found Clark in the first film he didn't look like the age kids sleep in cribs.
  • Note that it is the landowner saying that it's Clark's childhood crib, not Clark himself. It is possible, if not likely, that Ma and Pa Kent, in order to keep up the ruse that Clark was their child, bought or made up some baby furniture in order to keep up the pretense that Clark was their natural-born child, and that the landowner merely assumed it was Clark's.

• Why does Nuclear Man talk in an echoey version of Lex Luthor's voice? If anything, shouldn't he talk in Superman's voice, since he's created from his DNA?
  • I think it was stated somewhere that Lex also used some of his own DNA.

• How does Lex cut a strand of Superman's hair with just a pair of wirecutters? It's clearly stronger than wire.
  • Evidently not because the hair strand could only hold up 1,000 lbs, while a good pair of wire cutters can apply 4-5 times that. That's how Lex cut the strand. Superman himself may be durable to an insane degree, but his severed hair evidently is much less durable than he is. Even Superman can be harmed if he is subjected to enough physical force, and like Superman, even the hair has some limit and can break if you apply enough force, which Lex did with the wire cutters.

• Why do we see the army launch a nuclear missile after Superman supposedly got rid of all of them? We do see Superman grab it and throw it into the sun (which ends up bringing Nuclear Man to life), but why wouldn't they have launched it earlier when Superman was catching all the nukes in the giant net?