Essential computer part manufactured by Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) in A View to a Kill, and the key to the film’s plot. British intelligence fears that the magnetic pulse damage caused by a nuclear bomb exploded in space by the Russians could render all microchips useless. That’s why they’re so interested in a chip retrieved by Bond (Roger Moore) from the body of 003, who stole it from the Russians in Siberia—it’s impervious to micropulse damage.

Reasoning that Max Zorin might be supplying this new generation of chips to the Russians, M (Robert Brown) orders Bond to look into Zorin’s activities. Later, in France, Bond and fellow agent Sir Godfrey Tibbett (Patrick Macnee) discover that Zorin has been using a surgically implanted microchip to covertly inject his horses with steroids. However, like Goldfinger’s gold smuggling activities in the third James Bond film, Zorin’s microchip antics with the Russians and his horses are just the tip of the iceberg. His real scheme is bigger: Project Main Strike.

In order to monopolize the world’s supply of microchips, Zorin plans to utterly destroy Silicon Valley, where 80 percent of the planet’s microchips are manufactured. His nefarious plan calls for using his oil wells on the California coast to pump seawater into the Hayward Fault, a major earthquake zone. Simultaneously, he’s going to explode a bomb near the San Andreas Fault. The resulting double earthquake will turn Silicon Valley into a huge lake.

Like the “hoods convention” in Goldfinger, Zorin calls together a group of the world’s microchip manufacturers and offers them an opportunity to join his new microchip cartel. The price: $100 million a franchise. One Taiwanese tycoon (Anthony Chin) becomes another Mr. Solo from Goldfinger when he declines. Instead of being crushed inside a Lincoln Continental, the tycoon is tossed out the exit door by May Day (Grace Jones). This exit, though, is in Zorin’s blimp—five thousand feet up.