I never understood this movie

This may be the first James Bond 007 movie of all of them and is seen as a template of how the series should be, but I couldn't understand a few things:

1. Why is Bond introduced to the villain just 20 minutes before the end of the movie? In later Bond movies, they meet earlier, some movies MUCH earlier.

2. Why bother with the lame dragon disguise for the tracked vehicle with the flamethrower? I would think someone sooner or later would see it for what it is, not be superstitious like the rest of the locals.

3. Why were Bond and the girl treated so nicely by the Asian women tending to their needs when they were in the villain's lair after they were captured? And why would one of them help Bond when the girl was chained up, ready to be drowned in that pool?

4. What was the point of the nuclear reactor? I heard something about "toppling" American missiles for some reason, but it seemed silly that when the reactor was "ready to fire", a small satellite dish appeared - was THAT the weapon? How could radioactivity result in a radio beam that knocks over missiles? It honestly sounds to me that if Ian Fleming wrote this, he had no idea about such things, and was making up pure fantasy based on sci-fi pulp novels of the 1950s, when such things mostly don't belong in Bond at all.