This Film Scared Me - And I’ve Been Studying Nukes For 15 Years
It's time to start talking about nukes again.
Spoilers for the Netflix film “A House of Dynamite” follow. If you haven’t watched the film, please do and come back here!
Netflix’s newest thriller A House of Dynamite opens with the nightmare policymakers pretend is impossible: a single nuclear missile arcing toward the United States with less than thirty minutes to impact.
Cue the blinking DEFCON boards, the red phones, the rush into bunkers, and the dawning realization that someone’s worst decision is about to be immortalized in history books no one will live to read.
The film is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, (because apparently Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker weren’t stressful enough for her), and it drops us straight into the White House Situation Room as generals and suits argue over whether to fire back before their own shadow appears on a blast cloud over Chicago.
It plays out in real time, and every tick of the clock feels like a countdown to irreversibility.
When I booted up Netflix last night to screen this film, I was happy to see it listed as the #1 trending movie in the United States.
Why was I happy? Well… Americans don’t think about nuclear war anymore.
I came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a perfect contrast between acknowledging the possibility of nuclear war in the 1980s to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
For a single, brief decade between the birth of the Russian Federation in 1991 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States and its allies could breathe a little easier.
When you stack that relatively peaceful decade of the 1990s on top of twenty years of counterinsurgencies, fought in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, you can understand why the nuclear war conversation has slipped out of the public’s collective consciousness.
But here’s the thing… The nukes never went away. Theirs were still pointed at us and ours at them. Adversaries like China produced more, North Korea became far more dangerous, and Russia’s control of its nukes no doubt suffers from the same corruption that has hollowed out its conventional military. This actually makes the odds of an accidental Russian launch more likely, in my humble opinion.
Fast forward to today, and Americans are too busy trying to buy groceries and healthcare without declaring bankruptcy to worry about nukes. We’re descending into authoritarianism faster than Germany did in the 1930s and the President of the United States has hollowed out the very federal workforce that will help manage the emergency in the event of a nuclear launch.
So, yes, I believe everyone should watch this movie.
I want you to be scared, like me. Because fear leads to action.
The 1983 television movie “The Day After” shocked the American public so much, it’s credited with increasing public pressure that helped spur the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed in 1987.
But how realistic is “A House of Dynamite?”
In the film, a single, unattributed nuclear missile is fired from somewhere in the pacific with a trajectory pointing at Chicago.
Ah, I see what Ms. Bigelow is trying to do here. If we don’t know who fired the missile, the entire deterrence model collapses instantly.
Let me be clear here: The United States military does not have the ability to shoot down incoming missiles in volume. This might surprise some people, but the real reason we haven’t been nuked yet is simply because we will nuke whoever nuked us back.
Deterrence.
Mutually Assured Destruction.
Like two men standing waist-deep in gasoline, each holding a lit match, daring the other guy to drop his first.
Or, in the case of the movie’s title, we all live in houses that have walls stuffed with dynamite; and pretend we’re safe and secure.
But deterrence has one huge element: it assumes we know who did it. So, when the filmmakers start the film with an unattributed nuke, it instantly creates drama.
In reality, if someone fires a nuke at the US, it probably won’t come out of the blue. Nuclear war isn’t likely to begin with a single missile launched on a whim by a dictator who spilled his kimchi at lunch.
It’s more likely to grow out of a conventional clash gone sideways like escalation, miscalculation, or miscommunication. Call it a bad day that becomes humanity’s last one.
The movie’s “bolt from the blue” makes for great cinema, but real adversaries don’t give you only one warhead to worry about.
If they’re serious, they send a whole bouquet of them… Enough to blind radars, crater runways, and leave decision-makers with nothing left to decide.
In reality, the US has a multi-layered satellite system to detect nuclear launches, primarily using the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) and the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites, which use infrared sensors to detect the heat from missile plumes. The movie assumes our satellites “missed” the launch, otherwise we would presumably know who did it.
Then there’s missile defense. In the film, two US interceptors from Fort Greely, Alaska streak toward the incoming warhead, one fails, one misses.
Realistic? Unfortunately, yes. The odds of a single interceptor doing its job in the real world hover barely above coin-flip levels. And even if you fire four, (which current doctrine calls for, not two as in the movie) all an attacker has to do is put decoys or extra warheads in the mix, and homeland defense collapses under basic arithmetic.
On my best infantry days, I could hit a moving target at 300 meters. Hitting a hypersonic ICBM in space is a little tougher. As one character in the movie says: “It’s like hitting a bullet with a bullet.”
It’s a physics problem we haven’t solved yet. Once an ICBM or SLBM hit apogee, the ground-based midcourse interceptors no longer work.
The movie makes no mention of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, but THAAD is designed to hit incoming missiles in their high-speed terminal phase. They are literally the last line of defense right before the missiles hit.
By the way, the US only has eight THAAD systems.
Where the movie gets uncomfortably real is the human side of command and control. If screens flash red in the Pentagon, the US does kick off a series of secure teleconferences connecting the president, the National Military Command Center, US Strategic Command, and others who would rather be anywhere else.
And the sets in “A House of Dynamite” are eerily accurate.
The nuclear football looks like the real one: same brown or black, fake leather satchel that follows the president everywhere. It’s like a reminder from hell that we built a system designed to end civilization on ten minutes’ notice.
People tend to forget that there’s a human hand on the key (at least until we give AI control of the nukes, which I don’t recommend).
You can train, you can drill, you can write procedures in all caps and laminate them. But when leaders stare at the potential death of a city, they are not robots. Even the experts said the movie captures the tension that would push people to break protocol.
Maybe a cell phone comes out in a classified room because someone needs to text their spouse goodbye. That’s the part no simulation can prepare for.
But the movie misses a critical option the president would almost certainly consider: waiting.
The US nuclear posture is built on second-strike capability. This means we can absorb a hit and still destroy the attacker. Our nuclear triad is a three-legged stool: Silos at fixed locations in the high plains, nuclear submarines sneaking around, and stealth bombers.
Destroy the silos and we can still destroy your country with our other two options.
Launch-on-warning is possible, yes. But guessing wrong and lighting the world on fire because a radar glitched? That is the worst roll of the dice in human history.
The smarter move is to hold fire until impact confirms the threat. And even after a detonation, it doesn’t take long for nuclear forensics to reveal whose warhead just turned Chicago into glass.
Scientists from the DOE, or what’s left of it after Trump gutted it, will be able to tell exactly where the nuke came from after analyzing radioactive material in Chicago. So there is some wisdom in holding fire and not rushing to get all nukey the way one of the generals acts in the film.
I’m glad this film exists. Because right now, the world is moving back toward the abyss with alarming speed.
Angry with Western support of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Russia’s participation in the New START treaty in 2023, saying Russia could not accept US inspections of its nuclear sites.
Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, then said Moscow has suspended sharing information about its nuclear forces with the United States, including notices about missile tests.
In response, the US declared that it had stopped sharing information about its strategic nuclear stockpile with Russia.
Finally, back in 2023 Putin announced both that he was stationing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, and that Russia will be mobilizing its Yars missile launchers across the Siberian region for military drills.
This series of events amounts to an escalation in a yet-to-happen nuclear war. These tit-for-tat “announcements” are meant to rattle the other party in this grotesque game of realpolitik.
But this game has real consequences.
This lack of communication between the world’s two largest nuclear powers means that, statistically, the probability of finding ourselves in an unwinnable war just went up.
In 1983, a Soviet satellite reported that five US missiles were heading toward the Soviet Union. The Soviets prepared to launch a retaliatory nuclear attack on the US and its NATO allies and was only stopped by a single Russian officer who reasoned that if it were a real US attack, the Americans would attack with more than five missiles.
It turned out to be sunlight reflecting off of some cumulonimbus clouds that the new Russian radar misinterpreted as US nukes.
In these situations, communication is key.
The last arms control treaties are expiring. Nuclear arsenals are expanding. Hypersonic weapons rob us of precious time and cut response time to seconds.
Pyongyang is making huge progress this year in missile technology thanks to technical information sharing from Putin. Every nation with a nuclear stockpile wants to believe deterrence is stable… that no one will take the first swing.
But deterrence isn’t a forcefield. It’s a balancing act performed over a graveyard.
One misread satellite feed, one leader having a bad day, one rusty fuse in a missile silo. That’s all it takes.
I’ve stood in rooms where soldiers calmly train for the end of the world. Their job is to execute without hesitating.
Mine, today, is to make damn sure we never ask them to through writing and video.
House of Dynamite shouldn’t scare you because it’s a movie about nukes. It should scare you because it isn’t far-fetched enough.
We built these weapons to ensure a war like this never happens. What we forgot to build was a world where human stupidity isn’t always trying to make it happen anyway.
So, while Hollywood gives us a 30-minute countdown to doomsday, the real clock keeps ticking in the background.
And right now? It says 89 seconds to midnight.
We should be paying attention.
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