This essay contains spoilers for the film A House of Dynamite.
In the opening minutes of Kathryn Bigalow's latest film, A House of Dynamite, the unthinkable happens — a single nuclear warhead is lobbed from somewhere in the Pacific towards the U.S. mainland. America's leadership has less than half an hour to decide whether to order a massive nuclear counterstrike.
What follows is a story told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and bureaucrats in charge of the nation's nuclear war machine. It unfolds in near real time, and provides an unflinching look at the decisions that would need to be made if such a strike ever occurred.
Very few Americans think about nuclear war these days, but the small cadre of experts who do have split views about A House of Dynamite. Here's a taste of what they felt it got right, and wrong.
The nuclear attack was (probably) not the most realistic
As the film opens, it appears to be a relatively normal day. The nation's state of nuclear readiness, otherwise known as its defense readiness condition or "DEFCON", appears to be set to "4", just one notch above its lowest level. Then, seemingly out of nowhere the missile appears on screens, headed towards the central U.S.
Hollywood loves to depict nuclear wars as starting with a bolt from the blue. But many experts think nuclear war is more likely to escalate out of a conventional conflict or during a time of heightened tensions between nuclear powers.
"The real dangers of nuclear war mainly have to do with escalation from some non-nuclear crisis that evolves to armed conflict," said Matthew Bunn, who studies nuclear issues at the Harvard Kennedy School. Moreover, Bunn added, a surprise attack, if it did happen, would likely involve multiple warheads and be designed to blunt the United States' ability to launch a nuclear counterattack: "No one in their right mind is going to fire ONE missile at a major U.S. city out of a clear blue sky."
The depiction of the America's missile defenses isn't perfect
As the warhead flies towards its target, America's missile defenses swing into action. As it happens, the missile's trajectory makes it a good candidate for interception by the nation's Ground-based Midcourse Defense system at Fort Greely, Alaska.
Fort Greely fires two interceptors at the missile. The first one fails and the second one misses, much to the consternation of those soldiers operating the system and the officials who paid for it.
The failure of interceptors has happened before, said Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar of global security at Middlebury College who studies missile defenses. And just one interceptor has a slightly better than 50/50 chance of hitting, making the scenario plausible.
But Lewis said he thinks current rules call for launching at least four, rather than two, interceptor missiles at a threat. That would considerably increase the odds. "I do think the system in Alaska — if all it had to do was hit one lonely missile fired all by itself — I think they have a good chance of that," he said.
Lewis added that there are many scenarios where missile defense would likely fail. Existing missiles can carry multiple warheads or decoys, and many nuclear powers are developing new weapons that could evade defenses.
"The real problem is not when you're defending against one or two, it's when you're trying to defend against a hundred or a thousand," he said. Today's missile defense system wouldn't work, and even a vastly expanded system, like President Trump's proposed Golden Dome, could likely be overwhelmed.
The doomsday Zoom call is real
The bulk of the movie revolves around a video conference between military officials, the president (played by Idris Elba), and the secretary of defense (played by Jared Harris). That call is all too real, according to Stephen Schwartz, an independent scholar who has extensively researched the history of America's nuclear command systems.
If a missile is detected, then "the National Military Command Center (NMCC) convenes a Threat Assessment Conference Call with multiple lower level duty officers," Schwartz said. "If the threat is validated, it becomes a Missile Attack Conference Call joined by more senior officials (and the president, if a senior conferee requests it)."
The different rooms from which the calls are made were "scarily authentic," said Rose Gottemoeller, a professor at Stanford University who served as the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016-2019 and previously oversaw arms control at the State Department. "The situation room at the White House, for example, was absolutely pitch perfect," she said. The same goes for the movie's depiction of the deep underground command site at U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb.
Schwartz also praised the representation of the president's options for nuclear retaliation, which are carried by a military officer in a brown satchel, known as the "football." It really does travel with the president everywhere he goes, as a reminder that the U.S. could retaliate against a nuclear strike at any time.
"The 'Football' looked exactly as it should and that the Presidential Decision Handbook [which lists the pre-set options for a nuclear strike] was a reasonable-looking facsimile," he said.
Those on the conference call would likely face very human dilemmas, and that might lead them to deviate from the rules, added Erin Dumbacher, an expert in nuclear policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. "You see them at some point in time break the rules and bring their cell phones into the classified area because they have real families and real personal lives … that's also very real."
The president would have a choice the film never discusses
As the clock ticks down, the U.S. president faces an impossible decision about how to respond to what looks like it will be a direct nuclear blow to Chicago. His aide carrying the football (Jonah Hauer-King), recommends a forceful counterstrike — the "well done" option, as he describes it.
But in fact, the president would probably be advised to ride out the attack, Lewis said. U.S. forces are capable of launching their missiles "on warning" before an attacker's missiles arrive, but the country's nuclear doctrine actually emphasizes what's known as a "second strike" capability. That would allow it to strike back even if it were hit with a nuclear attack much larger than the one in the movie. Moreover, in the film, the U.S. is unsure who fired the warhead, so is no clear adversary to hit back at.
"It made no sense to me," Lewis said.
In a real-world scenario, it is more likely the president and his commanders would wait to see what happened to Chicago. (One possibility raised by several experts NPR spoke to was that the entire launch was a false alarm or spoofed as part of a cyberattack.)
If a weapon did detonate over Chicago, "it won't be very long before the national labs and the intelligence community can attribute the [nuclear] material to a particular country," Lewis said. Then the president could make a more considered decision about how to respond.
The timing of the movie could not be better
While experts quipped over some of the details, they agreed that the world needs to be thinking more about the possibility of nuclear war. China, Russia and the United States are expanding and upgrading their arsenals with new weapons and more of them. And early next year, the last surviving arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia will expire.
The film lays bare the tensions and paradoxes of nuclear deterrence, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, which advocates for nuclear arms control. "A House of Dynamite should lead us all to consider: 'what can we do now, what must change, to avoid the many different scenarios that could lead us down the road to a nuclear war?'"
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