There’s no shortage of things that could end the world. But between climate change, risks from AI, and biological threats like pandemics, we seem to be forgetting about one human-made existential risk that has been with us for 80 years: the ever-present possibility of nuclear warfare.
But nuclear war hasn’t forgotten about us.
“Because of extraordinary luck over 80 years, despite many close calls and near-misses, there hasn’t been a detonation of nuclear weapons,” Elise Rowan, the deputy vice president of communications at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), told me over email. “Every concern that is top of mind for Americans right now…could be eclipsed by a snap decision under pressure or even an accident.”
That makes the new film A House of Dynamite the perfect movie for the moment.
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow for Netflix — out in select theaters now, and streaming on the service beginning October 24 — the film is divided into three acts that follow government workers, military officials, and finally the president himself (played by Idris Elba) in the roughly 18 minutes that pass between the detection of a nuclear missile launch over the Pacific and its arrival in Chicago.
The unthinkable
The day starts like any other. Coworkers flirt and bicker. They make small talk about sports, kids, and snacking habits. A senior officer (Rebecca Ferguson) in the White House Situation Room, which provides 24/7 intelligence updates and decision support to US national security officials, chides a colleague for waiting until that night to propose marriage to his longtime girlfriend. Everything is normal until it isn’t.
Even then, it takes minutes for the tension to mount, for the unthinkable to become thinkable. Soldiers in a remote Alaska base initially think it’s a North Korean missile test that will land harmlessly in the Pacific.
After all, a real nuclear attack would probably involve hundreds of missiles, including decoys. That’s how the Soviet air force officer Stanislov Petrov realized that the five American nuclear missiles heading toward the Soviet Union in 1983 were actually a false alarm caused by malfunctioning early-warning satellites. Petrov’s good judgment — he decided not to report the finding up the military chain, which would have led to retaliation per Soviet doctrine — is how we avoided all-out nuclear war by way of Soviet retaliation.
Someone in the film naturally mentions the Petrov case. The US launches its anti-missile defense system from that base in Alaska. It’s like hitting a bullet with a bullet, one character explains. “This is going to be the second-most exciting thing that happens today,” the senior officer in the Situation Room reassures the colleague planning to propose to his girlfriend.
But the interceptor fails to destroy the missile, which remains inbound for Chicago and its metro population of 10 million people. It’s only after the fact that top officials learn that the defense systems charged with keeping the homeland safe from just such a strike have just a 61 percent chance of success. In real life, it’s around a 55 percent success rate — and that’s under controlled conditions.
“So it’s a fucking coin toss?” the defense secretary (Jared Harris) exclaims. “That’s what $50 billion buys us?”
That’s plan A. And when it fails, there’s no plan B.
What this shows, Rowan told me, is that the nuclear defense system “demands perfection from people and machines 100 percent of the time. And that’s just not realistic.”
(Disclosure: I worked at NTI for two years on the Global Biological Policy and Programs team. I learned a lot about nuclear risks through osmosis, but my focus was on pandemic prevention, bioweapons deterrence, and biotechnology governance. I did not work on “nuclear pandemics,” as my uncle once asked me.)
Back to the movie. With the minutes ticking down, the military chief of the US Strategic Command advocates for a preemptive counterstrike, even though the US doesn’t know who fired the missile or why, and even though doing so would mean the 10 million Americans who will die in the Chicago strike will only be the first to perish.
But it almost certainly wouldn’t end there. Further retaliations could lead to the death of billions, perhaps spark nuclear winter, and potentially spell humanity’s end.
No one is in charge of the end of the world
What comes across in A House of Dynamite is that no one, in this most important moment in history, seems to be in control.
While it’s impossible not to watch the film without nauseously picturing Donald Trump, who has the sole power to order a nuclear attack as the president, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in charge, it may not make a difference.
The experts, the president, the “other side” as far as we can tell from a brief conversation with the Russian foreign minister — everyone seems basically at a loss. It’s not a matter of skill or nerve; nearly everyone does their job as best they can.
In the end, we never even learn who fired the missile. North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran are floated as possibilities. The movie doesn’t tell us if the launch was a purposeful attack or an accident, an isolated incident or part of a coordinated campaign. I don’t see my childhood home in the Chicago suburbs get vaporized. It’s even possible that the missile doesn’t detonate at all — that can happen. But even if it doesn’t destroy the Chicagoland area, causing millions of deaths, the US might still respond preemptively, leading to an all-out nuclear war all the same.
The ambiguity, while narratively frustrating, is the point. It’s not possible for us to know all of this in just the 18 minutes the intercontinental ballistic missile allows, just as it’s not possible for the president to make a meaningfully informed decision on how to respond in that time. When presented with a menu of escalating retaliation options — “rare, medium, and well-done,” someone quips darkly — the president says he’s ready to give the order. We don’t see the results.
The film highlights how our approach to nuclear risks has changed since the Cold War. Things were simpler in those “us versus them” Cold War days, if not any less dangerous. But the world has since gotten multipolar. There are (at least) nine nuclear powers to keep track of, and emerging technologies like AI enhance the risks.
“I hope this film gets a new generation interested and engaged in nuclear issues,” Heather Williams, the director of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), told me by email. “There are still thousands of nuclear weapons in the world and some countries are still engaging in nuclear saber-rattling — the threat hasn’t gone away.”
It’s not all doom and gloom, though: In 1986, there were 70,000 nuclear weapons. There are 12,000 today — an 80 percent reduction of the world’s total nukes. But for the first time in 40 years, that number is expected to increase. More countries want to add nukes to their arsenals, and the last verifiable limits on nuclear weapons in Russia and the US are going to expire in February.
So things are heading in the wrong direction. “We need the same level of public outcry that led to reductions and [nuclear weapon] verification measures that have made the world safer,” Rowan said. “People have power on this issue — they just have to reclaim it.”
The argument for having nukes is that they may deter conventional warfare as devastating as World War II. But you can’t have deterrence in a world wiped out by nuclear apocalypse.
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