“It’s negative. Negative impact. Object remains inbound.”
These three sentences—spoken by a U.S. Army officer in Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite—are said quietly and with clipped military efficiency, but they are laden with dread; they mean that millions of people are minutes away from being incinerated or buried beneath the rubble of an American city.
Americans, along with billions of other people on this planet, once had a healthy fear of nuclear war. They knew, even if they did not dwell on it, that they could wake up and make a cup of coffee, and then, before they had a chance to finish breakfast, they and the civilization they took for granted every day could be extinguished. That fear seems mostly gone now, and Americans have long needed a movie set in the 21st century to remind them of why they should still be worried about nuclear war. Finally, they have one.
In recent decades, nuclear war has all but vanished from American movie screens, replaced since the end of the Cold War by special-effects blockbusters about zombie plagues, alien invasions, and errant asteroids. (One of the last major releases about a possible War World III, the HBO movie By Dawn’s Early Light, premiered on television more than 35 years ago.) But the world’s nuclear weapons haven’t gone anywhere. The United States is about to spend nearly $1 trillion on nuclear modernization. Washington and Moscow are still trading nuclear threats while a war of Russian aggression rages in the middle of Europe. India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed powers, recently came within inches of war.
And yet, for many reasons, Hollywood and the American public have treated nuclear war as yesterday’s problem, a nightmare that was long ago somehow solved. Bigelow has broken this silence with a film that reminds us that the world is still in danger—perhaps more today than ever—from a nuclear conflict.
I am not a film critic; I watched A House of Dynamite as someone who has spent much of his professional life studying nuclear weapons and strategies. (I also had the opportunity to visit the set and watch parts of A House of Dynamite while it was being filmed, and to discuss the movie with the director as well as the producer Greg Shapiro and its writer, Noah Oppenheim.) Like Bigelow, I am a child of the Cold War, and as I wrote this summer, I have long been distressed by how quickly the threat of nuclear war has faded from both America’s collective consciousness and its popular culture. Bigelow shares that concern, and she has created a film whose settings and scenario are all too possible.
A House of Dynamite opens with a missile appearing over the Pacific, headed for the continental United States. The missile’s origin is a mystery: Somehow, the U.S. early-detection systems missed its launch. (Was it a glitch? Sabotage? No one knows.) It might be a mistake. It might be a desperate move by the North Koreans, a sneak attack by the Russians or the Chinese, or the first wave of a larger attack by a combination of America’s enemies. Or it might be, as one of the officers at U.S. Strategic Command muses to his boss, that “some fucking sub captain woke up, found out his wife left him, and snapped.” Within minutes of detection, the missile’s target is confirmed: Chicago.
Now what? The story is told three times, from three different vantage points, but always ends with the same stomach-churning request: “Your orders, Mr. President.”
When I first saw an early version of A House of Dynamite, I expected to have something of a “punch list” of gripes, things experts might notice that seem wrong or out of place. I found very few. (I would argue, for one, that the film is too generous in its estimation of the possible efficacy of U.S. missile defenses.) More to the point, I worked for a U.S. senator in Washington during the first Gulf War, and later taught at the Naval War College, and I was struck by how many people in the film spoke and acted like the policy makers and senior officers I’ve met over the years. Tracy Letts was especially effective as the commanding general of STRATCOM. He was, like many top officers I knew, capable of turning from snippy martinet to consummate professional almost in the same moment.
Experts might also quibble with, for example, the likelihood that some enemy might launch just one missile, and why. But the reality is that the Cold War scenarios of the previous century, which were based on nuclear exchanges erupting during a major war between the United States and the Soviet Union, are no longer the only path to disaster. Nuclear deterrence was a dicey enough business when it was a two-player game; today, nine states can point nuclear arms at one another in a web of overlapping enmities and alliances. Wisely, Bigelow and Oppenheim did not stoop to making a morality play with villains and heroes. Everything in A House of Dynamite is plausible; the people at the center of the crisis follow procedures, make decisions carefully, and in general do things for sane and understandable reasons.
For example, I spent much of my career studying the Soviet Union and Russia; in the world of movies, Russians are often cast as the default bad guys. But Bigelow avoids such easy tropes, and portrays Russian leaders in the movie as normal people who have perfectly sensible fears. In one tense scene, the Russian foreign minister not only denies that the missile came from Russia, but also expresses exactly the concerns for Russia’s security that I would expect from a Russian diplomat talking to the U.S. deputy national security adviser.
Why is the Kremlin at that moment talking to a relatively inexperienced deputy national security adviser? Because sometimes, people are out of the office for things like colonoscopies—which is where the actual national security adviser is during this terrible day. The world in A House of Dynamite is correctly depicted as a chaotic place: Sometimes, telephones don’t work. Sometimes, satellites malfunction. Sometimes, the president’s top adviser is on a table, whacked up on propofol.
The young deputy does a fine job of laying out the American position, and that’s a theme in A House of Dynamite: All of the people handling this crisis are really, really good at their jobs. No one loses their mind and freaks out like Colonel Cascio does in Fail Safe. No one does anything reckless. (The secretary of defense, played by Jared Harris, is under immense personal strain, and the final choice he makes—I will not get into the details—will shock some viewers, but it has a precedent in American history.) The people in charge are professionals, and they did everything right, yet they have to stand and quietly suffocate with anxiety as the warhead begins its supersonic descent into Chicago.
Likewise, the president in A House of Dynamite (played by Idris Elba) is only an ordinary man who, like some of his real-life predecessors, never paid much attention to his one inadequate nuclear briefing, because he trusted the system. He knows how to do everything else: “Shit,” he says to his advisers, “I got a whole fucking briefing about when a Supreme Court justice dies. Replacements. What to do if the replacements drop out. What to do if the original guy crawls out of his grave and wants his job back.” But apparently no one explained what to do if an American city is about to be vaporized.
A House of Dynamite is about people, not gore, but it is still terrifying. Previous films such as The Day After and the grisly British film Threads tried to get viewers to understand the magnitude of the nuclear threat by showing in detail the destruction a nuclear war would bring. These movies still have the power to shock people—I know this from assigning them to students when I taught courses on nuclear issues—but their Cold War backstories don’t seem relevant to younger audiences. Bigelow has made a film that forgoes the carnage and instead explains—methodically and accurately—how the intricate machinery of nuclear deterrence can drag otherwise rational human beings along an inexorable path to disaster.
Movies can reflect a society’s fears and anxieties. But sometimes, they can remind us what we should fear. Kathryn Bigelow wants us to remember that we are still in danger. As the crisis in her film deepens, the president exclaims that the whole situation “is insanity.” The commander of STRATCOM could be speaking to every viewer when he replies: “No, sir. This is reality.” May it never be ours.
The post Kathryn Bigelow’s Nuclear Nightmare appeared first on The Atlantic.
