Warning: This story contains spoilers from A House of Dynamite, which began streaming on Netflix October 24.
A nuclear missile is barrelling toward Chicago, and the only people who know about it have just 18 minutes to react. Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping thriller A House of Dynamite captures those 18 minutes in nearly real time, using a three-act structure that follows different points of view—military personnel in Fort Greely in Alaska; officials in the White House Situation Room; leaders in Strategic Command (or Stratcom), which controls the country’s nuclear arsenal; and the president himself—to create a pressure-cooker drama that unfolds as these characters stare down what might be the end of civilization.
The film’s inciting incident is fiction, but the play-by-play of what happens next is based very closely in fact. Just like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow’s latest film is exacting in its details and authenticity. Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim—a former president of NBC News—spoke to numerous past and current military and White House officials about what would really happen if a nuclear attack was launched on the US. As they learned—and as the film reveals—the safety and stability of our country is far more delicate than the average citizen might assume.
“We have for a long time chased this kind of false comfort that, ‘Well, we can solve the nuclear problem by just building an impenetrable shield,’” says Oppenheim. “The people who do it for a living will tell you that’s nearly impossible to achieve with any level of perfection. And unfortunately, this is a line of work in which anything short of perfection is kind of useless. If you knock half the incoming nuclear warheads out of the sky, it’s not much of a victory.”
During the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and the administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Americans were widely aware—and afraid—of the threat of nuclear war. Though the issue has since faded in the public consciousness, Bigelow’s film explores how the threat still exists—nine countries have known nuclear assets—and how paltry the options are for what to do after a missile is launched.
Oppenheim and Bigelow discovered several disturbing facts about the plans in place in the case of a nuclear attack on the US. While many military and White House officials have spent their entire careers preparing for such a moment—personnel who work in Stratcom often do more than 400 drills per year, experts told Oppenheim—the person with the ultimate power to retaliate, the president of the United States, does not. “He doesn’t have to build a consensus amongst his cabinet or with senior military officials,” says Oppenheim. “He gets to decide, just him or her, as the case may be.”
In the film, the president, played by Idris Elba, is handed a binder with retaliation options. He is left to decide on his own whether he’ll fire retaliatory nuclear warheads at his presumed enemies, even though the government is not exactly sure who fired at the US in the first place. In the film, he has less than 15 minutes to decide—exactly what the time crunch would be like in real life. “In the nuclear policy community, they talk about sole authority and decision time as the two of the biggest dangers that we’ve built,” says Oppenheim.
That said, the film does embellish a bit for dramatic effect. Lieutenant General Daniel L. Karbler, who led the US Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command from 2019 to 2024, consulted on the film—and points out that if only one missile was headed toward the US (as happens in the film), the president could also choose to wait before deciding on a response. “That doesn’t make a good movie, because then the movie’s done at about the 12 minute point,” Karbler says. “But I think Americans should know that we just don’t all have itchy trigger fingers on the big button, just waiting to push it. We temper responses based on what’s being threatened, what the threat is coming in.”
Other small changes were also made for storytelling reasons. The real Pentagon does not have a helicopter landing pad on its roof, but Bigelow needed one there for the dramatic moment when the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) commits suicide by walking off the side of the building. Karbler does say that much of Bigelow’s filmmaking, down to the details on the military uniforms and the layout of buildings like Stratcom, were eerily accurate. He credits production designer Jeremy Hindle for taking a careful approach to these extremely top secret spaces, building replicas for each setting on a soundstage in New Jersey. “They’re very, very highly classified spaces to get into, and to have [them this] accurate was astounding,” he says. “People that have worked in those spaces have seen the movie and they’re like, ‘When did you guys go to Fort Greely to shoot?’ I said, ‘We didn’t.’”
Beyond the costume and production design, many of the film’s most astounding details are true. Yes, there is an individual who follows the president around at all times with a briefcase full of nuclear retaliation options. Yes, the US’s main line of defensive anti-ballistic missiles only have a 50% success rate in tests. Yes, there really is a highly classified, self-sufficient underground city built for nuclear fallout at the Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania.
Karbler, who had a small acting role in the film as Stratcom’s chief of staff, was very focused on the language in the film; he encouraged Bigelow to add a line about “dual phenomenology,” the requirement that both satellite and radar must confirm the existence of a missile before the US can launch a retaliatory strike. “That’s very important to get that little phrase in there, because that’s an important part of determining that truly is a missile coming in,” he says.
Bigelow’s movie focuses most on the human element—how normal people, even the most highly trained, might react to a catastrophic event. “We make sure our processes are done correctly. We make sure our reporting, our communications, procedures, weapons, employment, is [all] done correctly. It’s very sterile, but very process-oriented,” says Karbler. “This movie brings in the human element in spades.”
Watching this story from the vantage point of 2025, the unsettling fact Oppenheim pointed out is especially striking: The president of the US has final decision-making power in a theoretical retaliation effort. Elba’s president in the film is well-meaning, and the decision weighs heavily on him. Oppenheim—who began writing the script before Donald Trump took office for his second term—says that, in many ways, the movie presents a best-case scenario. “If everyone in authority is responsible, smart, prepared, and well-intentioned—even in that scenario, this is the outcome,” says Oppenheim. “We’ll leave it to everyone to contemplate how bad things could be, or are, if the folks in those chairs are not smart, prepared experts, and well intended.”
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