Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts
In Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, A House of Dynamite, the clock is ticking. The film’s fictional president of the United States has less than 20 minutes and very little information to decide whether or not to retaliate against a nuclear missile, launched at the United States, from an unknown source. The story is, of course, fiction, but as with Bigelow’s other war movies, it feels disturbingly plausible. During the Cold War, the likely scenario was a war with the Soviet Union. Now there are nine nuclear powers, which makes the possibility of error, rogue actors, or a total information vacuum more likely. And the arms race is only heating up.
Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim make some deliberate choices in the movie, which is out in select theaters and arriving on Netflix this Friday. The president is a rational—even affable—character. The military personnel follow all the correct protocol. The general in charge is reliable and unruffled. “We did everything right, right?” one of the officers asks his colleagues. The answer the movie provides is yes, but that doesn’t change the underlying insanity of the situation: The house of dynamite we’ve built could explode in a matter of minutes and wipe out cities’ worth of people.
In this episode we talk to Oppenheim about why he and Bigelow structured the movie the way they did and why they focused on nuclear war now. And we talk to Tom Nichols, a national-security writer at the Atlantic, about the realities of nuclear proliferation at this moment, and how a nuclear scenario might unfold with a president driven by very different motivations from the film’s fictional creation.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: The new movie A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, begins with some banal chatting between two military personnel at a base office. Like it could be an SNL skit about your corny, annoying colleague. And then all of a sudden the movie takes a sharp turn.
The office is Fort Greely, a U.S. missile-defense site in Alaska. And the military personnel there notice that this ICBM they’ve been tracking on their screens? Its arc is flattening. In fact, it’s headed straight towards the U.S., and they have no idea who launched it.
The missile has about 20 minutes until it hits a major American city. And they have just one chance to shoot it down.
Female military officer (from A House of Dynamite): Three … two … one …
(Phone rings.)
Male military officer one: Confirm impact. Confirm impact!
Male military officer two: Standby. Standby confirm.
Rosin: The movie maintains this level of intensity the whole way through. It’s definitely funny at moments, cleverly constructed, but it’s so realistic, so obviously relevant to the world we live in, that it’s very hard to relax while watching it.
I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. A House of Dynamite forces us to live inside a reality that’s mostly too big and too awful to contemplate.
But the thing is, the threat of nuclear war hasn’t gone away. In the decades since the Cold War, it’s just evolved. Instead of a Soviet Union, there are now nine nuclear powers, which makes the situation more volatile, less predictable.
The movie just reminds us of this reality, that we are all still living in a house of dynamite that could explode at any moment and easily get out of our control.
President of the United States: This is insanity, okay?
General Anthony Brady: No, sir, this is reality.
Male voice: Six minutes to impact.
Noah Oppenheim wrote A House of Dynamite, and staff writer Tom Nichols, who covers national security, consulted on the film. I’m talking to them about the making of the movie and how close it is to reality.
Noah, welcome to the show.
Noah Oppenheim: Thank you.
Rosin: Tom, welcome.
Tom Nichols: Thank you, Hanna.
Rosin: So, Noah, there is a clock running on this movie the whole time. Why did you choose that as a form of narrative propulsion?
Oppenheim: For the very simple reason that it was among the most terrifying aspects of the nuclear problem, which is to say, if someone were to ever lob one of these missiles our way, it would land very, very quickly. So, as we say in the movie, if somebody launches from the Pacific theater, you’re talking about a flight time of under 20 minutes. If a submarine—a Russian submarine, for instance—off our Atlantic coast were to launch, the estimate is 10 to 12 minutes to impact on the East Coast.
So you’re talking about something that would happen with extraordinary haste, and therefore, the people who would be responsible for responding and figuring out how to defend against it, whether or not to retaliate, they would have an incredibly short window of time to make any kind of decision or to even make sense of what was happening. And so we wanted to convey to the audience in a really visceral way—by telling the story in real time—just how short, for instance, 18 minutes is.
Rosin: Know the whole time you’ve been talking, I can feel myself sweating. All I wanna do is say, Tom, that isn’t true, right? We don’t just have 18 minutes. It’s not that short a time.
Nichols: I have bad news for you, Hanna.
Oppenheim: (Laughs.)
Nichols: And one of the things that I found striking about A House of Dynamite—in these other movies and in the Cold War environment where I grew up, you assume that you’re gonna have some long lead time up to the moment of nuclear peril. If you go back and watch the old BBC movie Threads, the movie actually begins about three months before the war breaks out, and they walk you through kind of the superpowers getting themselves into this jam.
But what’s important about this movie and about these scenarios is that it doesn’t matter how you got there—it’s always going to come down to those 18 or 20 minutes.
Rosin: Noah, I guess this is another thing the movie’s about, is this tension between man and the machine, which is also true in Kathryn Bigelow’s other movies: You have a system, you have a rule, you have a clock ticking, but then you have human beings. And that’s throughout the movie, like the deputy national security adviser fumbling with his phone while going through security. There are all these moments that are supposed to remind us—I think; you tell me—it’s actually humans making this impossible decision.
Oppenheim: Exactly. No, I think that’s spot on. I think it’s a very human impulse to try to impose order on chaos.
[Music]
Oppenheim: We build processes and procedures, and we put together big, thick binders of decision-making protocols and decision trees: If A, then B, and You call this guy; if that person’s not there, then you call this person. And we create this illusion that we have it all under control because these institutions exist, these processes exist—and not only that, but we rehearse them. The folks at STRATCOM told us they rehearse this 400 times a year, more than twice a day on average.
But at the end of the day, if it were to ever happen in real life, all of that rehearsal, all of those handbooks and processes and policies, they can never account for the human factor: the fact that, on any given day, somebody might wake up, and they could be having a terrible fight with their wife and are horribly distracted; they could have a kid with a spiking fever who needs to see a doctor. And you’re never going to be able to escape this sort of human infallibility and the fact that you’re asking human beings to confront a reality that I don’t believe any person is capable of dealing with, let alone with a clock ticking in the background.
Rosin: It’s like we know this, and yet we don’t know this—or maybe we just don’t look at it. It’s like, I kind of know, Of course, they practice it all the time, but what does that do for us in the end?
Tom, how have presidents in the past absorbed the reality of what Noah’s saying and what you guys have researched?
Nichols: Well, here’s a bright spot: The way they’ve absorbed it is not well.
Oppenheim: (Laughs.)
Rosin: (Laughs.) Thanks, Tom.
Nichols: Well, no, but they’ve reacted the way that, and this is across party and personality and generations, every president—I don’t know how Donald Trump reacted to his—but every president until now has had a nuclear briefing; they’re shown all the targets and what they would have to do. And every one of them has walked out saying, My God, what? This is crazy.
Kennedy walked out of his, and he turns to an aide, and he says—his one comment was: “And we call ourselves the human race.” JFK walked out and just thought this was absolutely appalling.
Richard Nixon, who nobody is gonna accuse of being some sort of left-wing pantywaist about foreign policy, was so appalled at the number of casualties that would be involved that he sent [Henry] Kissinger out in 1969 with a mandate to revamp the entire nuclear plan. Because he says, This is just—you can’t have this. I mean, we’re talking about millions and millions of civilian casualties.
[Ronald] Reagan, who people associate with this very muscular kind of nuclear posture, actually put off getting his nuclear briefing for almost two years because he didn’t think it was relevant. He didn’t wanna do it.
I’ll just get off this soapbox and say that the plan that was shown to Kennedy, our plan was to destroy the Soviet Union and China, just in case.
Oppenheim: (Laughs.)
Nichols: We were going to hit China and Eastern Europe, just like—it’s like that line in Aliens, right: We’re gonna nuke the site from orbit. “It’s the only way to be sure.” And we were gonna hit them all. And David Shoup, the commandant of the Marine Corps, stood up and said, This is not the American way. This is not a good plan. This is not who we are as Americans. And that was 65 years ago.
Rosin: Wow. So everyone in that moment, when they’re faced with the reality of it, becomes a kind of pacifist.
Noah, it’s clear that a lot of research went into this movie. Was there ever a moment when you were talking to generals, people at STRATCOM, whoever you talked to, and you thought, What? This is what it is? Did you have that moment?
Oppenheim: Absolutely. We had that moment, I think, several times over. Beyond the short time frame of the decision, I think the other piece of it that is striking is this notion of sole authority: the idea that in our system, here in the United States, the president of the United States has the sole authority to determine whether these weapons are used or not.
And not only that, but these initial briefings notwithstanding that we’ve been talking about, they don’t practice this—the president doesn’t practice it—very much thereafter. So while, yes, the professionals at STRATCOM do these rehearsals 400 times a year, the president of the United States—the person who actually ultimately has the authority—once that initial briefing is over, especially when they have so often walked out so appalled in the ways that Tom has described, they don’t rehearse it at all thereafter.
And so you have a situation in which the decision rests on one person’s shoulders; that person has probably spent the least amount of time of anyone in the system thinking about this, practicing for it; and they’re being asked to make the call, with a clock ticking down minutes, while they’re simultaneously, most likely, running for their lives, being evacuated to some safe place. And so the idea that any person could function rationally in that scenario is just—it’s mind-boggling.
(Sirens blare.)
President: Reid, are you still there?
Secretary of Defense Reid Baker: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m here.
President: What do you make of all this?
Baker: I really don’t know.
President: You don’t know? You’re running the fucking Pentagon. I had one briefing when I was sworn in—one. And they told me that’s the protocol.
Baker: They told me the same thing.
President: Shit, I got a whole fucking briefing on what a Supreme Court justice does. Replacements. Replacements for what happens if the replacement drops out. Shit, what to do if the original guy crawls out of his grave and wants his job back.
Baker: We focused on more likely scenarios, things we might actually have to deal with.
President: Yeah, well, we’re dealing with this.
Baker: Best I can remember, we follow the steps. We’re following procedure.
Oppenheim: Having spoken to folks who’ve worked at the highest level inside the White House for a couple different presidents, the sense that they had of their bosses was that once that initial briefing was over, these are not people who were laying up awake at night contemplating, Hey, if I ever find myself in a situation where the nuclear decision handbook is placed in my lap, here’s how I would handle it. I think it is one of those crises that is—we have a tendency to just push out of our mind because it’s so difficult to comprehend, and it’s so horrifying.
Rosin: In the movie, you can tell that the president is the one improvising, compared to the people around him. You clearly made choices: You don’t mention a political party. You make the president and everyone else a rational actor. There’s a moment in the movie—people say things like, We were prepared for this. We did everything right. Why those choices?
Oppenheim: Very simple: because we wanted, in many ways, to present the best-case scenario, right? The best-case scenario is that all the decision makers are rational actors, as you just said. They’re all well intentioned. They’re thoughtful. There’s no bloodlust at work here. These are reasonable human beings who are well trained and trying their best to do the right thing.
And even in that scenario, even when all those boxes are checked and you have the best of us sitting in those chairs, you still see how it might unfold in the movie, and you still see how unlikely a positive outcome is.
Rosin: Why, though? Why did you decide to go that route?
Oppenheim: Because once you introduce a bloodthirsty lunatic or somebody who’s clearly an idiot, then I think the audience is able to walk out and say, Well, oh, that’s the problem. The problem is just—we just have to elect the right person, or We just have to make sure our generals are more moderate in their disposition.
But, in fact, the problem is not that. The problem, at least in our minds, is the entire apparatus. It’s that we’ve built this world in which we live under existential threat from weapons of our own creation, and we have all of these systems—they’re, I think, as well designed as they can be given the circumstances, to a great extent—but whenever you have an apparatus like this, there’s always gonna be, I think, a bias towards action. Once that first domino falls, I think the amount of restraint necessary to say, Let’s all step back and do nothing, I think that requires a lot of strength, character, courage that might not be possible to summon in a moment of crisis and panic, with a clock ticking, etc.
And I think we just wanted the spotlight and the focus to be on those factors, the system, rather than giving the audience an easy villain to blame, like, Oh, the problem was that president who was drunk when this happened, and that’s why we have a problem. No, it’s not that. It’s even with the best person in the job we still have a problem.
Rosin:. Now, Tom, that’s not our current reality, exactly. The editor in chief of The Atlantic has written about our current president as being reactive, easily insulted, and having a lot of qualities that could cause problems in this specific scenario. How do you think about that?
Nichols: Uneasily.
Rosin: Mm.
Nichols: There’s a really important point in all this, which is that the system is designed to work this way, to enable the president to go to war, to make things happen fast. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature. And so that means that the people who have to be involved with this really need to be the most steady hands in the world.
[Music]
Nichols: What Noah wrote, and what’s on the screen in A House of Dynamite, is: Here’s this system, with all of its gears in motion, that will take even the most reasonable people and drag them along this road to disaster.
Rosin: Right.
Nichols: What happens if they’re not reasonable people and they decide not just to be dragged along that road, but to jump in their car and floor the accelerator?
And that really worries me a lot because I have a real concern that it’s not just this administration; it’s an entire generation. I just don’t think people take this threat as seriously as they should and as they once did. When that seeps into a culture and a political structure, you will have people talking about things and thinking things are options that are not really options.
Rosin: After the break, how the absurd situation that is the nuclear house of dynamite came to be.
[Break]
Rosin: In A House of Dynamite, a nuclear missile is heading for a U.S. city, and there is no way to stop that—no off-ramp, no emergency brake. There’s only the next action, the next decision, and on and on, until the unimaginable becomes reality.
Captain Olivia Walker: Get Liam, get in the car, and just start driving, all right?
Olivia Walker’s husband: What? Where? What are you talking about?
Walker: West—go west; go west as fast as you can. Get away from any urban centers you can get, okay? Listen to me—
Walker’s husband: Liv, what the fuck? What’s going on there?
Walker: I’ll call you. I love you. I love you. Can you kiss Liam for me? Just kiss him. Bye, bye, bye.
Rosin: This propulsion towards action is maybe the most intense aspect of the movie. The president could decide to do nothing, but the movie makes it feel as if the momentum is running in the other direction. I ask Noah about that.
Oppenheim: When this system was being designed, one of the concerns was, if the Soviets launched on us, could they destroy our arsenal while it was already on the ground or before we had an ability to initiate a counterattack?
And so the idea was, in order to win a nuclear war, which we now—at least those of us talking right now—believe is a preposterous notion, but if you were trying to win a nuclear war, you needed to make sure that you could initiate your counterstrike very quickly, before your command and control centers and your arsenal were destroyed by the enemy. So the system is designed for speed and to make it as easy as possible, on some level, for retaliation to take place.
Nichols: Can we add one thing to this, which is it’s not, at least back in the day, the ’60s and ’70s and even the ’80s, it wasn’t entirely crazy to say—leave aside winning a nuclear war; if you were trying to avert a nuclear war, you wanted to tell your opponent, Look, there is no way that you can strike us first, decapitate us, or, eliminate everything. We are going to respond. In the business, it’s called a “secure second-strike capability.” And part of that is to have a president who doesn’t have to say, Well, before I respond, I have to call a meeting with Congress. Before I respond, I have to get at least three-fifths of the Cabinet.
We did this in a different time and under a different circumstance, to say to the old men in the Kremlin: Listen, if we see this stuff coming at us, one guy is gonna make the decision, and he’s gonna make it fast, and there is no way you are going to escape retaliation. In a grisly deterrent sense, that made sense 40 years ago. It doesn’t make sense now.
Rosin: Because?
Nichols: Because we’re not facing the same threat of a massive, disarming, overwhelming first strike. And even if we were struck first, we have bomber submarines underwater that have enough firepower to destroy most of Russia or China with one submerged submarine.
Remember, back in these days, you’re talking about two countries that were pointing a total of something like 30,000 nuclear weapons at each other. By treaty, the United States and Russia now deploy 1,500 strategic nuclear weapons—which, listen, that’s bad, and it’s the end of the world, but it’s not the same thing where we were expecting an incoming armada of three or four thousand warheads that were meant to just catch us on the ground with no time for decisions. So we did this kind of centralized-command thing for a lot of reasons, and one of them was to kind of spook the Soviets, to say, If you attack us, you are not going to trigger a committee meeting.
Rosin: Right. It’s to make the threat real—
Nichols: Exactly.
Rosin: —but then isn’t it the whole idea of mutually assured destruction that doesn’t make any sense? It’s a system that has a huge amount of drama and momentum, but you depend on it being stalled. It’s like if you had a shootout and then everybody was frozen in time forever, and we depended on that. It’s a strange idea.
Oppenheim: It’s precisely that, and that is what the movie is predicated on, is the idea that we’re all standing around with these weapons pointed at each other, frozen in time, and all it will take is one person in that circle pulling the trigger and firing one proverbial bullet, and then all hell breaks loose.
[Music]
Rosin: Okay, I’m getting sweaty again, so a couple of fact-check questions. (Laughs.) And either of you can answer them.
Here’s two of ’em: The movie opens at Fort Greely. The ICBM is first identified, but they have no information about it—no lead-up, no ratcheting up of tensions, no enemy owns up to launching it. For all they know, it could be an accident. How realistic is that scenario, where you know nothing and you have no lead-up?
Oppenheim: Right, so I think—several things. One is just, philosophically, one of the things that I have noticed—and I could be wrong—over the last 25, 30 years of being an observer of world events from the perch of a journalist is that how often these kind of world-altering events do come out of the blue, right?
I mean, you think about something like 9/11. Now, yes, you could say 9/11 was predictable to anyone who was following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. But during the summer of that year, it wasn’t like the United States government—we now know they should have been more aware of the signals—but it did feel like an out-of-the-blue world event that was changing the course of human history.
So that, just philosophically, I would say.
In terms of a launch from a submarine, all the conversations I had with experts, I think everyone said to me that that’s the tricky thing about a sub-based launch, is that it’s harder to attribute responsibility.
We do have a pretty effective system of sensors that would likely pinpoint the location of it—in our movie, we play with the idea that one of these mechanisms failed, so it makes it even more ambiguous. But I would argue that, it turns out, our satellite infrastructure is perhaps the most susceptible part of our digital infrastructure to hacking and to cyber interference, so it felt like that was a reasonable liberty to take.
But even if those satellites work and everything functions exactly right, if you’re talking about a sea-based launch, you still don’t know whose sub it was.
Nichols: We don’t have to hypothesize about this. In 1995, the Norwegians launched a weather satellite, and they had told the Russians, We’re firing a rocket into space. We’re gonna launch a weather satellite. And some—as John F. Kennedy said during the Cuban missile crisis, “There’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word”—and in this case, it was the Russian high command, and they brought Boris Yeltsin the Russian nuclear football.
And they said, We have what looks like an incoming single missile launched from a NATO country, and we don’t know why. And Yeltsin basically said, Ah, this doesn’t look—Bill Clinton and I are friends. There’s been no tensions. Nothing’s going on. I don’t think this is what it is. And thank goodness, crisis was averted, but it was one missile being launched, and the Russians got their hair on fire about it.
Rosin: Right, right, so reasonably realistic. Second fact-check involves shooting the missile down. What I have in my head is Iron Dome; it always works.
Oppenheim: Yeah.
Rosin: But the deputy national security adviser in the movie says, No, it’s not like that. The capability we have to shoot down an ICBM is not nearly that reliable. He puts the chances of success at 61 percent and says it’s like shooting a bullet with a bullet. Is that all true?
Oppenheim: It is true, and I think Tom can probably speak to the technical reasons even better than I can. But there’s a big difference between the kinds of missiles that Iron Dome is shooting down in Israel versus shooting an ICBM down that’s coming from the other side of the world.
And we say in the movie 61 percent—that’s based on data from controlled tests. So, you can imagine, those are under the best of circumstances. A lot of the folks we talked to felt that 61 percent was being very generous when it comes to the system that we have. As we mention in the movie, there are fewer than 50 of these ground-based intercepts in our arsenal, so even if it were working perfectly, there are not a ton of them that we have available to use.
I think it’s always been this false comfort that we could build [an] impenetrable dome over ourselves that would somehow solve this problem. And it turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that knocking one of these ICBMs out of the sky is a really, really hard physics problem that nobody has quite cracked yet.
Nichols: I was one of the people that said 61 percent is very generous. That’s basically the Pentagon’s number, and that’s done under these super-controlled, you know, We know when the test missile is gonna be fired. We know where it’s going. We’re gonna shoot at it. Now, imagine that—I mean, those are not battle conditions. And so this notion that, somehow, an enemy who is specifically trying to get past our defenses, that we’d have at least a 60 percent chance, I think, is irresponsible.
And to your point about Iron Dome, Hanna, Iron Dome is meant to shoot down things that are low and slow: rockets. They’re relative—I mean, I know it seems crazy to say, Well, a slow rocket, but compared to an ICBM. When an ICBM’s warhead reenters the atmosphere and it’s coming down, it’s coming down at, like, 25 times the speed of sound.
And so this notion that we’re gonna shoot these things down—an enemy who is dedicated to doing this and launches two or three or five of these things is probably also gonna launch dummy warheads, chaff, other things that are meant to blind the sensors or confuse them. So the notion that you’re gonna put this bubble over the country, I don’t think even back in the ’80s anybody really believed that was possible, and it’s certainly not possible now. And I think very few decision makers are really, in the moment of crisis, going to rely on it if they have an option not to.
Rosin: So you’ve both mentioned this idea that this movie is reminding us of something that we’ve somewhat put in the background, but which is very real right now.
Tom, what is the state of nuclear proliferation? Are we in the middle of a new kind of nuclear-arms race? What’s happening in Asia? Can you just lay that out for us?
Nichols: Yeah, it’s a lopsided proliferation. The United States, even Russia to some extent, the U.K., France, we’ve been reducing nuclear weapons. I mean, if you had said to me in, like, the mid-1980s, when I was studying this—I was a grad student; I was writing about this stuff—saying, Hey, we’re gonna go from 20,000 weapons to 1,500, I would’ve said, You’re completely high. That this is never gonna happen this way. And it’s really a miracle that we got there.
The problem is that now the Chinese, the Pakistanis, the Indians, they are moving to catch up because they have their own concerns, and they have their own enemies in the world. Now, these are smaller weapons. They’re not ICBMs; they’re not intercontinental. Obviously, Pakistan and India and China keep arsenals for their own neighborhood. But it’s a proliferation problem that isn’t evenly spread out among all the nuclear powers.
And I’ll just remind people that there used to be 10 nuclear powers, and if you wanna sleep well at night, remember that the white apartheid South African regime actually built six nuclear weapons and managed to hide them from the world in the 1980s.
This is not, any longer, an exotic technology—I mean, the first nuclear bombs were made when airplanes had propellers and TVs had tubes in them—so it’s not that hard a technology to get.
Rosin: And, Noah, is this what you had in mind when you talked about the urgency of this movie? What do you want people to be thinking about as they leave the theater? It’s not a documentary, but what should we be thinking about?
Oppenheim: I think we wanted to invite a conversation. I recognize that there are so many dangers in the world right now; it’s hard to keep them all in mind at any one time. But this is one that has drifted out of focus, I think, for far too long. And it is a problem of our own making—we created these weapons—so I think, I’d like to believe, that means we can also solve the problem if we’ve created it. As Tom mentions, there is historical precedence for making progress; it’s not impossible—we’ve dramatically reduced the number of them in the world.
So there are paths towards possible solutions, and it just feels like one of those subjects that is far too easy to ignore, but we ignored at our own collective peril. And we shouldn’t leave the conversation entirely to that tiny community of nuclear wonks, who are incredibly thoughtful and have devoted their lives to thinking about this and probably understand the threat better than anyone—I wouldn’t wanna suggest in any way that they’re indifferent or callous. One of the things that we found in putting the movie together and doing the research was how eager the people in that world are to share their stories and their concerns with the broader public. I think they invite more people’s voices in the conversation.
Rosin: Tom, do you have anything to say about the path back from this lopsided buildup that you talked about?
Nichols: Well, I think—one of the things that I hope gets us on that path is people taking this more seriously.
When you’re electing a president of the United States, I think people have kind of let it drift away that, yeah, you’re voting because of the economy and the price of eggs, and you’re mad about political correctness or whatever it is, but in the end, you are still picking someone to hold a little card about the size of a playing card in his pocket all day that gives him the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.
And people, I don’t think, are voting thinking about that anymore. And we used to—I mean, during the Cold War, there was always the question of Whose finger do you want on the button? People worried about that. But I think that, somehow, they’ve lost that sense of seriousness about it because this, to them, it’s kind of yesterday’s problem.
I also think we are not powerless here. We can do this. We can back things up. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev eliminated an entire class of weapons that, right now, the Trump administration is trying to put back in Europe. But they actually managed to make the world a lot safer by simply saying, We’re gonna take all these weapons, and we’re gonna scrap ’em. We’re gonna literally crush them and throw them away.
It’s possible to do that, but first, the public has to take seriously that this is a real danger—it can really happen—and that real human beings have this responsibility.
Rosin: Well, Tom, thank you for laying that out for us, and, Noah, thank you so much for joining us today.
Nichols: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Oppenheim: Thank you.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Rob Smierciak engineered this episode and provided original music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.
The post This Movie Makes Nuclear War Feel Disturbingly Possible appeared first on The Atlantic.
