Director Katheryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” rudely gives Americans one more reason to lose sleep in 2025.
Weeks in, the film has generated strong reactions from those who see nuclear weapons as a critical life insurance policy — the late nuclear-weapons expert Janne Nolan termed such exponents “Guardians of the Arsenal.” The film also has stirred disarmament advocates who fear this monster the world created will come back to kill us all.
Opening an exchange of ideas on how to prevent the “unthinkable” – a nuclear war – is a good thing. And if the film succeeds where most fail and sparks a genuine public rethinking of nuclear risk, it could begin to address the longstanding democracy deficit that relegates nuclear weapons policymaking to a relatively small group of officials who rarely face the voting public. Americans deserve a role – and would be best-served if they take more responsibility – in shaping policy related to potential extinction-level threats, even if their preferred approaches vary widely.
The film focuses on the short window of opportunity that U.S. leaders have to detect, intercept, and respond to a single nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired at a major city in the United States, whether by accident or in anger. In Bigelow’s scenario, a suspected cyberattack blinds U.S. early warning radar, making it impossible to definitively identify the country responsible (known in nuclear-arms lingo as “attribution”). That matters because U.S. nuclear response options hinge in part on knowing who fired the missile. In the film, that uncertainty forces senior officials into educated guesswork about who launched the missile, drawing on circumstantial clues such as recent missile tests, ongoing conflicts, or possible AI-related failures in nuclear command-and-control systems.
A more realistic scenario is that U.S. space-based early warning satellites would quickly determine the country responsible for the launch. But the film is right that the president’s advisors would likely fiercely disagree over the appropriate U.S. response: anything from overwhelming nuclear retaliation, to a conventional military strike, or pursuing a diplomatic off-ramp to halt an unwinnable nuclear war.
“A House of Dynamite” does not get everything right. Experts have questioned the trigger-happy advice military officials give the president, the window of opportunity to attempt another missile intercept and the choice of Chicago as the key target given there are other U.S. targets of greater political and military significance.
However, these literary licenses do not distract from the key message of the movie: the U.S. government has procedures in place for nuclear war, but even the most serious, experienced leader may not guess right when the country’s survival is at stake.
The film’s resonance is amplified by the real-world backdrop. Just this past month, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Defense via his social media platform “Truth Social” to “start testing our Nuclear Weapons … immediately,” sowing confusion from America’s chief nuclear rivals. They were left wondering whether the president was signaling that the United States would launch the first test of a nuclear bomb since 1992 or he was simply referring to testing of delivery systems such as missiles and related equipment, which both the United States and Russia do routinely. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, whose department is actually the one responsible for maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal, quickly clarified that it was indeed the latter and the United States has no plan to test a nuclear bomb other than with the usual non-explosive verification methods. But the episode underscored how imprecision at the highest levels can escalate into crisis when nuclear-armed states lack time to verify intent.
Every newly inaugurated U.S. president receives a classified briefing on nuclear attack options and is outfitted with a wafer-sized “biscuit” containing the authentication codes required to order a launch. Those who have received the briefing from U.S. Strategic Command describe it as sobering. The power to act as judge, jury, and executioner is one that most presidents did not flaunt. President Richard Nixon may be the exception, reportedly saying of his sole-authority to launch:
“I can go in my office and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes, millions of people will be dead.”
Trump has given many Americans reason for concern about how he would wield this power. In addition to the nuclear testing missive just weeks ago, there are several examples from his first administration. At a highly sensitive time of denuclearization negotiations with Kim Jong-un, he ordered a high-risk Special Forces mission to gain intelligence on North Korea’s thinking. And when briefed that the U.S. nuclear stockpile had decreased by 80 percent from its Cold War peak, Trump asked his advisors to build up the U.S. active arsenal tenfold to an unprecedented 50,000 warheads.
Unlike President Jimmy Carter, a former nuclear submarine officer, or President George H.W. Bush, who personally edited the President’s Daily Brief as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Trump, like other post-Truman Presidents, brought with him no direct experience navigating nuclear risk.
“A House of Dynamite’s” contribution is to show that experience only goes so far by the time a ballistic missile is inbound. As the movie depicts, the United States has detailed procedures for nuclear deployment, but that plan doesn’t account for the vagaries of the human element in deciding the fate of millions. The president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons is one king-like power that he inherited from his predecessors, dating back to President Harry Truman. And unlike the tariffs that the current administration is defending before the Supreme Court, this is one executive authority that faces no serious check in U.S. law or practice.
That democracy deficit in how the United States wages a nuclear war once started is likely here to stay. But the democracy deficit in most urgent need of repair is the one that leaves nuclear policymaking writ large to a small group of officials largely invisible to the broader electorate. Based on Google Trends search results in the first week that “Dynamite” premiered on Netflix, viewers were doing their own research to see if the U.S. government is getting it right. And though the search queries dropped off quickly, they mirror 2023 polling that shows 60 percent of Americans want more information about nuclear weapons, and more of them trust academics and military leaders to provide that insight than the president, the U.S. news media, Congress, activists, or social media.
Past generations had more constant reminders of nuclear danger, albeit filtered and sanitized. Baby boomers, for instance, grew up with public-service advertisements such as “Bert the Turtle,” which sold the idea that ducking under a wooden school desk would protect against a Soviet megaton bomb.
Prior to airing the blockbuster 1983 television movie “The Day After” about the horrific effects of a nuclear attack on the American heartland, ABC tried to preempt the likely emotional distress of its audience by distributing an eight-page guide to cope with the difficult subject. The film had real political consequences: President Ronald Reagan, who watched it, went on to negotiate arms treaties with the country he had labeled an “Evil Empire” just six months earlier.
Today, Americans lack that steady drumbeat of reminders, arms control advocacy notwithstanding. Some incidents have been widely reported over the past decade-plus – the earthquake- and tsunami-triggered meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011, the 2018 false alert in Hawaii, Russia’s shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In July this year, the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites corresponded with the most searches of “nuclear weapons” as a topic on Google Trends in five or more years. But these cases occurred at a distance from most Americans and quickly faded from the headlines. That keeps the low-probability but high-impact risk of nuclear war largely out of sight and out of mind.
In their 1984 presidential debate on foreign policy, Reagan and former Vice President Walter Mondale spoke fluently about nuclear weapons systems, missile-defense, and goals for verifiable arms control. Those positions had a large role in shaping voter preferences. By the 2020 cycle, they were relegated to a short quip from then-Vice President Joe Biden poking fun at Trump in their presidential campaign debate for reportedly suggesting to advisors that the United States drop a nuke into the eye of a hurricane.
“A House of Dynamite” ends before any post-detonation aftermath like that depicted in “The Day After,” but it captures the incredible pressure that civilian and military leaders would face in a real crisis. Those raw emotions are often omitted from nuclear posture debates and doctrine.
Like “The Day After,” Bigelow’s film is not prescriptive. It is meant to illuminate. Some viewers may conclude from “A House of Dynamite” that mutual vulnerability to nukes is unacceptable, and that the United States should invest heavily in a Trump-proposed missile-defense system known as “Golden Dome,” to make the probability of intercepting a nuclear-tipped missile less of what the film calls “a coin toss.”
That could explain the surge in Google Searches of “Ground-based Midcourse Defense” during the movie’s debut, the most searches of that term in at least five years. Others have argued the key lesson is that if the United States doesn’t invest in new capabilities, its adversaries will gauge that they could get away, or at least survive, a limited strike; so the U.S. president needs flexible, scalable options.
The Pentagon reportedly is concerned that the movie may shift public opinion in ways that complicate its budget priorities. Unlike “Top Gun,” for example, “A House of Dynamite” is not likely to lead to a recruiting surge and it could threaten support for high-end expensive hardware as nuclear weapons eat up a larger share of the discretionary federal budget over the next decade. Instead, it exposes a realistic scenario that, until now, existed largely in classified war games.
President Trump can shape public interest for ill or good through his megaphone and willingness to break with convention. He has moments of pragmatism: entertaining an extension of New START and showing an apparent willingness to return to some form of nuclear agreement with Iran after U.S. and Israeli strikes delayed, at best, Iran’s nuclear program. He could do a Reagan-sized transformation by using his “Bully Pulpit” to push for ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). This type of dealmaking would likely be to his political benefit as 83 percent of Americans say “preventing the spread of nuclear weapons” should be a very important priority.
By elevating a set of issues that the public says they want to learn more about from trusted sources, elected leaders can help repair the democratic deficit in nuclear policymaking – the one that leaves most Americans with little agency in shaping policies that reduce the chance that everyone they love could be killed in 20 minutes.
“Left of launch” is the time to spend political capital to reduce nuclear risk. Once the first country launches the first nuclear weapon, it is anyone’s guess whether the president reacts appropriately – no matter if it is “Dynamite’s” Idris Elba or the real one.
