“A House of Dynamite” Shows Why No Leader Should Have a Nuclear Trigger

When you spend your career trying to understand and analyze the threats nuclear weapons pose to humanity, you might become a bit jaded. But even with decades of work around this issue, I found A House of Dynamite to be a harrowing, alarming, and clarifying cinematic revelation about the most extreme powerlessness that human beings can experience—even the most powerful people on earth.

The film, written by Noah Oppenheim and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, flashes from the White House Situation Room, where we first learn a nuclear missile has been launched from waters frequented by North Korean and Chinese submarines, to military bases and multiple government intelligence agencies, as the characters pass through phases of dismissal (it’s a glitch), to alarm (it’s real), to perplexity (who launched it and why?). We feel them go from quixotic hope (a U.S. defensive missile fired from Alaska will intercept it) to desperation (I must try to save my loved ones). Throughout, the characters display admirable professional diligence, as national security officials often do, with little public appreciation.

For me (and my fellow nuclear specialists), escaping the existential torment of the story and debating the technical merits of the scenario was natural. A single incoming and unattributable nuclear weapon is one of the simpler situations to face on the verge of nuclear war. In the film, the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus does not know which person from which country ordered the launch—it could have been a rogue actor or an accident. The warhead may not even detonate. Rationally, there is nothing to be gained by launching a nuclear response before the weapon (and its impact) is analyzed, its provenance and purpose assessed, and the wide range of military, economic, and other countermeasures considered.

But the U.S. Strategic Command commander (played realistically by Tracy Letts) is either misguided or bellicose. The general in charge of U.S. nuclear forces contemptuously dismisses the “no-nuclear-response” option—presented by the deputy national security adviser—as an invitation to any bad actor to attack the United States in the future. The general’s eagerness to retaliate could be explained by the fact that our longstanding nuclear response protocol tends to “jam” a president if an enemy strike appears underway, as nuclear command-and-control expert Bruce Blair once opined. The system, in other words, is biased toward annihilation (in the hope that this will deter aggression).

In the film, the nuclear football—a doctorlike satchel with the notebook of laminated pages of maps depicting options for nuclear strikes the president could order—is frequently in view. Its steward, a handsome naval officer, tells the president there are basically three options: “rare, medium, and well done.” The best option—no immediate nuclear response—is not on the menu. In a real-world launch scenario, it’s all on the president to say, “Maybe there’s a better way.” Recent U.S. leaders seem to acknowledge the gravity of such a decision: President Barack Obama began a meeting on nuclear policy by saying, “Let’s stipulate this is all insane.” More recently, President Donald Trump described America’s nuclear arsenal as “something we don’t ever want to have to think about.”

Although the film depicts the agony around responding to a single weapon launch, the more likely and more difficult scenarios would be when U.S. intelligence detects the beginning of a Russian or Chinese or North Korean attack with dozens (or more) nuclear weapons. Such attacks unlock another set of decisions: Should the president order scores or hundreds of U.S. nuclear weapons to be launched immediately to try to hit as many of the adversary’s remaining nuclear weapons as possible? Should this be done even if it is likely to make the adversaries use all of their remaining nuclear weapons before they lose them? Even if limiting damage to the United States by destroying some number of the adversary’s nuclear weapons before they can be launched would reduce likely casualties from 100 million to 50 million, who would celebrate? Who would feel powerful?

Ultimately, what moved me to tears were the scenes of White House officials desperately sneaking phone calls to loved ones who don’t answer. Missile defense officers retching after failing to intercept the target. The secretary of defense toggling desperately between his professional duty to protect America and his paternal efforts to warn his estranged daughter of the incoming danger. The roaring sound of the presidential motorcade, with all the power of country and office that it signifies, racing to evacuate a president who sits inside looking utterly lost. All the scholarly research in the world cannot capture the film’s depictions of powerlessness writ large and small, on a scale we try not to imagine.

A House of Dynamite shows us why everyone on earth must question the wisdom of granting a handful of leaders with nuclear buttons the power to kill everyone and every living thing on the planet—in less time than it takes to watch the film. So long as these weapons are deployed, competing states will find ways to render each other powerless to block their delivery in devastating numbers. There is no technical solution. The only way is to use the power that nations and their leaders wield today to stabilize or resolve the conflicts that tomorrow could make one of them desperate enough to press the button in a real-world house of dynamite.