A House of Dynamite, a new Netflix film, may be the most realistic depiction of a nuclear crisis ever made. Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim partnered with Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) to capture the intimate details of the U.S. national security state as a president (Idris Elba) and his advisors confront the riskiest 19 minutes in human history.
Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News, joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked. They discuss Trump’s missile defense plans, the filmmaking process, and Hollywood’s surprising influence on nuclear policy—from Dr. Strangelove to Crimson Tide.
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Jon Bateman: A House of Dynamite is the first major film in decades to depict the terrifying realities of a nuclear crisis. And you're about to hear from the visionary filmmaker who created this story. Now, if you know anything about national security, a typical Hollywood treatment can be difficult to watch. It has over-the-top action, blending fantasy with reality, tidy storylines featuring clear heroes and villains. But this movie is very different. Leading nuclear experts are calling A House of Dynamite the most realistic depiction ever of the brutal timelines and impossible dilemmas created by nuclear weapons. It's a film that deserves to be screened in the corridors of power, and it raises serious questions. Its director is Kathryn Bigelow, whose Oscar-winning films like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty have made her the preeminent storyteller. Of the post-9-11 U.S. national security state. And its screenwriter is Noah Oppenheim, the acclaimed writer and former journalist who joins me today. In our conversation, we discuss war, politics, and filmmaking in an age of growing nuclear danger. I'm Jon Bateman, and this is The World Unpacked. Noah Oppenheim, welcome to the show.
Noah Oppenheim: Thanks so much for having me, I appreciate it.
Jon Bateman: You've been part of high-end show business for a while now, you ran NBC News, you ran the Today Show, you wrote an Oscar-winning film, you've been palling around with Idris Ilba, but you have not been on The World Unpacked podcast, so I just wanna ask, how does it feel?
Noah Oppenheim: Feels like I've really made it finally. And I'm grateful to be here. And that description of my life sounds very foreign to me. I love the term high-end show business. That's great.
Jon Bateman: Well, this is high-end podcasting, a classically trained podcaster actually, but we're here to talk about a very serious topic, which is nuclear war. You have written a remarkable new movie called A House of Dynamite, and it's about nuclear crisis decision-making. There's so many different angles for us to take here about the nature of these crises, the filmmaking process itself. But I just want to start with this question of Why now? By my count, the last time somebody made a movie of this ilk was 1995 Crimson Tide and then great movie. And then the real classics, the heyday of this kind of crisis decision making movie was in the mid 1960s when we saw Dr. Strangelove fail safe, two favorites of mine. Yes. So we're decades out of that. People have not been telling these stories. Why now?
Noah Oppenheim: So that is precisely why now it is because, um, Kathryn Bigelow, who was the director of the film, uh, felt like it was time to push this topic back into the spotlight and hopefully renew a conversation about it. Um, you know, you mentioned Dr. Strangelove is my favorite film of all time. I know people struggle when they say name your top three. I mean, it's always hard to compare apples and oranges, but it's probably the movie I've seen the most and loved the most on every level. So, you know, a couple years ago, this started, I got a phone call from CAA, our mutual agency, and a gentleman said, hey, Kathryn Bigelow wants to talk to you. She has an idea for a movie. As you'd imagine, that's as good of a phone as one can get if you're a screenwriter. And I hopped on a Zoom with her and she shared with me that she had been fascinated by this topic since she was a kid. You know, she was. Of that generation that had to hide under school desks during drills. She had been a fan of those movies that you mentioned as well, and had similarly been struck by the fact that it had been a long time, not only since movies had been made about the subject, but just since the subject had been at the center of the public discourse. You know, it's not brought up at presidential debates. It's not covered often in the news. And yet the threat. Remains as great, if not greater, than ever. The complexity of the landscape is certainly greater than ever, and so this really did begin from a place of wanting to bring that drought, so to speak, to an end.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, in many ways, it feels like it's time. You're probably familiar with this thing called the Doomsday Clock that's run by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It's the best thing that we have to experts' view of the level of threat. And they use this kind of metaphor of minutes to midnight, how close are we? And people might be surprised to learn that we're actually the closest ever to midnight according to this list. Factors like. The shredding of international arms control regimes, the fact that major powers have some of the worst relations in decades, the fact that China is undergoing a huge military buildup and the U.S. and Russia are modernizing their nuclear forces. And then you add in things like AI. Was there a single factor or event in the news that caused you and Kathryn to sit up and say, Wait a minute. This is the thing that we need to be focused on right now, because with Kathryn in particular, she is known for her war on terror movies, right? And so you're kind of shifting to a different terrain of great power competition and the ultimate stakes of nuclear war. What drove that?
Noah Oppenheim: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, she has spoken about this film as the third part of a triptych that begins with Hurt Locker includes Zero Dark Thirty and now this. And yes, you're right. Those first two films dealt with the war on terror. And this is dealing with a somewhat with a different subject, but I think she views the unifying theme as being explorations of the military industrial complex in the 21st century. As for whether there was one particular impetus for her making that call, I think it really was an accumulation of factors. Again, I'm a former journalist, as you mentioned. I had been running NBC News during an era where Israel's attempts to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon were very much part of the news. North Korea becoming a nuclear power and the repeated tests of missile technology over the Sea of Japan that they were undertaking was a regular story. So, I had been thinking about it, covering it for quite a long time. She had been thinking about, it reading about it for a quite a time. And then, you know, it's interesting. I don't know if this played a role in her leaning in, but, you had an extraordinary film in Oppenheimer that came out, which is not a nuclear crisis movie, but it is, again, sort of helping to re-center the subject of the nuclear age in which we live. And so, I think it was really kind of, you of a bunch of... Of empiricists.
Jon Bateman: As a former card-carrying member of the military industrial complex, I just want to say I feel very seen by this movie. I want to get into later in the conversation the extraordinary level of realism, not just the strategic realism of portraying a nuclear crisis, but the very, very granular tactile, the sounds, the sights, I want talk about that. But one more question about... The development of this movie idea, because when I think about the nuclear movies of the past and setting Oppenheimer to one side, cause it's a little different, um, you could kind of separate them into two categories. Category one is a movie in which a nuclear weapon might go off at the end of the movie. Right. And so these are the movies where the drama is the decision-making of a small group of national security officials as they wrestle with the ultimate dilemma. Yeah. But Category 2 is movies where a nuclear weapon has gone off very early in the movie. Yes. So these would be things like The Day After, Threads, you know, a post-apocalyptic dramatization where we focus on what's at stake for humanity. Why did you choose Category 1 instead of Category 2 as a way to dramatize this issue?
Noah Oppenheim: Well, I think, you know, the, you're right that that threads day after genre does shine a light on the stakes, but I also think it's, you know, post-apocalyptic genre in general. It's not as pointed for me in terms of drawing attention to the issue because, you know, there's, there is the zombie apocalypse. There's the alien invasion apocalypse. There's, the nuclear apocalypse and the qualities of those worlds tend to blend together on some level, often as stories of communities trying to kind of eke out life in the aftermath and it's not a specifically to me about the nuclear threat. So, you know if you're going to tell a story about the nuclear threat. We wanted to be as kind of pointed as we could then, you know, as I had done a lot of reading about this over the years, um, I have a friend, Marc Ambinder, who was a journalist who wrote a book called The Brink and it was about the able Archer, uh, nuclear crisis, which was when NATO had, uh was undertaking exercises in Europe and there was a misunderstanding on the part of the Soviets and they thought it was a potentially real mobilization and we came close to, uh. To conflict, um, and as part of his book, he recounts many other near misses, you know, and Danny's for any, for any students of the subject, there are the classic near misses there's, you know, Stanislav Petrov and the. The five ACI CBMs that were just a radar reflection. There are many instances of it. It occurred to me that one thing that hadn't really been fully explored is we're so close. It's almost miraculous that this hasn't happened already when you read about how close we've come before. It seems like all it would take would be one domino to fall. And then this whole system kind of kicks into gear and sends us barreling towards the apocalypse. And so that idea of just the first domino, one domino falling, one missile, one person, either by accident or miscalculation or, um, malevolence sends one missile. And then what happens? Um, it just seemed like a ripe way to tell the story.
Jon Bateman: So that brings us to the plot or the premise of your movie. No spoilers here. I'm a hard liner when it comes to spoilers. I'm like the, the Andrew Poff of spoilers. So we're not going to go there. But we can tell the audience that the basic structure of your movie is that a single intercontinental ballistic missile presumably armed with a nuclear warhead is launched from somewhere in the Pacific by an unidentified party. Yep. And it has a trajectory of falling into the United States is what's predicted. This then triggers a clock. And everyone in the movie, the members of the military industrial complex all the way up to the president, have under 20 minutes to figure out what's happening, why it's happening and how they could respond, whether that's by stopping the missile or by somehow retaliating. Why did you pick this particular scenario? Why one missile, why an unattributed actor?
Noah Oppenheim: Sure. I'll answer the second question first, which is we wanted to explore the system and we wanted to examine the threat that is the entire sort of nuclear apparatus. If you assign blame or responsibility, I believe, to one actor, if this becomes a movie about the Russians firing missiles at the United States or the North Koreans, then that's what the movie's about. Then people walk out of the theater and the takeaway is. The bad guys are the Russians or the bad guys or the North Koreans. And that's the problem we somehow need to solve. I think both Kathryn and I wanted to, to ask a different question, identify a different problem, which is the entire nuclear apparatus. And so that's one thing. The second thing is, is that, you know, the, in talking to experts, we do have a pretty great system of identifying, um, when an ICBM is launched anywhere on the planet. But like any system, it's not foolproof. You know, the DSP satellites that, you know, we mentioned in the film, the DSPs satellites miss the launch, but then it's picked up by secondary measures. Those satellites are fairly reliable, but we know now more than ever that our satellite infrastructure is arguably the most vulnerable part of our cyber infrastructure. And so the idea that a bad actor could interfere with those satellites felt interesting to us dramatically. And then... You get to this question of sea-based launch capabilities. And it sort of says, seems obvious when you say it out loud, but you don't often think about it. If somebody were to launch weapons from a submarine, there really is no way to know who's submarine it is. I mean, definitively. I mean it's the nature of a sub-based launches that there's some ambiguity around who's responsible. And so all of that felt like, you know, if you're going to try to build a more interesting, nuanced, complicated scenario, that those all felt like good ingredients.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, I think that's right. And maybe an unattributed launch, a single missile by an unknown actor, maybe that isn't the most likely scenario, but in some ways it's the one that focuses our attention on the structure of the problem. When I was watching the movie, one of the words that kept coming to mind to me thematically was humbling. At the opening shots of the sequence, there's a kind of buildup of this awe-inspiring military-industrial complex with this 24-7 watch floors, satellites surrounding the globe, incredibly competent, practiced national security officials who have gone through their reps, their sequences, they know every move to make. And technology beyond belief. And as the movie goes on, these systems start to buckle under what is an impossible set of dilemmas. And really, the situation itself is kind of the villain of the movie. Yeah. Was that fair to say?
Noah Oppenheim: Absolutely. I think it's very well put and astutely observed. I mean, so much of this is about our effort to impose the illusion of control over what is ultimately a force that is uncontrollable. You see that theme operating on a number of levels. One is missile defense. I I think going back to SDI and Star Wars and Reagan. Many folks have chased this, um, very comforting illusion that we could solve the nuclear problem by building an impenetrable shield, and we could all retreat under that dome and then the rest of the world to hell with it. And we'll be all safe underneath that, underneath that dome. It turns out, um you know, as the movie explores and as many people have subsequently observed and written about, uh, building an impenetrable missile defense system. Very hard, very hard physics problem to solve, maybe unsolvable. Um, and we've certainly not succeeded in doing it thus far. Um, similarly, we have all of these handbooks and processes and plans for what is an unimaginable scenario that, you know, if somebody launches a world destroying weapon our way, there are these literally in many cases, books, binders that you, these folks have been trained to open up and, and turn to page one and go through the steps. Um, and I think that there's a comfort in that because it's like, okay. And, you know, I know what to do if this happens, but I, I think that it may be a false comfort because, um, no process is perfect. No technology is, uh, infallible and all of it relies ultimately at the end of the day on human beings. And, yeah, you know, those human beings do rehearse, do practice. But on the day that it actually happens. Maybe they didn't get enough sleep the night before. Maybe they're fighting with their wife. Maybe their kid is sick. Maybe they are hungover. And there's no way to perfectly account for those kinds of variables.
Jon Bateman: Okay, couple rich topics to dive into here. First of all, missile defense. You know, it strikes me that this is one of the ways in which a real life nuclear crisis might actually be a lot harder than what's presented in the movie, right? I mean, in the move, a single warhead could even, it's conceivable that we could use our ground-based interceptors to shoot down a single, you know, the odds are not as comforting as one might think if you understand. These systems, and I think you portray them quite realistically in the film, but actually if the United States were under attack by a large wave of missiles from Russia or China, there's no sense in which the expert military planners believe that these systems would protect us. And yet, the Trump administration is actually doubling down on this. Trump has announced what I think he calls a golden dome for America. Um, invoking the, the kind of brand of the sort of the dome brand that people associate with Israeli, so I spent a lot of money on that. Um, but that's not going to probably help us avoid what you describe in the movie.
Noah Oppenheim: Well, I, you know, I can say our current system of ground-based interceptors, we have left fewer than 50, so in the entire arsenal. So to your point, if there were ever a wave of warheads heading our way, you know if the system worked perfectly, we could only knock down 50 of them. So, you're correct. We do not have an adequate shield or intercept system today. Whether one can ultimately be built, whether, you know, a golden dome is achievable, I don't know. But I just know that in this moment in time and thus far, it's been a problem that's very hard to solve. And I think that the Iron Dome system, which knocks down a different kind of projectile in Israel, right? Iron Dome is able to knock lower, slower moving rockets out of the sky with great success, although only like 80, 85%, but still great success. Um, and I think that that has led people to. Believe that, oh, this, this is easy. They could do it there, but those, like I say, those, those those weapons are moving much slower, lower altitudes and the ICBM threat is much, much more difficult to, to counteract.
Jon Bateman: And to your point about, you know, Star Wars in the 1980s, that was a period where nuclear technology was more well-known to the public, where, you know, a presidential candidate might have gotten on a debate stage and actually made a technological or strategic critique of missile defense and Americans might've been prepared to have that conversation. You know, right now we're, we're very far away from that. Hopefully, your movie. We'll do something about that. I wanted to return to this issue of the human element. This is very effectively dramatized in the movie. One thing that you do is you show characters who are very well-prepared. They've trained a thousand times, but never before the real thing. And so we see them almost bargaining with reality. This must be a drill. This must a false signal. I'm sure the missile defense will work. Someone will take. This problem away from us. And then as those hopes fade away, very human responses, praying, sweating, vomiting, freezing, calling your family. Walk us through how you think a real human being might respond in what I would say would be the most profound moment of in human history? A true hinge of humankind that no human has ever faced before. How would someone respond to that?
Noah Oppenheim: I think in as many ways as there are types of people in the world, I think everyone would respond differently. But I think that to your point, it's a scenario that the human mind fractures in any attempt to wrap itself around. I don't think it's within our capability to understand the end of the world, the end mankind, the end civilization. And so I think any range of responses is entirely rational. I don't think there is an irrational response to an irrational situation. And this is precisely that. I mean... I would not blame anyone for walking out. I wouldn't blame anyone for abandoning their post to spend the final moments of their life with their family. I would admire those who stay on duty and try to solve the problem to the end. And I certainly wouldn't cast any aspersions on somebody who just buckles and collapses in a puddle. I think it's, I don't think any of us can appreciate what it would be like if this were to actually happen. You know, you see in the movie, you know, Tracy Letts plays the commander of STRATCOM and does such an extraordinary job of it. And you know what's interesting, one of the things that I should say was interesting to us is, is that the people at STRATCOM, they rehearsed this 400 times a year on average, they told us, so, you know, more than twice a day. And that makes sense, right? It's the same, I guess, you know, it's part of the reason why soldiers train with live fire. It's if you do something enough and you kind of acclimate your body to a situation enough times, it's you're less likely to panic and you're more likely to stay calm and follow the steps in the process and all the rest. And, and Most of the people on in our film do do that to some extent, you know, there's not a lot of absolute dereliction of duty because I think these people are very serious, well-intentioned, responsible, smart and well-trained. And I think we wanted to reflect that. That being said, a couple of things. One, while STRATCOM rehearses it 400 times a year, the president of the United States, the person who in our system is the only one who has to make this decision in the end, he or she has probably never rehearsed it. And, you know, and all the experts we talked to, we said, how often does the president go participate in nuclear drill? And they said, pretty much never. The last president who participated in nuclear drills was like Nixon. I mean, they don't do it. They get a briefing, but they get a brief when they come into office. About the military aid who follows them with the football and how that system works and what options they're gonna see if that nuclear decision handbook is ever opened up and placed in front of them. Most of the presidents who've received that briefing going back to Kennedy have walked out of it absolutely appalled, like just horrified by what they heard. And some have taken steps, Nixon ordered a reevaluation of our systems. Reagan kind of decided for himself that he was never going to, you know, retaliate no matter what. But they don't then, you, know, once a week go through a drill where somebody says to them, if this happens, here's how it works. So we were left in a situation where the person was the most power has the least practice, the least expertise. And so thinking about that was another thing we wanted to center in the film.
Jon Bateman: My sense is the last president who really was seized with this problem was Obama. And just to be clear, all of our presidents have, have grappled with this President Trump for all his kind of heedlessness on the world stage. He really does seem to have a profound respect and fear for nuclear war. You can hear that in how he talks about it. Um, President Biden, his Ukraine policy was deeply shaped by the desire to avoid a nuclear escalation. With Russia, but neither of those presidents have really done anything to dismantle this decision-making structure that creates the dilemma, to reduce the number of warheads, to replenish arms control, to try to slow down the system. I think the last one to really do that was Obama, and for the intent to do so, he was given this kind of precipitous Nobel Peace Prize. Which even he understood was a little absurd, but ultimately he was boxed in by domestic politics and by the machine that didn't want to see it happen.
Noah Oppenheim: I take some encouragement from the fact that, you know, this is one of those big existential problems that it's easy to believe is, is just so big and intractable that there's nothing we can do, but there actually is a great kind of track record if you go back of making positive progress, like, I mean, you know. At the end of the Cold War, there were like 30,000 warheads. We've got it way down from where its peak was at the end of the cold war. Um, we have a precedent when it comes to countries giving up nuclear, their nuclear arsenal, you know, apartheid South Africa had six warheads and they gave up. Um, so it's not like we've never turned the tide in the right direction on this issue. We, we, have, um, but what it seems to require is the public's engagement, which is one of the reasons again, we made the movie which is to say like the more people involved in this, thinking about it, talking about it. The more likely it is that the policymakers and the politicians might, might do something about it and there are positive examples for reducing this danger.
Jon Bateman: I really appreciate that Noah because I think for people of my generation, it's hard to remember that there once was mass politics around nuclear weapons. There was a very significant anti-nuclear movement in the United States, Western Europe. This seemed to peak in the 80s. There is a lot of fear of Reagan and the escalation with the via Union. And actually, this has something to do with filmmaking. There's a remarkable story about the movie The Day After we've mentioned already, 1983, ABC TV movie, and it had an effect on the public. Actually, Ronald Reagan, who was president of the time, watched it. This is what he wrote in his diary. It's very effective and left me greatly depressed. Whether it will be of help to the anti-nukes or not, I can't say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent. And to see that there is never a nuclear war. After that, it spread further. Congress actually passed a joint resolution wishing that the movie might be broadcast in the Soviet Union. And there are theories that this had something to do with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, one of the pillars of arms control that was signed several years later. So there is actually a precedent here for filmmakers such as yourself. Influencing the public. Is that part of your intention here and do you have hope of that?
Noah Oppenheim: Listen, it obviously smacks of hubris and sounds silly to say out loud when one is making a movie that they hope it changes the course of policy. That being said, the reason to make a movie about this subject is not to just scare the pants off people. The reason to focus on this subject, is to hopefully drive some conversation around it and, and ultimately. Some change. I mean, we would be, of course, enormously gratified if that were to happen. And to your point, I mean when President Trump has spoken about this issue, he has spoken about it with a fair amount of reverence and seriousness and seems to understand and seems to be horrified, like so many of his generation, by the prospect of these weapons being used.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, I mean, we're talking about 1980s as the moment of peak cultural penetration of these issues are one of the peaks. We all know President Trump is a man of the 80s in many respects, and he's actually written about these issues for many, many years. Just to give the other side of it, in the first Trump term, he used brinksmanship negotiation to try to do a deal with the North Koreans, threatened fire and fury upon them and said, my big red button is bigger than. Your big red button. I was working for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time. And this was one of those moments where I and other people like me were opening up websites where you could model nuclear explosions and asking ourselves questions like, could a North Korean ICBM reach Washington DC? And if so, what should I do? I mean, this is a serious conversation I had with my parents.
Noah Oppenheim: What I would say is, is that the threat has been with us, you know, for decades now, the moment that North Korea developed a nuclear warhead, that is something that unfortunately we've all had, we all should be living with on some level in the back of our mind, because at the end of the day, you know, whatever one thinks of our current leadership, the leadership of North Korea and other countries.
Jon Bateman: Leaves something to be desired.
Noah Oppenheim: So I will just say that like, you know, we that that's the point is, is that nobody, no human being should have the ability to destroy the world at their fingertips. And that, you knows, regimes rise and fall, political leaders come and go. These weapons are what we should be focused on because they're they're, they're the threat.
Jon Bateman: We've been talking about the planetary scale here and the realism that this film brought to these issues. I wanna bring it down to the very tangible human scale. It's some of the realism that you achieved in this movie was stunning to me. A couple moments that stuck out. The Office of the Secretary of Defense, it looks exactly like the real Office of the Secretariat of Defense a room I've spent some time in. Um, there was a moment in the situation room, which was also portrayed very realistically where one character hands a challenge coin to another character. This is a kind of shop worn military ritual. And it was done in the exact way that you would do this, kind of putting it in your palm and sort of slipping it to the other person in a handshake. The screens in the movie, the computer screens have. This little subtle little yellow banner designating them as top secret. If you're not looking for it, you would never notice these things. But I think part of the effect that you achieved is that people who are part of this world will recognize what they're watching, even if a general audience member won't. Why was that important to you? Why go to such lengths?
Noah Oppenheim: Well, first of all, I'm so glad that you felt that way. It was incredibly important to both Kathryn and I and the entire filmmaking team for a number of reasons. One is we felt an enormous responsibility that if you're going to bring a general audience into these rooms and show these professionals doing their jobs, we owe them the respect of rendering it accurately and authentically. That this is, these are real people who do this every day. We're doing it right now. There are people on the watch floor. There are, people at STRATCOM, um, and they live with this pressure so that the rest of us don't have to, they are working to keep us safe each and every day, um. Almost without exception again, like they're incredibly responsible, thoughtful, serious people, and. They deserve their reality to be rendered accurately. Um, so that's number one. And we were fortunate in that we had a... Working with us from the research and writing stage straight through production people who had been In each of these rooms worked in these places So if we're filming in the White House Situation Room set we had Larry Pfeiffer Who was the former director of the Whitehouse Situation Room on set every day? You know Kathryn and her production designer named Jeremy Hindle who's brilliant production designer did severance just won the Emmy for Severance they were allowed access to the Battle Deck at STRATCOM. I mean, I couldn't take pictures, but part of Jeremy's genius is complete photographic memory. So much so that when we were filming that set, we had several people who had either formerly or currently worked at STRATCOM, who were with us, some of whom are background extras in those scenes. And when they walked on that set. Their jaws dropped. They said, this is STRATCOM down to the grain of wood. It was they were blown away by the accuracy. And again, that was important to us. And it was, you know, you know, a testament to Kathryn and Jeremy that those kind of visual details were all gotten right. But you know it feels like if you're going to tell people this is what those rooms look like we should get it right.
Jon Bateman: I think one critical piece of the film that bears on what we're talking about, that we have not talked about yet, but we have to is the time urgency of what the characters experience. So from launch detection to landing in the continental United States, I believe the film gives about 18, 19 minutes. That's how long it would take in real life. It's such a short period of time that you actually cannot depict it in a feature length film. Unless you have some clever structural tricks, which you and Kathryn bring to bear here, tell me about that. Tell me about the tyranny of the clock and how that affects everything that happens in the film and would affect a real life nuclear crisis.
Noah Oppenheim: If you talk to nuclear policy experts, they will tell you that there are two things that scare them most sole authority and decision time. So, you know, sole authority is this idea that we've alluded to before, which is that the president in the United States has the sole authority to make a decision about the use of nuclear weapons. Doesn't need any consensus. Doesn't a vote in the cabinet or Congress or the joint chiefs, one guy or woman gets to decide that's scary in and of itself. The second thing is this idea of decision time that most people don't appreciate these weapons move so fast. You know, the Pacific launch scenarios is a good scenario because you've got that 20 minutes. If a submarine off the Atlantic coast launches, you're talking about 10 to 12 minutes, uh, before that weapon could hit the United could hit, um, you know, Washington, DC, for instance. So we wanted the audience to understand that, you know a, that it's that short of time, 18 minutes. And B, we wanted the audience to experience it on a visceral level, to see what it feels like when 18 minutes unfolds in real time, because it's not enough time to wrap your head around anything, let alone wrap your hat around the potential end of the world and be asked to make a decision about it. And the other thing that's kind of interesting and scary is we built all the plans that you see, the processes, the procedures, we built those. During the Cold War, iteratively, in a desire to maintain a credible second strike threat, meaning we wanted the Soviets to believe that they could not get away with a first strike, that if they tried to launch a wave of missiles at us, we needed them to believe that we would be able to retaliate before our command and control centers were destroyed, before our arsenals were destroyed on the ground. And so in order for that to be the case, We have built a system that facilitates speed in, in using nuclear weapons. We've made it as easy as possible for the president of the United States to retaliate. Um, and so the collision of those things, a ticking clock, a really easy press of the button running from your life, running for your life at the same time, because of course it's like, he's going to be sitting still when this is happening. They're going to evacuate the president. Um, we wanted to kind of depict, in the scenario that we show.
Jon Bateman: It's such a short period of time that things like who can you get on the phone, right? Does someone drop off the call because they lose reception? Are they in a cab? These actually become essential. And then your point about one person, the president of the United States, someone who is credited in the film only as POTUS. So you're kind of foregrounding this national security role that this person has been thrust into. And, you know, in many ways, this is another... Part of the movie that I actually thought you were kind of going easy on the audience because POTUS in the film, he is a robust thinker. He is with it. He's described as reading newspapers, he listens to podcasts, he's taking these challenges seriously. Not necessarily the case for all of our recent presidents, but you also portray him as recognizably human. He complains about his knees, his insoles, we see him yawning, we him panting, you know, we see him. Recalling the last time he was in church. Yeah. This is a single human being at the most important moment in his life, the most important moment of human history. Is that a good system?
Noah Oppenheim: Well, you, you again, you've asked the, the exact right question, which is should any human being, no matter of their qualities, no matter how wonderful they are, be put in a situation where they're asked to make a decision like this. Um, and I think all the choices that you describe, he's not a superhero. He's not Jeb Bartlett or Harrison Ford in Air Force One, because we don't have those in the real world, nor is he a buffoon. He, he, he not, he is not an idiot. He's, not reckless. Um, he has not careless. He's just a normal human being. The kind of human being that we've often had in that, in that chair. Um, and even in what is in many ways, the best case scenario, a thoughtful, serious person. It's still impossible. And it's still horrifying to think that that guy or gal as the case, may be someday, would be asked to do something like this, would be asked to make a rational call under those circumstances.
Jon Bateman: So you and Kathryn, the crew and cast, you really are making a concerted effort to reach people with this film. And I saw this film at a private screening in Washington DC alongside other think tankers, nuclear experts, journalists. Hopefully you guys are trying to get this film to members of Congress, to senior officials in the executive branch. I'd love to hear about the reaction so far. And especially from insiders, policymakers, opinion shapers, what are you hearing?
Noah Oppenheim: So we are making those efforts. We're going to continue to make those efforts, um, you know, so far the reaction from, from the policy community and the expert community has been phenomenal. I mean, as you would imagine with a group like that, there's a robust debate discussion over, over some of the minutiae, but, uh, but I, I say with all humility that the overwhelming response has been that the film largely gets it right. Um, it, both in the details and in the broad strokes, um, and I love and welcome the conversation about all the rest, because I think, you know, that's part of the fun of making a movie like this is, is to hopefully generate that kind of, that kind of dialog. Um, the movie goes up on Netflix on October 24th, everyone with Netflix will be able to see it, you now on their couch, it's been in theaters now for, uh, for a bit, um people can still go see it in theaters. And yeah, I mean, I think hopefully the more of the general public, the more of a general audience is exposed to it, the larger conversation takes place. You know, our, our hope, our goal would be to, you know, to penetrate, you know, the halls of Congress, the white house, you know, other pieces of the executive branch and involve as many people as we can in the conversation.
Jon Bateman: I am a minutiae enjoyer, but I have to say, I talked to nuclear experts about the film and the ones that I spoke to who are very credible found it profoundly realistic. I actually wanted to share with you another quote. So we've been talking about Fail Safe from 1965, masterpiece. And I think the movie that maybe your film is most similar to in many ways would urge people to watch it. So it was a product of its time. And after the credits rolled, a title card came on the screen that said the following, “The producers of this film wish to stress that it is the stated position of the Department of Defense and the United States Air Force that a rigidly enforced system of safeguards and controls ensure that occurrences such as those depicted in this story cannot happen.” My question to you Noah, and it's kind of again, product of his time.
Noah Oppenheim: I love those cards. So good, right? I feel like Crimson Tide had a card similar to that of like, you know, anyway, go ahead, yeah.
Jon Bateman: So there's no similar card in your movie and my sense is no one in the government would have the gall to actually make such a claim about your movie because it is a roughly truthful depiction of these awesome dilemmas that we've created.
Noah Oppenheim: I appreciate that. I hope you're right. That was, well, I hope you're, right. But I also, you know, it's the, that's the tragedy of it all would be better if we were wrong. Yeah, it would be much better for all of us if this were a elaborate fantasy. But unfortunately, you know, again, this, as I mentioned, this started this whole film began with just Kathryn and I posing a series of questions to people who have worked at the highest levels of the Defense Department and the White House and just asking them, how would this actually unfold? And these were the answers they gave us. And so it was a journalistic endeavor in many ways from the very beginning, although it's a hypothetical.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, a journalistic endeavor by a filmmaker who is a former journalist. And I think that's actually important to the way you made the movie. Let me, let me just end the conversation here by asking, uh, what gives you hope? What are you seeing or would like to see that would comfort you that we're a long way from solving these problems, but that we might start to turn in the right direction.
Noah Oppenheim: People don't remember, which is fine. It's understandable, but there is a precedent for dealing with this issue. Right. We, we have seen the world's powers, most bitter enemies get together across the table and not only agree to, but actually carry out a reduction in their nuclear stockpiles. We have seen countries give up their nuclear weapons. So there is every reason to believe that we could achieve that again. Um and reverse the tide in that way, if there was enough public pressure on the policy makers. So that to me is the biggest cause for hope. And more philosophically, these weapons are manmade. We created the problem, which means we have it within our capacity to solve it. And I think last thing I would say is, that's been encouraging is, you know, relates back to this incredible community of, of nuclear policy experts and thinkers, the eagerness to invite a bigger conversation. You know, nobody is slamming the door and saying, don't look in here or you guys don't need to know this. We've people were so happy to talk to us and share their concerns, their expertise, the details of how these systems work. They want people to understand. This threat because they live with it every day, right? It's the, you know, it's not easy for them to sleep. So they, they want the rest of us, you know, they're welcoming the rest of us into this conversation. And I think that's also encouraging because you do have an incredible community of people who have great expertise, who know the path to potential solutions far better than I do. And they are, they are sitting there waiting for people to knock on their door and ask them how we can make this better.
Jon Bateman: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as you say, not only have there been times in the past where we've gotten better grips on the nuclear threat from a policymaking perspective, better diplomacy, better guardrails, but also this has been connected to times when there was a mass political awareness and interest in these topics. And that is achievable again. So in many ways, this is a movie whose time has come. Congratulations on the remarkable achievement. I urge people to go out and see it if they haven't already. And thanks for coming on the podcast.
Noah Oppenheim: Thank you so much, Jon. I really appreciate it.
