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On the morning of October 10, 1983, in the rocky hills of Camp David, President Ronald Reagan was treated to an early screening of one of the year’s most anticipated films, The Day After, a two-hour dystopian imagining of what nuclear apocalypse might look like in the United States.
In a matter of weeks, the movie would air on television and have a profound effect on a politically polarised American public. More than 100 million people would watch scenes of a mushroom cloud swelling over Kansas, with many citizens instantly vaporised. Historians would credit the film with helping sway Americans against Reagan’s “peace through strength” approach to nuclear conflict. Reagan, too, gradually pivoted, in rhetoric, in behaviour, in policy.
More than 40 years later, a new nuclear war movie hopes to inspire a similar awakening. But Kathryn Bigelow’s buzzy procedural, A House of Dynamite, is less interested in the effects of a nuclear attack, focusing its attention instead on the processes designed to keep Americans – and the rest of the world – safe from annihilation.
It’s now Netflix’s most-watched movie in the world, garnering 22.1 million views in three days and launching fiery discourse among scholars and normies alike. Within a week, the film’s official Reddit thread has clocked more than 3700 responses, while military defence experts and policy advocates have picked apart the movie’s themes and details.
Idris Elba plays the US president in A House of Dynamite.
According to a Bloomberg News report, the Pentagon waded into the discourse, in an internal memo sent earlier this month by the Missile Defence Agency. That document told recipients to prepare to “address false assumptions, provide correct facts and a better understanding” about the weapons depicted in the movie. (The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.)
But most nuclear policy experts say A House of Dynamite accurately captures how fragile and fallible America’s nuclear defences actually are.
Garrett Graff, historian and author of the 2025 bestseller The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing the Atomic Bomb, put it this way: “Everything changes when a missile is in the air. At that point, you have already lost. We stand much closer to a nuclear precipice than most of us realise.”
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In A House of Dynamite, the characters tasked with saving the world are sleep-deprived parents, bureaucrats navigating divorces and new jobs, intelligence officers who groan about receiving a work call while they’re on vacation. Military jargon rattles through the dialogue. The events of the film – a 30-minute sequence repeated three times, through different perspectives – occur in real time. (Here come spoilers.)
Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim said he and Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker, committed early in the filmmaking process to being as accurate and authentic as possible. They worked with more than a dozen technical experts, including people who have held senior roles at the Pentagon, CIA and the White House.
Still, experts have debated the level of accuracy and plausibility in the film, which chronicles the government’s response to a single intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched by an unidentified attacker.
Anthony Ramos plays one of the marines at Alaska’s Fort Greely.
“Approximately three minutes ago we detected an ICBM over the Pacific,” a general flatly informs a wide-eyed group of government officials in the film’s opening sequence. “Current flight trajectory is consistent with impact somewhere in the continental United States.” The estimated time until the nuke lands somewhere in the heartland (Chicago, it turns out): 18 minutes.
“I’ve seen people quibbling with the idea that we would not know where the launch came from or who was responsible,” said Mark Melamed, who helps lead the Global Nuclear Policy Program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based nonprofit group. Other points of contention: that the president (played by Idris Elba) would face such immense time pressure in the scenario outlined in the film – since it’s just one weapon – and that any adversary would launch just one nuke at the US.
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Oppenheim has said the inciting incident is the biggest creative liberty the film takes. But what follows is “a series of decisions that all fall within the realm of possible to probable,” he said. “Somebody might make a different decision if this were to unfold.”
According to Melamed, “These are all fair points for debate. Mileage may vary in terms of how plausible you find individual elements of this scenario. We’ve never seen nuclear weapons used in the world that we currently inhabit, so I think it’s totally fair to say we don’t know exactly how that would play out.”
It is true the US has a robust missile defence system – but not a foolproof one. In A House of Dynamite, two land-based missiles are launched from Fort Greely in Alaska to intercept the incoming enemy one. Both fail.
Tracy Letts as General Anthony Brady and Gbenga Akinnagbe as Major General Steven Kyle in A House of Dynamite.
“The description of it as a coin flip is generally quite accurate,” Melamed said – and that 50/50 chance is under test conditions, leading many experts to speculate that their success rate in the real world would be lower.
It is also true that, if someone were to launch a nuclear attack, the world’s leaders, their militaries and their bureaucrats would have mere minutes to talk through the most consequential decision in human history. It would take 30 minutes or less for a missile launched from the Pacific Ocean to hit the US. Launched from the Atlantic coastline, where Russian submarines regularly patrol, it would take somewhere around 10 to 12 minutes.
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Yes, Graff said, the fate of the world would be decided over a conference call while the president “and whichever senior officials happen to be reachable at that exact moment” were simultaneously being evacuated to various underground bunkers.
And yes, Graff confirmed, “the nuclear football” at the heart of America’s nuclear deterrence strategy is exactly what is depicted in the film: a plain leather briefcase with a couple of briefing binders, “filled with what is pejoratively called a ‘Denny’s Menu’ of nuclear options of ‘rare, medium, and well done.’ ” Always just steps away from the commander in chief.
That the president is the sole authority on commanding such a strike has been a core part of our nuclear policy since the Cold War, said Erin Dumbacher, the Stanton Nuclear Security senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The president is capable of launching a nuclear assault at any time – by land, by sea or by air. Theoretically, that readiness is enough to discourage the country’s enemies from attacking.
Director Kathryn Bigelow on the red carpet at A House of Dynamite’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Credit: AP
“Nuclear weapons policy is the only area where the Constitution does not require the president to seek congressional authorisation to go to war,” Dumbacher said. And what recourse is there for a president who sets off nuclear armageddon?
“Certainly, there are no guardrails on the president other than the threat of impeachment, I suppose,” Dumbacher said.
With A House of Dynamite, Bigelow expects audiences will be – ought to be – shocked by these realities. “I have a friend who saw it on a plane over the weekend and he … texted me in the middle of the night with like, the head exploding emoji,” Melamed said.
In the 21st century, the nuclear war film has become a period piece. Nuclear weapons are now little more than a plot point, just another tool in a bad guy’s arsenal. But as A House of Dynamite reminds us, we still live in the nuclear age. And indeed, we may be at a crucial turning point.
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the number of nuclear weapons in the world is increasing: Russia has been expanding its arsenal, as has China. Mounting global tensions and shifting alliances could mean that even more countries will elect to build their own stockpiles, no longer confident that the US will use its “nuclear umbrella” to protect them.
“We don’t want to think about these existential threats in this way every day and we shouldn’t,” Dumbacher said. “But we do, in fact, live in this world. And so we have to kind of take a step across or through that disbelief in order to do something about it.”
The Washington Post
