‘A House of Dynamite’ reminds us there are no good choices after a nuclear launch, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

Warning: This article contains spoilers in connection to the film, A House of Dynamite. If you have not seen the film, you are advised to read no further (and to watch the film).

Upon the abrupt ending of Kathryn Bigelow’s new drama, A House of Dynamite, the three bros in the row in front of us at the cinema all exclaimed in unison, “Whaaaat??” They had expected the film to have an ending; a resolution; a big bang for their fourteen bucks. “Congratulations” I remember uttering under my breath, “you just missed the entire point of the movie.”

A House of Dynamite is not about seeing things blow up. It is about realizing that once things are about to blow up, there is no right decision anyone can make, not even the President of the United States. (In case you haven’t seen the film, an omission you should immediately remedy, it features three versions of the same 18-minute span during which US military, officials and the US president must respond to a single nuclear missile headed for Chicago.)

The editorial pages of the Washington Post, which have become a compliant mouthpiece for the paper’s owner, Trump-supporting billionaire Jeff Bezos, couldn’t wait to nitpick at the film, desperate to find “inaccuracies.” The US president, they complained, played by Idris Elba, would not have been “alone on Marine One with one military aide” when faced with deciding what to do about the missile. 

Really? Chicago is about to be obliterated and this is what niggled at them? Doubtless the scene was done this way for dramatic effect. Their other gripe was that the greeting between the president and his deputy national security advisor was too formal. Perhaps the Post had to cling to these trivial pursuits because when it comes to the things of substance in the film, almost everyone familiar with how such a scenario would play out has called many of the depictions in it by and large chillingly accurate.

All of this was simply the Post’s way of navigating toward the central thesis of its editorial — entitled How to live in our nuclear ‘House of Dynamite — that “only deterrence, not disarmament, can actually keep the peace” and that “Mutually assured destruction works.” Houston, we’ve had a problem!

The problem we have is just how pervasive this belief is — that we are safer with nuclear weapons than without them. This is the case not only in virtually all political circles, not just the hawkish ones, but also among otherwise perfectly reasonable people. For those of us in the nuclear abolition movement, the deterrence credo is the biggest barrier against achieving our disarmament goals. That means we’ve got to keep exploding that myth, to use an unfortunate metaphor, because, as Bigelow’s film shows us, living in a house of dynamite means it will inevitably blow up.

A House of Dynamite, like Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer before it, and the Chernobyl television series before that, provide our collective anti-nuclear movements with unmissable teachable moments. We may not like everything about the choices the directors made or their fidelity to absolute fact, but they deliver our issue to a mass audience of wildly high numbers we could never dream of reaching. 

A House of Dynamite is currently the most watched film on Netflix (although for an erudition reality check, the most watched film in Netflix history is KPop Demon Hunters). Oppenheimer grossed $80.5 million in North America during its opening weekend. Chernobyl had a record-breaking 52% of its audience watching on its digital platforms, surpassing Game of Thrones, and an average of 4.7 million viewers per episode.

All of these dramas give us the chance to amplify our message. So did President Trump’s error-laden blurt last week that the US would resume testing nuclear weapons. The US Department of Energy has since explained to Trump that when it comes to “nuclear testing”, they “do not think it means what you think it means.” (If I’ve lost you, please see another popular movie, The Princess Bride.) But for a while, his remarks captured the headlines and generated a lot of ink.

To prove its point, and having clarified that  there “will not be nuclear explosions”, according to DOE Secretary Chris Wright, the White House moved quickly to authorize the launch of a Minuteman III missile from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, which landed 30 minutes later on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a typical practice exercise carried out several times a year. The Minuteman III is an intercontinental ballistic missile ground-based nuclear warhead delivery system. There was no actual nuclear warhead on the test.

Nevertheless, Trump’s confused threats before the latest test was launched, provoked an interesting debate within the nuclear disarmament movement as to how best to respond. The discussion took place on an email listserv, but I have permission from the correspondents to quote them. Many valid points were made across a spectrum of perspectives, stimulating further discourse.

The practicability of actually being able to resume genuine nuclear testing was questioned by Timmon Wallis, executive director of NuclearBan US. “It is unclear what the US could possibly test at this point — especially as the staff required to conduct such a test have all been furloughed,” Wallis said. “Even if they were immediately brought back to work, it would take them several months, if not years, to be ready for a test.” Wallis recommended against further amplifying “Trump’s confused and contradictory statement.”

“This entire subject is another Trump ‘chaos bomb’ as it were. It is a distraction,” agreed Greg Mello, founder of the Los Alamos Study Group. “Other subjects are far more important for us, IMO.” Among these, he  suggested pushing to extend the New START arms reduction treaty, the last remaining arms control treaty between the US and Russia, which expires in February 2026; and highlighting the immense costs of new nuclear weapons.

But however impracticable it may be, is an actual atomic test entirely implausible? And could Trump, in a moment of petulant machismo, just decide to blow up a nuclear weapon anyway to show off? Although such an idea might sound far-fetched, “A resumption of US nuclear testing is a long-standing objective of Project 2025,” Michael Christ, executive director of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, reminded us.

The Heritage Foundation report, Project 2025, otherwise known as Coups for Dummies, has served as the Trump administration’s policy playbook on virtually every issue. On page 399 of Project 2025 it recommends: “Reject ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and indicate a willingness to conduct nuclear tests in response to adversary nuclear developments if necessary.”

Consequently, Christ, whose organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, advises, “The anti-nuclear movement should speak out clearly and forcefully now, before it’s too late. (Ironically, Alfred Nobel, after whom the prizes are named, was the inventor of dynamite.)

Kathleen Sullivan co-chair of the Nuclear Truth Project said: “I do not support the idea of pretending that this is more of Trump‘s typical bellicose bluster. Anything that is said into the public record should be dealt with publicly.” Nuclear tests, she added, “are not merely a balancing of ledgers between nuclear armed nations. Nuclear tests are explicit acts of violence against all living beings. Testing nuclear weapons is using nuclear weapons.”

While I am a vehement opponent of “all of the above” when it comes to energy choices, I think in this instance we have a marvelous opportunity to embrace just that. We can both dismiss Trump’s typically deranged, inflammatory and dead wrong utterances, and seize the opportunity that raising the subject of nuclear testing provides us by bridging to our core message — that nuclear weapons are insane and we should neither test nor use them but instead get rid of them entirely. We can also remind people of all the considerable benefits to be gained by redirecting the massive spending on nuclear weapons into everyday human needs.

Among other things, we have logic and common sense on our side. Despite what the hawks at the Washington Post might declare, it is abundantly obvious that having no nuclear weapons in the world is the surest path to peace. That’s also because we can’t be certain that nuclear weapons won’t be used accidentally or by a mad man (hello!). And deterrence relies on having one hundred percent certainty it will work, always and forever. That’s clearly one hundred percent unrealistic.

Oddly, even the Washington Post seemed to concede this in the end. In a curious non sequitorial last line in its editorial it extolled the virtues of Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense boondoggle, “even if it ultimately works half the time,” because “just as missile defenses can fail, so too can deterrence.”

Now there’s coherence for you. We should welcome a $25 billion downpayment of taxpayer money on a missile defense system that will only work half the time so that we can continue to spend $50 billion a year maintaining nuclear weapons we supposedly won’t use and $1.5-$2 trillion over the next three decades “modernizing” them, just in case none of this works after all and someone else does use theirs against us, at which point we can assume that about 50 percent of them will reach their target.

We can knock these specious arguments out of the air with a far greater success rate than Trump’s Golden Dome or Fort Greely’s missile interceptors, the ones that failed so drastically in A House of Dynamite. With all the well-versed arguments of our colleagues in our armory, let’s get to work. Fire away!

Headline photo (cropped) from the Wellcome Collection/Wikimedia Commons.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the founder of Beyond Nuclear and serves as its international specialist. Her book, No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War, can be pre-ordered now from Pluto Press.