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“A House of Dynamite” is a taut, high-stakes thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow that centers on a looming nuclear threat. The film delves into the complexities of global politics and personal sacrifice as characters navigate a tense and unpredictable situation, when an unidentified ballistic missile enters American airspace. It’s already in theaters and will start streaming on Netflix on Friday. But how realistic is the scenario that “A House of Dynamite” depicts? For more than a year, Times Opinion’s series “At the Brink” has been exploring the modern nuclear age and the unique risks the current moment holds. Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury asked the series’s lead writer, W.J. Hennigan, just how worried filmgoers should be. (Mild spoilers below.) As the movie begins, Bill, there’s a lot of confidence that what the White House Situation Room is watching a harmless missile test. Is there any history of real false alarms? Oh sure, there’s been several. Perhaps the scariest incident occurred in the fall of 1983, when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were particularly bad. In September of that year, the U.S.S.R. shot down a Korean Air jet that had taken off from New York because the military mistakenly thought it was an American spy plane. All 269 people, including a U.S. congressman, were killed. A few weeks later, Soviet satellites detected that five U.S. missiles were heading toward the U.S.S.R. Fortunately, Stanislav Petrov, a duty officer at the time, had a funny feeling about what he was seeing. He thought it was strange that if the United States were willing to gamble with Armageddon, it would do so with just a handful of missiles. He deliberately disobeyed military protocol, ignored the warning because he believed it to be false, and didn’t relay the affair to senior leadership — thereby sidestepping any potential Soviet retaliatory strikes. Good thing he did. What the satellites had detected was the sun’s reflection off the clouds — not a missile attack. There’s a documentary that was made about this called “The Man Who Saved the World.” So basically it came down to one man’s gut instinct to save us from nuclear war. I bet many moviegoers who saw “A House of Dynamite” were surprised when the fictional president is asked to make the decision over whether to retaliate in only a matter of minutes — before the missile even hits. Is that how this process works? Yes, as we wrote about in our series, the U.S. president would have about 15 minutes to decide what to do in response to an incoming nuclear weapon. Once a launch is detected, which would happen immediately, it would take a bit for U.S. intelligence to sort out details on the missile, the warhead, the weapon’s trajectory, and its estimated point of impact. Once that’s completed, the government would have some idea about casualties and fallout zones. And, while in the film there is a Navy officer who explains the president’s options, the president is the only person who ultimately gets to make this decision. Right. We live in a nuclear monarchy. Only the president has the decision power to respond with a nuclear attack. It’s a quirk to our democratic system that the commander in chief has unchecked authority over the nuclear arsenal. There’s been various efforts by Congress to rein that power in, but no bill has ever come close to passing. I found the movie so lifelike as to be terrifying. Did you have any specific critiques of the accuracy of its portrayal? I didn’t see any flaws. The only thing I raised an eyebrow at was the missile early warning satellite going down, so U.S. intelligence couldn’t figure out who was responsible for the launch. There are several of those satellites, which detect the infrared emissions from the heat blasts emanating from missile and rocket launches, so the redundancy would ensure the United States early warning system wasn’t entirely blind, but I felt it was clever as a plot device to add intrigue. In the film, the United States is trying desperately to speak to counterparts in China and Russia, and struggles to even get them on the phone, much less get answers on who has launched this strike. What systems are in place in the real world to ensure there is better communication in such a scenario? Washington has maintained a hotline with Moscow since the potentially disastrous Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. I saw what this arrangement looked like last year when I went to the The National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center at the State Department. There, government officials sit all day, every day, to facilitate the information exchanges, mostly between the United States and Russia, that are required by decades-old arms control treaties and security-building agreements. The United States doesn’t have the same setup with China, but the White House does have the means to reach Chinese leadership if an emergency arises. All governments recognize the necessity to maintain these kinds of hotlines. No one wants a mistake or miscalculation to spiral out of control. “A House of Dynamite” depicts a scene where the military tries to use our missile defense apparatus to knock down the fictional projectile. There, the secretary of defense is surprised to learn that missile defense only has about a 60 percent chance of success. Are those the real odds? Yes, it’s about 55 percent. So as the secdef in the film says. It’s basically a coin toss. The defense system against ICBMs is called Ground-based Midcourse Defense. It basically involves just 44 long-range interceptors installed in silos in Alaska and California. The system is designed to blast apart a handful of missiles launched by a rogue actor, like North Korea or Iran. But if Russia or China launched the hundreds of nuclear-tipped missiles that they possess, the system would be overwhelmed and American cities would be helpless. The United States has already spent billions on the system and there is much more spending to come, thanks to President Trump’s plan for a Golden Dome, which will expand our defenses. It’s also worth pointing out that while the Ground-based Midcourse Defense has been successful 55 percent of the time, these were in highly-scripted tests where the military generally knew what to expect. War doesn’t work that way, of course. Hitting an intercontinental ballistic missile as it travels thousands of miles per hour is no easy feat. The metaphor most often used in military circles is “hitting a bullet with a bullet,” which the film mentions. But we saw last year Israel effectively take down hundreds of Iranian missiles before they hit, with some help from the U.S. and other allies. This is true. But Israel is the size of New Jersey. Not a lot of guesswork as to what targets the missiles are headed toward. The other thing about Israel’s Iron Dome defense system is that it typically intercepts relatively slow, often unguided, projectiles lobbed from nearby — not the intercontinental ballistic missile that you see in the film. Everything needs to work in concert — radars, satellite sensors, interceptors, analytical assessments — in order to detect, track and engage inbound ICBMs. One of the more human parts of the film is watching as the president and other senior officials are hustled off to bunkers while the few others who know that the bomb could soon hit are left to suffer the impact. It’s gut wrenching (and some of the strongest acting). Tell us more about these bunkers. How sure are we that they could actually survive a nuclear bomb? In the 1950s, at the beginning of the Cold War, the government built a series of secret subterranean lairs in rural Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. The most well known one, which is in the film, is called Raven Rock. Most of what I know about this site is from Garrett M. Graff’s 2017 book on the site, which he reports was built to accommodate around 1,400 people in multiple structures. It’s encased in granite and also happens to be on springs so it can sway as the ICBMs thunder down more than a quarter mile above. They’ve obviously never been tested in a real-life, all-out thermonuclear attack, but the goal of this facility is “continuity of government,” ensuring that our democratic leaders survive to govern whatever survives the attack amid smoldering radioactive ash. You visited the U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska for “At the Brink." It plays a big role in the movie. What does “A House of Dynamite” get right or wrong about that command? What we saw in the film was the spitting image of the battledeck, which is the command center buried below Stratcom’s headquarters. Maybe the filmmakers used the photos from our series, but I couldn’t see a single flaw in the set design. As for the protocol and conversations among military and political leaders, I also found that to be accurate. The president is briefed on the threat and then is confronted with the unimaginable choice on whether and how to retaliate. Millions of lives are at stake. We should all hope that nightmare never becomes reality.
