From Cold War Certainty to Modern Chaos: How A House of Dynamite Captures the New Nuclear Reality
In an era where the geopolitical landscape shifts with dizzying velocity and the specter of nuclear catastrophe feels less like Cold War nostalgia and more like imminent possibility, Kathryn Bigelow returns to what she does best: forcing us to confront the uncomfortable realities of modern warfare. Her latest cinematic endeavor, A House of Dynamite, arriving in select theaters and on Netflix this Friday, is perhaps her most claustrophobic and urgently terrifying work yet—a real-time thriller that compresses existential dread into a mere 20 minutes of screen time.
The premise is deceptively simple, which is precisely what makes it so devastating. An intercontinental ballistic missile of unknown origin is hurtling toward American soil, destination: Chicago. The fictional president of the United States, along with military advisors and defense personnel, has less than twenty minutes and frustratingly scant information to determine whether to launch a retaliatory strike. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of Russian roulette, played with the lives of millions.
For screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, the film began with a single, haunting question—one that undoubtedly kept him awake at night and will likely do the same for audiences. What unfolds is not a story of incompetence or villainy, but something far more unsettling: a scenario where everyone does everything correctly, and yet the system itself remains fundamentally, catastrophically broken.
Bigelow and Oppenheim make deliberate, almost radical choices in their construction of this nightmare. The president is portrayed as rational, even affable—a far cry from the bombastic caricatures that populate much of contemporary political cinema. Military personnel adhere meticulously to protocol. The commanding general remains unruffled and reliable, the picture of professional competence. “We did everything right, right?” one officer asks his colleagues with palpable desperation. The film’s answer is a resounding yes—but that correctness offers no comfort whatsoever when the house of dynamite we’ve collectively constructed can detonate within minutes, erasing entire cities and their populations.
The film opens with disarming banality: two military personnel at Fort Greely, a U.S. missile-defense installation in Alaska, engaging in the kind of mundane office chatter that could easily be mistaken for a Saturday Night Live sketch about that insufferable coworker. Then, with whiplash-inducing abruptness, the tone shifts. An ICBM they’ve been monitoring suddenly changes trajectory, its arc flattening ominously. It’s headed directly for American soil, and nobody knows who launched it.
Cut to the White House Situation Room, where watch-floor duty officers scramble as they realize Chicago has eighteen minutes before impact. The United States has precisely one opportunity to intercept the missile—but as Oppenheim grimly notes, America possesses fewer than fifty ground-based interceptors in its entire arsenal, with a success rate of merely 61 percent under controlled test conditions. “When you’re testing a system, you’re able to control a lot,” he explains. “So it’s likely that in a real-world scenario, the success rate would be even lower.”
This is the crux of Bigelow’s thesis: During the Cold War, the adversary was known—the Soviet Union. Today, nine nations possess nuclear capabilities, exponentially increasing the possibility of error, rogue actors, or the total information vacuum depicted in the film. And the arms race? It’s only accelerating.
In accompanying interviews, Tom Nichols, a national-security writer at The Atlantic, provides sobering context about contemporary nuclear proliferation and how such scenarios might unfold under leadership driven by motivations far less rational than the film’s fictional president.
A House of Dynamite doesn’t offer easy answers because there are none. It simply asks us to stare into the abyss we’ve created—and recognize that the fuse is already lit.
