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Kathryn Bigelow's upcoming film A House of Dynamite looks like a timely warning about the dangers that the world's nuclear weapons pose to the world
It feels like the advent of nuclear war is becoming the next big prestige thing for directors to tackle. Christopher Nolan rightly earned his accolades for Oppenheimer two years ago, while Denis Villeneuve signed on to develop an adaptation of Annie Jacobsen's chilling moment-by-moment novel Nuclear War: A Scenario (although he seems to have put that aside, and his adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama in favor of Dune: Part 3) and James Cameron has said that Ghosts of Hiroshima is next on his docket after Avatar: Fire and Ash comes out in December.
Kathryn Bigelow (K-19: The Widow Maker, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) is beating them to the punch with her next film, A House of Dynamite, which will briefly hit theaters in October before streaming on Netflix at the end of the month. The streaming service just unveiled a first look at the film, which features a chilling narration from Carl Sagan about life existing on a pale blue dot.
The film is written by Noah Oppenheim and it follows a crisis that arises when the US detects a single missile headed towards the country. The film recently premiered at the Venice film festival, and Deadline's Pete Hammond has a rundown of the film's plot in his review: it follows officials in the White House Situation Room, STRATCOM, and the US President (played by Idris Elba) as they have just minutes to figure out who fired the missile and how to retaliate.
This feels very much like two books that I've read: Jacobsen's, which plays with a similar premise and follows the story minute by minute (it's good until it goes a bit off the rails) and Jeffrey Lewis's The 2020 Commission Report On The North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against The U.S.: A Speculative Novel, which recounts a nuclear strike against the US by the North Koreans in a similar fashion.
Andrew Liptak
Lewis is a leading figure in the world of nuclear proliferation: he's the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and writes a blog, Arms Control Wonk. I interviewed him about his book came out in 2018, where he noted that he had been writing a lot about North Korea's nuclear program and how the US's own strategic stance could break down in the event of an attack.
Essentially, he uses the book to highlight how quickly a nuclear war can escalate: an ICBM equipped with a nuclear weapon can reach its target around the world in a frighteningly short amount of time, and because the US and USSR had adopted a strategy of hitting back, working one's way down the decision tree to figure out one's next steps takes place in a very, very small window of time.
Andrew Liptak
A big part of the issue here is the sheer size of the stockpile of nuclear warheads that we're amassed over the course of the cold war, slowly building up our reserves to counter the Soviet Union's arsenal. As the nuclear club has grown bigger (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, the UK, and Pakistan have all developed nuclear weapons)[1], so too has the threat of escalation into a global conflict that devastates the war in a matter of hours.
Lewis made an interesting point when I interviewed him:
The way that I treated that historical and structural baggage kind of pins down the people who have to make the decisions, and they’re not really free in an important sense to make any decisions. They’re stuck in a really specific circumstance that puts them in a particular direction. What I care about is how these factors constrained someone like a chief of staff, who can see that this is going a bad way. But because of those structural factors, they can’t figure out how to get out of the rut.
In a lot of ways, we've boxed ourselves into a corner with these decisions already, and if a nuclear warhead is launched, it's a pretty sure thing that it won't be the last on that day.
South Africa, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus all had nuclear weapons, but gave them up. ↩︎
From the looks of things, Bigelow is playing with a similar idea: if the U.S. detects a nuclear weapon headed our way, the opportunity to realistically mitigate the threat has long since passed because it's so baked into a system that moves quicker than a leader can really process.
The real chance to reduce the threat to the world is to cut down on the stockpiles of nuclear weapons: something that the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons sought to accomplish when it went into force in 1970 (and extended indefinitely in 1995), while Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons seeks to eliminate them completely (none of the nuclear-armed countries have signed onto it.)
This type of diplomatic work is difficult and requires long-term commitment from parties around the world, and it's not always effective. In 2019, President Donald Trump pulled the US from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that the US and USSR had signed in 1987, which limited both countries from producing or using missiles that could travel between ~300 to ~3000 miles. And of course, there's the ongoing issue with Iran's own nuclear ambitions and the back-and-forth on its efforts to create a nuclear bomb.
This is really the nightmare scenario, cued in by Sagan's narration. Our collective nuclear stockpile means that our existence – beyond national borders and civilization – as a species, is put in a more perilous position, one that can change because of decisions made by a very, very small handful of people.
There's a limit to what art can practically do here beyond raise awareness, but I don't think enough people truly recognize the situation we've put ourselves in, and shining a spotlight on it seems to be Bigelow's goal. Speaking in Venice during the premiere of the film, she noted that she hoped that "the film is an invitation to decide what to do about all these weapons," and that "hope against hope maybe we reduce the global stockpile someday, but in the meantime we are really living in a house of dynamite."