“A House of Dynamite”: A Review
[Spoiler Alert]
A House of Dynamite is an attempt to bring the Cold War-era nuclear crisis procedural film into our new Cool War era. That genre consists of the canonical Dr. Strangelove film and now play; FAIL-SAFE and its live made-for TV remake; the TV miniseries World War III; and the important but buried under immediate post-Cold War debris, By Dawn’s Early Light. Any approach to A House of Dynamite should take into consideration two things: how does it hold up as a film, and how does it hold up when compared to procedural and strategic reality?
A House of Dynamite is essentially a play in three acts, with concurrent activity between the character in the acts. The basic scenario in the film is the launch of an unattributable ICBM that is detected late by the U.S. missile warning and interception system, the interception fails, and the characters have 18 minutes to react to the situation before it hits Chicago. The film is nearly two hours long, so the overlapping narrative, which is arguably overloaded with what we could call “human meddling” errrr…..”human interest,” tends to detract from the tension of the situation. In Dr. Strangelove and FAIL-SAFE, the drama can play out over hours and come to a crescendo at the end because the scenario is bomber-based and it takes time for them to get there, thus allowing a build-up of tension as the principles figure out a response. World War III similarly is about an escalatory situation that comes out of a covert action gone wrong, and takes time to build up to an ending which is almost as inconclusive as A House of Dynamite’s. By Dawn’s Early Light’s drama is driven by a series of pulses: the first is, like A House of Dynamite, an unattributed single missile attack against Russia and the immediate ICBM response, followed by the trials and travails of a B-52 crew in the middle of all of this, followed by the search for a Presidential successor, followed by a bifurcated command structure, one trying to stop the war, the other trying to accelerate it. This pulse-like structure maintains audience tension. A House of Dynamite narrative structure gives us something different.
The three-act structure allows us to engage with some of the players to some depth before the situation abruptly shifts to the next player. Where it works is demonstrating that a crisis scenario like this will occur when it is the most inconvenient for people: the officer on watch at the Fort Greely ballistic missile defence unit is in the middle of a cell phone argument with a wife that is divorcing him; the head of the White House Situation Room has been up all night with a sick kid; the President is at a political sports event for children. This tracks with General “Buck” Turgidson on the can when the phone call comes in that Ripper has launched his B-52’s, or when a B-52 crew member is in the shower in the Alert Facility when the klaxon goes off in By Dawn’s Early Light.
The idea that all the protagonists are pre-stressed before the crisis starts is an important aspect of A House of Dynamite. All of our other nuclear procedural films start off with a relatively non-stressed baseline: the crisis is initiated and everybody reacts accordingly (the exception is Fritz Weaver’s Colonel Cascio in FAIL-SAFE). This isn’t so in A House of Dynamite. There is a freak-out at Fort Greely launch control; the FEMA representative character, the White House Situation Room characters, the Secretary of Defense, POTUS….everybody is distracted with everyday life and has difficulty shifting into crisis mode when the shit hits the fan. Having the young, harried, deputy NSC staffer stand in for the National Security Advisor running from public transit to the White House while having problems with his phone was another. This I believe is realistic in our present circumstances. As we saw in January-February 2022, the level of disbelief, especially in Washington DC, reached staggering levels.
In the Cold War, repetitive drills and training, constant exercises: these were mechanisms used to overcome chaos or at least manage it so that POTUS could make a decision on authorizing nuclear weapons use during a crisis (this is, incidentally, depicted in The Sum of All Fears at the beginning, a film situated in the post Cold War 1990s). The world of A House of Dynamite seems bereft of that. In the 1950s Eisenhower participated in his own evacuation by helicopter from the White House during the Operation ALERT series of exercises held annually. What happened after the Cold War in this realm is obscure but it is not beyond the realm of possibility to suggest that those mechanisms have atrophied after 9-11. Those who have been forcibly conscripted by history to fight the Cool War may not be made of the sterner stuff that their Cold War predecessors were, having not gone through anything like the crucible of the Second World War or the introduction of the age of multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons. SECDEF doing a Forrestal off the Pentagon roof may not be so unrealistic today.
The most realistic aspect of human reaction to the crisis: everyone is using their cell phones and violating EMSEC to communicate with loved ones, including the SECDEF. The lack of self-discipline and accountability extant under the stress of a crisis like this is totally believable today. Less so during, say, the first half of the Cold War. (One wonders if Steve Bannon is an Designated Evacuee or if he will have to wrestle Steve Miller for a seat on Marine One).
However, there are too many character storylines that simply trail off. This includes the FEMA representative, who winds up at Site R (she should be at Mt Weather). The B-2 pilots don’t have anything resembling the deep dialogue between Powers Boothe and Rebecca de Mornay in By Dawn’s Early Light (let alone Maj Kong and the B-52 crew in Dr Strangelove). They are more FAIL-SAFE-like. The same goes for the characters introduced from the White House Situation Room. Perhaps it was a narrative necessity but there is the feeling that there are far too many threads hanging in the wind at the end. Indeed, the ending of A House of Dynamite is possibly the most fatal weakness of the film and is reminiscent of the ending of the TV miniseries World War III.
So how does A House of Dynamite hold up in the practical areas? The pieces on the nuclear chessboard in this film have been updated: there is the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) facility at Ft. Greely, Alaska; the White House Situation Room; the White House emergency operations bunker; STRACOM’s underground crisis management facility, and even the SBX floating radar station. Airborne command posts do not figure in this drama as they do in By Dawn’s Early Light, though Marine One does for a time. The film places an emphasis on the BMD system and walks the viewer through an engagement procedure…to the point the system fails. There is virtually no emphasis on the ICBM and SLBM legs of the deterrent: they are briefly noted. The B-2 scenes lack the urgency we came to expect from SAC operations as depicted in By Dawn’s Early Light and The Day After. The bulk of the action is between organizations and people in Washington DC and STRATCOM. NORAD isn’t mentioned at all, but the commander of NORTHCOM appears in a video conference.
Procedurally, there is some accuracy. The DEFCON system, for example: DEFCON 1 is not war (I’ve emphasized that for years). The National Security Conference teleconference which brings together the aerospace defence system, the strategic deterrent, and the civilian leadership looks to me what an updated version of the Cold War system looked like (it was a telephone conference then and I discuss this in detail in Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove), except today it’s a video conference with too many people injecting opinions. That’s where the dramatic tension for me went up: watching people inject irrelevant information and opinions under such a time constraint with a nuc inbound. There are authentication processes depicted in the film that look accurate.
The film’s characters make reference to “dual phenomenology” a Cold War concept whereby multiple systems had to agree that an ICBM attack was under way before the leadership could issue a response. In the Cold War this consisted of MIDAS satellites and BMEWS radar systems. In A House of Dynamite, the DSP early warning satellite constellation is referenced in that the origin of the launch of the missile against the U.S. is ambiguous because DSP did not pick it up. This is a key underpinning for the crisis and the dramatic tension that flows from it: who launched? Only later in the film does a character question what DSP did not pick it up, suggesting that a cyber event blinded DSP and that the communications for it may be compromised. This is buried too deeply in the film. More emphasis on this would have actually increased the tension for the characters as well as the audience, and it would have been a priority issue.
The failure of the BMD system in the film will be used as a political cudgel to beat BMD and its possible successors under the Trump Administration. BMD was justified in part to handle a scenario exactly like this one. Why the site launched only two interceptors in the film is explained as hold- back in case there was more “incoming.” Whether Vandenberg-based interceptors could have conducted another intercept attempt is something that should be explained away narratively. I don’t believe that BMD personnel would behave as unprofessionally in a crisis situation as they do in the film.
The attack scenario is problematic to me. The very idea of discussing the unleashing of simultaneous counterforce strikes against Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan on the bases of a single unattributed ICBM attack makes no sense to me. It would be more realistic for the U.S. to go to DEFCON 1, hold in order to deter all overt players, take the hit, see of there is more, then go after who did it. And if anybody interfered, then a Trident II SLBM enema awaits. The “spiral” theory of escalation presented by a character in the film is simplistic and unrealistic: if it was intended to suggest that there was academic unreality being injected into a real-world crisis dynamic, then it works. That said, if the incoming missile was a potential hypersonic EMP generator, then the urgency that should be in the film would be justified. A good scene is when CINCSTRATCOM and his deputy discuss the possibilities as to who is behind the attack: North Korea or Russia pretending to be North Korea using a single strike to generate chaos in the U.S. because its global situation is becoming less tenable. The two note that a submarine captain may have lost it, in reference to Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide. The hint in this discussion that this may be Nuclear Grey Zone Warfare is intriguing and tracks with work I am doing now.
This leads us to the depiction of POTUS selecting response options. The film correctly refers to OPLAN 8044. In the film the response options include Select Attack Options, Limited Attack Options, and Major Attack Options. These are visually depicted as laminated pages of three colours in a binder carried in “The Football” case by the President’s military aid. The problem of having too many options for a POTUS to select was noted in the 1970s when the SIOP was modified to include Limited Nuclear Options or LNOs. The 1960s SIOP was streamlined and clear by comparison, especially compared to the options presented in the film. It is entirely possible that an unprepared, stressed POTUS who has not really paid attention to his initial briefings on taking office and training on the system annually would flounder about at the point of decision and rely on his military aid to essentially frame his selection as depicted in A House of Dynamite. That is kind of scary. The idea that a POTUS would check with his wife via SATCOM before making a decision two minutes before impact? I’m really not sure what to say about that.
I need to note that the conversation between POTUS and his military aide on response options in the film was lifted directly from a 1980 memoir by Bill Gulley, former Director of the White House Military Office:
A very important aspect of nuclear crisis management that falls out of A House of Dynamite is how different our current Cool War situation is from the Cold War. The Cold War nuclear crisis films have two antagonists: the United States, and the Soviet Union. There is the MOLINK, the so-called Hot Line, whereby crisis communications could and did take place. Once the UK and France acquired their nuclear deterrents, similar means were established with the Soviet Union. In the film there are no reliable means to conduct crisis diplomacy with Russia, China, and North Korea simultaneously. The film depicts a telephone conversation between the Russian Foreign Minister and a young NSC staffer, which is then relayed to POTUS. I would like to believe that more robust arrangements exist with China and Russia, with appropriate translation capabilities. But the idea of information overload, with conflicting advice connected to spotty comms rings true and I think that is captured well.
If A House of Dynamite is a “message movie” for our time on par with Dr Strangelove or FAIL-SAFE, what are those messages?
1) Ballistic Missile Defence doesn’t work and is a waste of money, with unstated implications for the Trumpian Golden Dome.
2) The U.S. nuclear command and control system is convoluted, designed to address a major attack, and will collapse under a Grey Zone attack.
3) High officials will allow their emotions to override cold steel-hearted duty to the country and its people, which could impair decision making.
4) High officials have not taken nuclear crisis decision making seriously in the post-Cold War era
5) Nucs are bad (subtext).
My overall impressions of the film are influenced by my historical work on these processes, and my analytical work on pop culture dealing with nuclear crisis films. The narrative tension mechanisms in the film do not work for me because of my background in the field. I cannot suspend disbelief enough because of the nature of the attack scenario and its response as depicted. There are too many story arcs that go nowhere…unless Bigelow has set us up for a sequel. I understand why Bigelow used an inconclusive ending, but I personally don’t like that aspect of the film. That said, my opinions should not deter you from watching A House of Dynamite. It should stimulate interest in nuclear crisis dynamics for a larger audience as well as within the analytical community, which has atrophied after the Cold War in matters nuclear.
-Sean M. Maloney, PhD
Copyright© 2025 Sean M. Maloney