A House of Dynamite – Review

This review probably contains spoilers. If you worry about such things, don’t read it.

Geoff Brumfiel has capably summarized a few reactions relating to the authenticity of “A House of Dynamite.” That’s not what I’m writing about.

Another thing to get out of the way is the device on which the plot hinges: An ICBM whose origin is unidentified is on its way to destroy Chicago. A number of officials urge retaliation before the origin is identified. First, it’s unlikely the origin wouldn’t be identified before retaliation is necessary. Second, who to retaliate against? All the possibilities? Please.

“All that emotion,” said one of my colleagues on Bluesky. That’s what I’m writing about.

“A House of Dynamite” is a film with a mission – to alert the world to the dangers of nuclear weapons and the way nations have become accustomed to the house of dynamite that is called nuclear deterrence. I think we will not know whether that mission has succeeded until, in a couple of decades, a government official who has negotiated a treaty to end the standoff says that, when they were an early teenager, they saw the film and found their mission.

For now, nothing is likely to change nuclear deterrence. In the US, we are preoccupied with a struggle to defeat the fascists who have won power. Russia needs its nuclear arsenal to shake at those who would help Ukraine resist its onslaught. China has said that they will not participate in arms control talks. Israel and North Korea aren’t going to give up its nuclear weapons any time soon, nor are the others who hold them.

I have envisioned the sequence of events depicted in “House” since I was a child. Nothing was a surprise, and I have gotten to a point in my life, or of repetitions of this sequence, where it no longer terrifies me. This is how it will play out if it happens.

Brumfiel writes about why he finds movies like this fascinating:

I have spent a long time covering nuclear weapons:

I’ve spoken to the scientists who build them.

The wonks who think about how they’d be used.

And even met the airmen (and women) with their fingers on the nuclear trigger….

And all of these people hold two ideas in their head simultaneously:

Nuclear weapons are completely insane.

There are rational reasons they must do the mission they’re doing.

Those two ideas are what the President struggles with in the helicopter with the lieutenant commander who is on “football” duty, carrying the Presidential Emergency Satchel that contains the plans and communication devices for nuclear war. The President hasn’t thought much about this eventuality, which seemed so far away. Every president receives a briefing on the satchel and its uses in the first days after they are inaugurated. Those who have reported their reactions have been horrified by the loss of lives that using one of the plans would incur. Like any human being, they probably avoid thinking about it. And the danger of nuclear war seemed far away in recent years.

Moments in which others realize that the clash of those two ideas has become real are dramatized throughout the movie. The young woman who launches the interceptor missiles. The woman in charge of the White House situation room and her colleagues. The deputy National Security Advisor whose boss is having a colonoscopy. The FEMA executive whose phone lights up.

The plans for nuclear war are made outside the world of emotions, providing another clash of ideas as indelible as Brumfiel’s two. We must be utterly rational about the power to destroy countries and the earth itself. The people who will be following the plans have a child with a fever, a wife who is pregnant, a daughter who is estranged, a mother in the target city.

Those things can never completely be put aside, as the Secretary of Defense ultimately decides.

Mistakes will be made, technology will fail. Worse, those paradoxes shadow all decision-making. The Russians say that the missile isn’t theirs, nor from the Chinese. They say they will not retaliate. The deputy NSA says that if there are missiles, they will not be aimed at them.

The decision to believe or not is shadowed by emotion, the desire not to have nuclear war. But there is no assurance, no way to know what they are saying is true or, if it is true, that it will not change. No assurance.

The makers of “House” have said that they want to alert people to the dangers of our nuclear situation. But there is only one answer to removing that danger – abolishing nuclear weapons. I think it can be done, but not easily. And, for the reasons I’ve given, not for some time.

I’m curious about others’ reaction. Mine is highly conditioned by having thought about such things for far too long.