Kathryn Bigelow. That’s all it took to get me on board “A House of Dynamite.” I would have leaped to collaborate with her on any project, but fortunately nuclear Armageddon is also a preoccupation of mine. (And no, not because my last name bears a similarity to the father of the bomb — there’s no relation, not even distant.)
The sociobiologist E.O. Wilson famously remarked, “The real problem of humanity is … we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” That’s been our curse since the dawn of the Atomic Age, now compounded in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. And for that reason, I’ve always thought it nothing short of miraculous that any of us are still here.
In fact, early in my writing process, I interviewed an expert on nuclear war at a major think tank. At the end of our long, harrowing conversation, I asked how it was possible that the world hadn’t already ended. He replied, in absolute earnest — “I’m sure it has, in most realities. We’re just living in the one branch of the multiverse where it hasn’t.”
Nuclear war movies are, of course, their own genre. Many, exemplified by “On the Beach” (1959) and “Threads” (1984), depict the grim aftermath of apocalypse. Others tell stories about the race to avert calamity. In “Fail Safe” (1964), a bomber receives mistaken orders to attack the Soviets, then loses radio contact and can’t be recalled. In “WarGames” (1983), a primitive AI takes over NORAD and tricks its human overlords into believing an attack is incoming. And in my favorite of them all, “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), a deranged Air Force general orders a strike, sending the world on a tragicomic road to doomsday.
I’ve spent half my life working for NBC News, and Kathryn often takes a journalistic approach to filmmaking. So that’s how we built our story.
Rebecca Ferguson in “A House of Dynamite.”
(Eros Hoagland/Netflix)
For 80 years, our government has envisioned, in granular detail, how a nuclear conflict might unfold, planning for almost every contingency. Many of those policies are in the public domain. I read everything I could. I called everyone I knew who had worked in the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon. Then I asked them, who else can I talk to?
Another early conversation that stood out: In America, the president of the United States has the sole authority to decide if, when and how to use nuclear weapons. No vote of the Cabinet or the Joint Chiefs. One man (or woman) makes the call. We asked a former senior official, “How often does the president rehearse for the moment when they might be woken in the dead of night and asked to decide the fate of humanity?” The answer: almost never. When first sworn in, they’re given one briefing on the logistics — the military aide who will follow them, the secure communications device known colloquially as “The Football” — and after that, they never think about it.
Based on this research, our movie tries to depict with as much accuracy as possible what will happen if America is ever attacked by a nuclear missile. And how our system does so much to guarantee that, if just a single weapon is ever launched at us — by anyone, anywhere — we may quickly embark on a path toward mankind’s collective suicide.
A final thought on the movie’s final moments. We knew some would crave the morbid satisfaction of a CGI mushroom cloud. Or perhaps an orgy of many. Others, the sweet relief of a false alarm and disaster narrowly averted. Still others, simply a culprit identified. (It was Russia! It was North Korea!) But all those are resolutions to a different story.
At any moment, the machinery you see in the movie could actually be set into motion. Is that the world you want to live in?
You write the ending.
(Matt Seidel / For The Times)
