Netflix’s latest release, A House of Dynamite, arrives on screens October 24, 2025, bringing with it a surge of conversation about nuclear threats, military readiness, and the chilling realities of nuclear war. Directed by Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow, the film dramatizes the unthinkable: a lone missile, presumed to be armed with a nuclear warhead, streaks toward Chicago, thrusting the city—and the nation—into a race against time. As reported by CBS Sunday Morning News, the film’s attention to procedural detail has sparked renewed debate about how prepared the United States really is for a nuclear crisis, both in the corridors of power and among ordinary Americans.
Bigelow’s film is not just another Hollywood thriller. To ensure authenticity, she enlisted retired Lt. General Dan Karbler, who not only consulted on the project but also appears onscreen. Karbler, reflecting on the realism of the film’s depiction of military protocols, told CBS, “I believe the last president to have participated in one of the exercises was President Reagan.” That’s a sobering admission, given that the film’s scenario—a missile launch detected and confirmed in a matter of seconds—demands an immediate and decisive response from the nation’s highest office.
The scenario at the heart of A House of Dynamite is drawn directly from the pages of Annie Jacobsen’s 2024 book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. Jacobsen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, spent years combing through unclassified documents and interviewing nearly 50 former high officials and nuclear weapons experts, including former Secretary of Defense William Perry. Her book lays out, minute by minute, what would happen if a missile were launched from North Korea toward Washington D.C. The sequence is harrowing: within three seconds of launch, the missile is detected; after three minutes and multiple confirmations, the president is notified. From there, he (or she) has just six minutes—six minutes!—to decide how to respond. “The president has no idea that as soon as he is briefed on what is happening, he has six minutes to deliberate and decide which nuclear weapons to launch in response,” Jacobsen writes. During those few moments, the president is bombarded by military officials, advisors, and Secret Service personnel, all urgently vying for his attention. Jacobsen notes that the president, unlike military personnel who regularly drill for such scenarios, is generally “underinformed” and untrained for the task at hand.
That lack of preparation is compounded by U.S. military policy itself. As Jacobsen explains, the doctrine of “launch on warning” means that the U.S. is committed to launching a nuclear response as soon as electronic warnings are confirmed—there’s no waiting to see if the attack is real, no absorbing the first blow. Former President George W. Bush, during his 2000 campaign, called the high-alert, hair-trigger status “another unnecessary vestige of the Cold War.” Yet, as Jacobsen points out, neither Bush nor any of his successors have changed this policy. The system remains as taut and unforgiving as ever.
But what about missile defense? Many Americans believe that the nation’s missile shield is robust enough to protect them. In fact, a 2023 poll found that 46 percent of Americans are at least somewhat confident in the U.S. missile defense system. Unfortunately, as national security analyst Joe Cirincione wrote on his “Strategy and History” Substack, this confidence is misplaced. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, the backbone of U.S. missile defense, has cost $63 billion since its inception and is part of a staggering $453 billion invested in national missile defense since Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. And yet, the results are underwhelming at best. In carefully scripted tests designed to favor success, GMD’s interceptors have managed to hit their targets only 57 percent of the time. There are just 44 operational GMD interceptors. Cirincione is blunt: “The GMD system is so bad that the Department of Defense has canceled both the interceptor program and the kill-vehicle program and gone back to the drawing boards for a new system.”
Proponents of missile defense argue that even a partial shield is better than none, but critics say the money and effort would be better spent elsewhere. Enter the “Back from the Brink” campaign, which offers a radically different vision. According to its website, the campaign calls on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war by actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their arsenals, renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first, ending the sole, unchecked authority of any U.S. president to launch a nuclear attack, taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, and canceling plans to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons. The campaign’s message is clear: true security comes not from perfecting defense systems, but from reducing—and ultimately eliminating—the nuclear threat altogether.
This debate is nothing new. In the 1980s, the world’s nuclear arsenal was slashed from 64,000 to 10,000 weapons, thanks in large part to treaties negotiated by Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Cultural forces played a role, too: the 1983 television film The Day After, which depicted the horrific aftermath of nuclear war in the U.S., reportedly influenced Reagan’s thinking and spurred public debate. There’s hope among advocates and educators that A House of Dynamite might have a similar impact, reigniting discussions in classrooms and beyond about the realities of nuclear conflict and the urgent need for new approaches.
In anticipation of the film’s release, nuclear expert Kennette Benedict of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sat down with reporters to separate fact from fiction. Benedict’s insights underscore the film’s chilling realism. While some aspects are dramatized for effect, the core scenario—a missile streaking toward a major U.S. city, the president thrust into an impossible decision, the clock ticking down—mirrors the very real dangers that persist in today’s world.
Yet, despite all the warnings, the cycle of complacency continues. As the film’s release date arrives, it’s worth remembering that the last time a sitting president participated in a nuclear response drill was during the Reagan era. The world has changed, technology has advanced, and yet the fundamental risks remain. The hope is that A House of Dynamite will do more than entertain—it will spark a renewed sense of urgency, prompting policymakers, educators, and citizens alike to confront the uncomfortable truths about nuclear weapons and the precarious systems designed to control them.
With the world’s nuclear arsenal still numbering in the thousands, and with policies and defense systems that many experts describe as outdated or inadequate, the lessons of the past—and the warnings of the present—have never been more relevant. As viewers tune in to Netflix to watch Bigelow’s gripping vision unfold, the real drama may be playing out not on the screen, but in the conversations and actions that follow.
