On October 25, 2025, two seemingly disparate stories—one from the world of international espionage and the other from cinematic fiction—collided in the global consciousness, each casting a stark light on the ever-present specter of nuclear conflict. In California, former CIA officer John Kiriakou delivered a sobering warning: Pakistan would lose any conventional war with India, and escalation would only spell disaster for all involved. Meanwhile, moviegoers and critics alike grappled with the chilling realism of "A House of Dynamite," Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, which thrusts audiences into the nerve-wracking heart of a nuclear crisis in the United States.
Kiriakou, whose 15-year CIA career included leading counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, spoke candidly in an interview with ANI. His message was unequivocal: "Nothing, literally nothing good will come of an actual war between India and Pakistan because the Pakistanis will lose. It's as simple as that. They'll lose. And I'm not talking about nuclear weapons, I'm talking just about a conventional war. And so there is no benefit to constantly provoking Indians." That blunt assessment, delivered with the gravitas of experience, echoed far beyond intelligence circles.
He went on to recount his time posted in Pakistan in 2002, revealing that, at the time, the Pentagon exercised unofficial control over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. However, as he noted, the intervening years have seen a hardening of attitudes in Islamabad. Pakistani officials now publicly assert that their generals alone command the country’s nuclear weapons. "The United States has nothing to do with the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, that Pakistani generals are the ones who control it," Kiriakou emphasized, reflecting the shifting sands of trust and sovereignty in South Asia.
When pressed on whether Washington had ever informed New Delhi about its alleged influence over Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, Kiriakou expressed doubt. Instead, he recalled the U.S. State Department’s efforts at the time to urge restraint on both India and Pakistan. Their advice was clear: if conflict was unavoidable, it should remain short and strictly conventional. The introduction of nuclear weapons, they warned, would transform the situation for everyone, with consequences too dire to contemplate.
Kiriakou also highlighted India’s firm stance on nuclear coercion. According to him, New Delhi has repeatedly warned that it will not tolerate nuclear blackmail and will respond decisively to any terror attack. He pointed to a series of Indian military responses to terrorism in recent years: surgical strikes across the Line of Control in 2016, the Balakot airstrikes in 2019, and, most recently, Operation Sindoor in May 2025. That operation, Kiriakou explained, was carried out in response to the Pahalgam terror attack, which claimed 26 lives. Each of these episodes, he suggested, underscored India’s willingness to act forcefully in the face of provocation.
For Kiriakou, whose career later saw him become a public whistleblower over the CIA’s interrogation program—a move that led to a 23-month prison sentence—these issues are not merely academic. "I did the right thing," he reflected, displaying a personal conviction that matches the seriousness of his geopolitical analysis.
While Kiriakou’s remarks focused on the real-world dangers of South Asian brinkmanship, Kathryn Bigelow’s "A House of Dynamite" offered a fictional yet unsettlingly plausible vision of nuclear catastrophe. As reviewed by The New Indian Express, the film eschews melodrama in favor of a cold, procedural look at how a nuclear crisis might unfold in the United States. The story kicks off with the White House situation room thrown into chaos by news of an incoming nuclear warhead. Departments scramble, high-ranking officials confer, and the machinery of government lurches into action—or, at times, stalls in the face of bureaucracy.
Bigelow’s direction, bolstered by performances from Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, and Greta Lee, immerses viewers in the tension and uncertainty of the moment. The film offers no clear villains or heroes; instead, it speculates about North Korea’s potential involvement but ultimately leaves the aggressor unnamed. This ambiguity, as the review notes, is deliberate: "There are no clear antagonists, and no clear sympathetic victims. However, if you read between the lines, and look at the history of the nuclear arms race and the state of geopolitical tensions, the film tells us that everyone is both the antagonist and the victims."
What makes "A House of Dynamite" so gripping—and so terrifying—is its portrayal of the systems and protocols designed to prevent disaster. The review observes, "Even the most secure systems in the most technologically advanced country in the world, could still fail. We see how flimsy the systems that hold the entire fate of humanity really are." The film’s climax, in particular, leaves audiences with more questions than answers, a "nerve-wracking choice left hanging in the air." It’s a stark reminder, the reviewer writes, of the "global illusion of control."
In a world where a mouse-click can trigger the ignition of a missile, and where numbers on a screen can represent millions of lives in peril, both Kiriakou’s warnings and Bigelow’s cinematic vision converge on a single, uncomfortable truth: the margin for error is vanishingly thin. The film’s refusal to offer easy answers or reassuring resolutions is, perhaps, its most powerful message. "It does not matter if the leader of a country or even an AI decides to start a war. It is the fact that anyone could do it and we won’t know until seconds before being eviscerated, and it could happen at any moment now, and we as a species haven’t begun to discuss this possibility... That is the most terrifying reality and we are living it right now," the review concludes.
As the world marks another year since the first atomic bombs were dropped, the shadow of nuclear weapons looms as large as ever. Whether through the lens of a seasoned intelligence officer or the frame of a Hollywood thriller, the message is clear: the threat is real, the stakes are high, and the time for complacency is long past. The uneasy intersection of fact and fiction serves as a wake-up call—a reminder that, for all our sophistication, humanity remains perched precariously on the edge of the unthinkable.
