What we should be talking about after watching Bigelow’s ‘A House of Dynamite’ nuclear thriller.

It’s hard to avoid wondering how the change in leadership and the loss of expertise within the government would affect decision-making today.

Damage limitation in nuclear war is fundamentally a mirage.

By Mark Goodman | October 25, 2025,

Mark Goodman is a former senior scientist at the US State Department who specialized in nuclear policy—nuclear energy, nuclear nonproliferation,…

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, presents a compelling, Rashomon-style dissection of a moment of crisis from three different perspectives. Other nuclear wonks have praised the film for exposing the dangers of nuclear weapons. While the film is a work of cinematic art in its own right, Bigelow’s main objective is to make the audience reflect on those dangers and discuss how to deal with them.

Surprise attack, realistic response. The film gets many important facts right. Chiefly, it illustrates the dilemmas and paradoxes of nuclear deterrence. Deterrence is supposed to prevent war, but it depends on making the threat of nuclear war credible enough that it deters actions that could lead to war. In normal times, when tensions are low, deterrence can contribute to stability; in times of crisis, it can prompt decision makers to act with greater caution. But crises can also create a “use it or lose it” pressure to launch nuclear weapons while it’s still possible. The decision time can be painfully short—19 minutes in this movie. As one character puts it in the film, the choice is between suicide—launching a retaliatory strike knowing the response will be devastating—and surrender. This is why President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review in 2010 put a premium on giving the president more time to decide.

The movie also shows the machinery of government as it faces a crisis. It presents the drama first at the operational level: soldiers and watch officers going from routine to “What the heck?” in the blink of an eye. A single long-range missile is heading to Chicago from northeast Asia—probably from North Korea, but it could be Russia or China. The second iteration brings in a sprawling array of experts and policy advisors as they seek to understand what is happening, the choices, and the consequences.

The third iteration shows decision makers—the defense secretary and the president—suddenly facing an urgent dilemma with no good choices. In the movie, the scenario jumps to “DEFCON 2,” which is the second-highest state of military readiness for which armed forces are on high alert and could deploy and engage in combat within six hours. And when the interception fails, the scenario moves to “DEFCON 1,” the maximum readiness posture when an attack is imminent or already underway. I’ve never been that close to a crisis—DECON 2 was ordered only once during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and DEFCON 1 is without precedent—but the human and institutional dynamics at each level seemed plausible. It’s hard to avoid wondering how the change in leadership and the loss of expertise within the government would affect decision-making today.

But for all it gets right, the film also muddles some key points……………..

Illusion of ‘damage limitation.’ The film brings to mind current debates over whether the United States needs more nuclear weapons to simultaneously deter Russia and China, particularly as China’s stockpile is growing by roughly a hundred warheads a year. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the United States does, based on arcane calculations of what deterrence requires, which in turn are based on policy assumptions about what nuclear weapons are for.

It turns out that what drives the numbers is not what one might think of as the primary role of nuclear weapons—to deter a nuclear attack against the United States. Rather, the numbers are based on the secondary role of trying to limit damage to the United States if deterrence fails. Damage limitation makes sense in principle, but in practice is virtually impossible, and trying to limit damage can do more harm than good. According to the logic of damage limitation, the United States would launch a preemptive attack to destroy the other side’s nuclear weapons and limit their ability to destroy the United States. This notion of preemption is what creates the use-it-or-lose-it pressure, and that pressure gets worse when the United States designs its nuclear forces to emphasize the ability to strike first over the ability to ride out the attack and then retaliate.

Damage limitation in nuclear war is fundamentally a mirage.

If even a small number of nuclear weapons survive a first strike, they could still wreak massive devastation. A nuclear power cannot escape its own vulnerability. There’s a saying that the first casualty of war is the war plan, and nuclear war is no exception. Any use of nuclear weapons would fundamentally change the nature of a conflict. Everything, including the scenarios and dilemmas confronting decision makers, would be transformed in unpredictable ways. Catastrophe might not be inevitable, but it would loom at every turn. It is this incalculable danger—not the calculations of the planners—that is the unavoidable essence of nuclear deterrence.

Missile defense myth. A House of Dynamite also gets the futility of missile defense right, but it does not explain why. Sure, the limited defense system failed in the film, but one could argue we could do better. Wouldn’t President Donald Trump’s proposed Golden Dome defend the United States against a nuclear attack? As counterintuitive as it sounds, the answer is no. Worse, it would be futile and dangerous.

Golden Dome is futile because it’s always going to be easier and cheaper for the attacker to overwhelm, spoof, or circumvent any missile defense system.

Take Russia’s war against Ukraine for example: Russian missiles can relatively easily hit Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, while Russian ground forces are at a standstill. The attacker’s advantage is magnified for intercontinental-range missiles, which are faster and harder to hit, and any failure to intercept a nuclear warhead would be disastrous.

And missile defense is dangerous because, if paired with a nuclear force structure designed to preempt, it can magnify the temptation to use that force to strike first. ………………………………

I spent most of my career in government trying to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and avoid nuclear war. After the Cold War, the world seemed to lose interest in nuclear weapons. Arms control and risk reduction became niche topics for a narrow group of insiders and experts. Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is a welcome and useful reminder that the dangers of nuclear weapons not only never went away, but they have been growing in recent years. Hopefully, this renewed attention will stimulate a rethinking of the United States’ nuclear posture so that the danger of possessing and deploying nuclear weapons does not outweigh the threats they are meant to deter.https://thebulletin.org/2025/10/what-we-should-be-talking-about-after-watching-bigelows-a-house-of-dynamite-nuclear-thriller/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=What%20we%20should%20be%20talking%20about%20after%20%20%20A%20House%20of%20Dynamite&utm_campaign=20251024%20Monday%20Newsletter