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Spoiler alert: deterrence doesn’t work.

 November 9, 2025 by beyondnuclearinternational

‘A House of Dynamite’ reminds us there are no good choices after a nuclear launch, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

Warning: This article contains spoilers in connection to the film, A House of Dynamite. If you have not seen the film, you are advised to read no further (and to watch the film).

Upon the abrupt ending of Kathryn Bigelow’s new drama, A House of Dynamite, the three bros in the row in front of us at the cinema all exclaimed in unison, “Whaaaat??” They had expected the film to have an ending; a resolution; a big bang for their fourteen bucks. “Congratulations” I remember uttering under my breath, “you just missed the entire point of the movie.”

A House of Dynamite is not about seeing things blow up. It is about realizing that once things are about to blow up, there is no right decision anyone can make, not even the President of the United States. (In case you haven’t seen the film, an omission you should immediately remedy, it features three versions of the same 18-minute span during which US military, officials and the US president must respond to a single nuclear missile headed for Chicago.)

The editorial pages of the Washington Post, which have become a compliant mouthpiece for the paper’s owner, Trump-supporting billionaire Jeff Bezos, couldn’t wait to nitpick at the film, desperate to find “inaccuracies.” The US president, they complained, played by Idris Elba, would not have been “alone on Marine One with one military aide” when faced with deciding what to do about the missile. 

Really? Chicago is about to be obliterated and this is what niggled at them? Doubtless the scene was done this way for dramatic effect. Their other gripe was that the greeting between the president and his deputy national security advisor was too formal. Perhaps the Post had to cling to these trivial pursuits because when it comes to the things of substance in the film, almost everyone familiar with how such a scenario would play out has called many of the depictions in it by and large chillingly accurate.

All of this was simply the Post’s way of navigating toward the central thesis of its editorial — entitled How to live in our nuclear ‘House of Dynamite — that “only deterrence, not disarmament, can actually keep the peace” and that “Mutually assured destruction works.” Houston, we’ve had a problem!

The problem we have is just how pervasive this belief is — that we are safer with nuclear weapons than without them. This is the case not only in virtually all political circles, not just the hawkish ones, but also among otherwise perfectly reasonable people. For those of us in the nuclear abolition movement, the deterrence credo is the biggest barrier against achieving our disarmament goals. That means we’ve got to keep exploding that myth, to use an unfortunate metaphor, because, as Bigelow’s film shows us, living in a house of dynamite means it will inevitably blow up.

A House of Dynamite, like Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer before it, and the Chernobyl television series before that, provide our collective anti-nuclear movements with unmissable teachable moments. We may not like everything about the choices the directors made or their fidelity to absolute fact, but they deliver our issue to a mass audience of wildly high numbers we could never dream of reaching. 

A House of Dynamite is currently the most watched film on Netflix (although for an erudition reality check, the most watched film in Netflix history is KPop Demon Hunters). Oppenheimer grossed $80.5 million in North America during its opening weekend. Chernobyl had a record-breaking 52% of its audience watching on its digital platforms, surpassing Game of Thrones, and an average of 4.7 million viewers per episode.

All of these dramas give us the chance to amplify our message. So did President Trump’s error-laden blurt last week that the US would resume testing nuclear weapons. The US Department of Energy has since explained to Trump that when it comes to “nuclear testing”, they “do not think it means what you think it means.” (If I’ve lost you, please see another popular movie, The Princess Bride.) But for a while, his remarks captured the headlines and generated a lot of ink.

To prove its point, and having clarified that  there “will not be nuclear explosions”, according to DOE Secretary Chris Wright, the White House moved quickly to authorize the launch of a Minuteman III missile from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, which landed 30 minutes later on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a typical practice exercise carried out several times a year. The Minuteman III is an intercontinental ballistic missile ground-based nuclear warhead delivery system. There was no actual nuclear warhead on the test.

Nevertheless, Trump’s confused threats before the latest test was launched, provoked an interesting debate within the nuclear disarmament movement as to how best to respond. The discussion took place on an email listserv, but I have permission from the correspondents to quote them. Many valid points were made across a spectrum of perspectives, stimulating further discourse……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Among other things, we have logic and common sense on our side. Despite what the hawks at the Washington Post might declare, it is abundantly obvious that having no nuclear weapons in the world is the surest path to peace. That’s also because we can’t be certain that nuclear weapons won’t be used accidentally or by a mad man (hello!). And deterrence relies on having one hundred percent certainty it will work, always and forever. That’s clearly one hundred percent unrealistic.

Oddly, even the Washington Post seemed to concede this in the end. In a curious non sequitorial last line in its editorial it extolled the virtues of Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense boondoggle, “even if it ultimately works half the time,” because “just as missile defenses can fail, so too can deterrence.”

Now there’s coherence for you. We should welcome a $25 billion downpayment of taxpayer money on a missile defense system that will only work half the time so that we can continue to spend $50 billion a year maintaining nuclear weapons we supposedly won’t use and $1.5-$2 trillion over the next three decades “modernizing” them, just in case none of this works after all and someone else does use theirs against us, at which point we can assume that about 50 percent of them will reach their target.

We can knock these specious arguments out of the air with a far greater success rate than Trump’s Golden Dome or Fort Greely’s missile interceptors, the ones that failed so drastically in A House of Dynamite. With all the well-versed arguments of our colleagues in our armory, let’s get to work. Fire away! https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/11/09/spoiler-alert-deterrence-doesnt-work/

November 12, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized