A House of Dynamite

Go see Kathryn Bigelow's new political thriller

If you are looking for a great movie to see before or after the No Kings rallies this weekend, go see A House of Dynamite. It is the new white-knuckle political thriller from the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker).

The film is in select theaters for another week before it premiers on Netflix October 24.

Rebecca Ferguson as Captain Olivia Walker in A House of Dynamite

We have had many films about the terror of nuclear war, but Bigelow’s is the first to show the fallacy of relying on a national missile defense system to protect the country from nuclear attack. As Donald Trump pours $45 billion this year into the bottomless pit of his absurdly named Golden Dome missile defense system, this film shows what happens when officials believe that such a system will actually work.

Spoiler alert: It does not.

The film begins with the detection of a sole nuclear-armed missile rising from the Pacific heading towards America. We don’t know who launched it because the detection satellites missed it. Technical failure? Sabotage? We don’t know. The President, played convincingly by English actor Idris Elba, has been shooting hoops with WNBA star Angel Reese to promote youth sports at the Capital One Arena. He is hustled away by Secret Service agents to the Marine One helicopter that will whisk him to a secure location.

Inside, the President is briefed by the young officer that follows him 24/7 carrying the “nuclear football,” the briefcase with nuclear launch codes and attack options. The President - as he very well might do in real life - complains that he has had deeper briefings on what to do in case a Supreme Court Justice dies than what to do if under nuclear attack. The young officer dryly describes the destruction levels of his nuclear launch options as “rare, medium or well-done.”

But wait. Maybe the President won’t have to launch a retaliatory attack. We have a missile defense system. Surely that can destroy one, single missile?

This is my favorite part of the film. This mirrors exactly what officials have been told in countless briefings and Congressional hearings: We have an operational system of 44 interceptors based primarily at Ft. Greeley, Alaska (where the film opens) that can protect us. “We are confident in our ability to defend the homeland against current missile threats by rogue states,” then–Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy Robert Soofer assured us in a 2020 article arguing for more funding. “During this time of uncertainty, Americans should be confident knowing our country already has protection.”

This is a lie. At best, in highly scripted tests, the interceptors have only hit their targets in half the tests (11 out of 20 attempts). When worried Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (played masterfully by Jared Harris of Chernobyl and Foundation fame) is told of those odds (slight exaggerated in the film to a 61 percent chance of success), he exclaims, “So, it’s a fucking coin toss?! That’s what 50 billion dollars buys us?”

We have actually sunk $63 billion into the Ft. Greeley system, know as the Ground-based Missile Defense system (GMD). It is part of the $453 billion that the Congress has spent on failed national missile defense systems since Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983. The best contractors, the best scientists, a fire house of money and…nothing has worked.

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. But it is the deeply flawed GMD system that is called into action in A House of Dynamite. And it failures mirror the failures in the test program. The first kill vehicle fails to separate from its booster - exactly what happened in three of the tests. The second misses entirely - exactly what happened in six other test. DOD has now stopped testing the system entirely.

Here is how the prestigious panel of the American Physical Society, the nation’s premier organization of physicists, described the pathetic test program in their recent report:

The 20 years of past GMD tests have been conducted under scripted conditions and designed for success: the Pentagon has consistently rated the GMD tests as low in operational realism.Even so, the system has failed as often as it has succeeded. Of the 20 tests conducted since 1999, the interceptors successfully destroyed their targets11 times.

Realism would require testing against threat-representative targets that include complex countermeasures and with unannounced target launch times. But only two tests have used simulated warheads of ICBM-range missiles as targets, and in all the successful intercept tests, the time of the test was chosen so the kill vehicle would see the target brightly lit by the sun against a dark background. And the GMD system has yet to be tested against a salvo of attacking missiles. This is a critical test, because a determined adversary could launch several missiles at once.

If you test for succcess, expect failure in real life. That is exactly what A House of Dynamite chilling portrays. As the film races to its chilling conclusion, one character exclaims, “But we did everything right!” That is Bigelow’s point. Everyone fulfilled their roles. The system worked as designed. And it failed miserably. “We built a house made of dynamite,” Elba’s president says, “And now the walls are ready to blow.”

Golden Dome will now try to design a brand new system that won’t work either. “There is zero possibility of a comprehensive missile defense of the United States in the foreseeable future,” James N. Miller, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, told The Washington Post’s Max Boot earlier this year.

Until we can restore Congressional oversight - there hasn’t been an investigation or serious hearing on national missile defense in almost 20 years - we should expect the defense contractors to continue to steer billions of dollars into project doomed to fail and Members who benefit from their generous campaign contributions to continue to look the other way.

One day, the fictional attack depicted in A House of Dynamite may play out in the real world. We should expect the same results.

Bonus: I wrote a review of A House of Dynamite for The New Republic this week. You can read it here.