The Nuclear House of Dynamite

A new film about nuclear war, called “A House of Dynamite,” was released in theaters on Oct. 10 and became available on Netflix on Oct. 24. It’s directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who directed “Zero Dark Thirty” and “The Hurt Locker,” and was written by Noah Oppenheim, a producer and screenwriter who is also former president of NBC News. According to The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin, the film is all about the process that locks the President into launching a response to an attack on the U.S. “The President” in the film “is a rational—even affable—character,” Rosin writes in an article posted yesterday. “The military personnel follow all the correct protocol. The general in charge is reliable and unruffled. ‘We did everything right, right?’ one of the officers asks his colleagues. The answer the movie provides is yes, but that doesn’t change the underlying insanity of the situation: The house of dynamite we’ve built could explode in a matter of minutes and wipe out cities’ worth of people.” The situation is insane but, judging from Rosin’s article and the accompanying transcript of a podcast interview she did with Oppenheim and Atlantic writer Tom Nichols, who served as a consultant on the film, there’s no real discussion of how we got into such an insane situation in the first place or how we may get out of it safely.