Warning: This piece contains some spoilers for A House of Dynamite.
In the new Netflix movie A House of Dynamite, director Kathryn Bigelow chronicles what happens when the unthinkable unfolds. One morning, members of the Fort Greely missile defense base spot an ICBM of unknown origin on a suborbital trajectory heading straight for Chicago, baffling the country’s top intelligence and defense teams who only have 18 minutes to respond before impact. Viewers take in this prelude to disaster across three perspectives, each one repeating the same countdown in near-real time and featuring different sets of characters in different locations—bureaucrats and intelligence heads from the White House, to the Pentagon, to STRATCOM headquarters, which communicate via video conference call to determine the right course of action for potential nuclear war. In this unique, high-stakes situation, nobody knows what “right” even means.
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Written by Noah Oppenheim, Dynamite is largely a movie about structures and processes and readiness in the face of chaos—and how even the most competent and prepared authorities can still become undone by it. After spending a quarter-century in journalism covering politics and foreign affairs, Oppenheim, who also wrote the Netflix miniseries Zero Day, explains he’s always been fascinated by the way institutions handle crises and respond under pressure. “When I got my first significant job in news, somebody said to me, ‘I’ve got bad news. There is no floor of grownups that know what to do,’” Oppenheim says. “It’s just people, and we’re all doing the best we can. And that’s true in every organization, including the White House and the Pentagon.”
To depict this very human pressure cooker, Bigelow and Oppenheim relied on a variety of sources—policy experts, journalists, former intelligence directors, and government officials—to effectively and authentically recreate a real doomsday scenario. They also leaned on Dan Karbler, a former army officer who previously served as STRATCOM chief of staff, to be the movie’s technical advisor (and even play a role on screen), using his decades of experience at every opportunity. “I was kind of prepared to just be the guy in the background,” Karbler says. “But [Kathryn’s] like, ‘No, no—your chair is right next to me. You’re going to watch the playback and give me input.’ She was very deferential to me in a lot of different areas.”
Still, how plausible is Bigelow’s tick-tock nightmare? And how much creative license did the filmmakers take in crafting it? To answer those questions, TIME spoke with Oppenheim and Karbler about the movie’s technical accuracy, its depiction of government response in crisis, and the global temperature on nuclear war.
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Is it possible we could not know the source of an incoming missile?
Early into writing A House of Dynamite, Oppenheim made the decision that U.S intelligence wouldn’t know the origin of the sea-based nuclear attack. Instead of a clear-cut villain to take over the story, “what we wanted to do was examine and interrogate the system itself—our nuclear strategy, our policies, and the global infrastructure around it—without giving anyone the easy out of assigning blame to a single bad actor,” Oppenheim says. “That was the philosophical, thematic reason behind the choice.”
But does that choice hold up? Not especially. In speaking with various experts, Oppenheim found that the most plausible way for someone to carry out a surprise attack would be to interfere with the satellite systems (as is surmised in the movie), which he says are “strong but vulnerable” and “arguably the least secure element of our cyber infrastructure.” However, according to Karbler, unattributable missile launches are “almost unheard of,” because of the confidence in the U.S.’s SBIR’s (space-based infrared satellites). Still, Karbler acknowledges that, early into his career, secretary of defense Ash Carter ran these kinds of scenarios to prepare for a lack of information. “I don’t think it’s likely, because we have a lot of redundancy in our capabilities,” Karbler says. “But is it something we have to consider and practice? Yeah.”
Is there anything the soldiers at Fort Greely could have done differently in this scenario?
When an ICBM pops up on the radar screen and begins cruising toward the continental U.S., the Alaskan missile defense team sends two interceptors into its trajectory. Unfortunately, both miss. Over the next 20 minutes, everyone in the room sits in disbelief at the situation destined to unfold. Karbler notes that dejection and disappointment are common reactions in these kinds of scenarios. “I’ve been on the receiving end of missile fire in Israel. My daughter has too,” he says. “And when our missiles don’t work—and they don’t always work— there’s a lot of F-bombs.”
With such a small engagement window, it makes sense that the soldiers only had time to shoot out two interceptors, “and by the time you see whether they’ve hit or not, the window has already closed,” Karbler says. Typically, though, those same soldiers wouldn’t just hang their heads—they’d be preparing for another launch attack. Karbler notes that Bigelow resisted that depiction for fear of distracting from the emotional moment. “The focus was on the human element: the frustration, the helplessness, the idea that these soldiers had done everything right, trained and rehearsed countless times—and still, the missiles failed,” he says. “And she captured that.”
Read More: Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite Is Skillful, Stressful, and Urge
Is there really a 61 percent shot for a nuclear missile to get shot down by a ground-based interceptor?
Technically, 61 percent is an accurate—or, at least, accepted—number, but it takes into account the entire history of ballistic missile testing since the U.S. government began in the late 1940s. Within the last five years, Karbler says, ground-based interceptors have performed better at determining adversary countermeasures and success rates have been higher. “I would say we’re definitely better now, especially when you look at the upgrades to the missiles over the last five to seven years,” Karbler says. “But if you look at the entirety—we failed a lot.”
What other options might there be to stop a nuclear explosion in its “terminal phase”? Could you send a fighter jet on a suicide mission? Could you set up drones to collide with its trajectory?
Once an ICBM reaches the terminal phase of its trajectory, ground-based interceptors aren’t strong options. With just a dozen minutes before impact, there’s not much else a country’s defense system can do—but Karbler notes that the U.S. ran a successful test last year, taking down a hypersonic target in its terminal phase using an Aegis ballistic missile deployed from a warship. As for combatting a nuclear warhead with something besides a missile interceptor, Karbler says unmanned fighter jets or drones are possibilities if you can figure out the missile’s flight trajectory in time. “That is always in the discussion,” he says.
One of the ways to throw the missile off course or destroy it is by deploying chaff—tiny, metallic strips that create a cloud of false targets—into the air to hide the location of a drone or distract radar-guided missiles. “If you put a giant chaff field in there, as [the missile] is going through it, it’s going to scar and mar the seeker of the ICBM,” Karbler says. “And you’re also going to do some damage to the fuselage, so it doesn’t have the same aerodynamic properties.”
Is there really a bunker in a mountain, and who gets to go? What kind of protection does it offer?
At the very end of the movie, Bigelow captures a variety of government officials funneling into Raven Rock Mountain Complex, otherwise known as Site R, a military installation with an underground nuclear bunker near Blue Ridge, Pa. Many of them have received JEEP alerts (Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan) notifying them of their designation and their quickest point of access to the bunker, which is built to withstand a nuclear explosion.
Raven Rock is, indeed, a real place, one of a few bunkers throughout the United States meant for emergency situations. Karbler notes that certain Pentagon officials visit the bunker once or twice a year to make sure it’s running properly. Otherwise, Oppenheim, who based a lot of his research on Garrett Graff’s book Raven Rock, admits there is not much known about how someone earns a spot to shelter there—or what is available inside it. “It’s designed for people to be able to ride out your confrontation and all that that entails,” he says. “Obviously it’s never been tested, so who knows whether it will work that way. But I think it’s what we kind of imagine and what has been depicted in other Hollywood movies over time.”
Would the president ever have practice for this kind of event?
The short answer is no. According to Karbler, President Ronald Reagan was the last to participate in any kind of missile response test. Otherwise, the Commander in Chief, he believes, would prefer not to telegraph even a notional sense of how they might respond until the moment actually happens. “Even though these conferences are top secret—they’re at the very, very highest levels—something will leak out about the president’s decision,” Karbler says. “And no president is going to win.”
Oppenheim found some of the same reasoning in his discussions with presidential aides, who often cited that it wasn’t an optimal use of the president’s time because nuclear war “just seemed so unlikely and so unfathomable,” he says. The idea of even having to make a decision like the one being contemplated in Dynamite is so difficult that most presidents would prefer not think about it until absolutely necessary. “It’s just something that they don’t really want to contemplate because it’s so horrific,” Oppenheim says.
Though, as Karbler assures, between STRATCOM and the Pentagon, the government conducts around 400 kinds of rehearsals, exercises, and conferences to practice for crisis events like this, and that includes various cabinet members. “We step them through that so that they understand the process very well so that they can be a good advocate to the president when it comes up,” he says.
How likely is it that a country with the capacity to respond (like the U.S.) would actually do nothing?
In the scenario that Dynamite presents, with no knowledge of the missile’s source, Karbler believes a president would likely exercise restraint and think about the larger picture. “If I respond back, it’s going to be much, much worse than just losing 10 million people,” he says. That being said, the president has to think about re-establishing deterrence options. At present count, there are about 12,000 nuclear warheads in the world, and only three of the nine countries with nuclear capabilities belong to NATO. That means communication and diplomacy may not be at the top of everyone’s agenda. “Maybe it’s cyber,” Karbler says. “Maybe it’s something else strategic that cripples an adversary without using a nuclear weapon.”
Oppenheim exhausted his list of national security resources to figure out a more precise answer to this question, but came away with a split vote about the president’s response. “Some of them have said there’s no way that he would retaliate at that moment—he would wait, he would take his time,” Oppenheim says. “And then just as many people have said, ‘There’s no way he doesn’t retaliate. He’s pressing the button right there.’ We don’t know. Hopefully we’ll never know. But I think so much hinges on the man or woman who’s facing that decision and what their character is like.”
How serious is the nuclear threat right now?
At certain points during the Cold War, nuclear war felt like an imminent threat—despite the fact that only the United States and U.S.S.R. were formidable nuclear powers. Today, nuclear war isn’t an everyday thought, but its danger has never been higher. There are more nuclear players, and the global environment is much more complex. As Oppenheim notes, “the doomsday clock is closer to midnight than it’s ever been in history.”
According to Karbler, the reason many people don’t fear nuclear war in the same way is based on its normalization. Russian president Vladimir Putin has discussed using “tactical nukes” on Ukraine, meanwhile, and within the last 15 years, hundreds of missiles have been fired between countries. Karbler hopes the rhetoric begins to diminish. “In A House of Dynamite, they talk about how the walls are full of dynamite—the genie’s out of the bottle,” he says. “I don’t think we’ll ever get the dynamite out of the walls, but we have to make sure that the fuse never gets lit. And the conversations that even hint at lighting those fuses have to be tamped down.” Karbler thinks this movie can start to facilitate that.
“I know it’s pie-in-the-sky thinking,” he says, “but somewhere, that discussion has to reach the highest levels so we can move forward.”