Too Late

I don’t know whether the podcast Elba’s character references is real. Considering how much oxygen podcasts suck up these days, especially for news-junkie liberals like screenwriter (and former NBC News head) Noah Oppenheim, I suppose it could be. But I’m not about to go scrubbing through the archives of Pod Save America looking for it. Instead, I’ll go out on a limb and guess that A House of Dynamite’s title was inspired not by a podcast but by a passage in a 1984 book called The Abolition by the New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Schell.

Schell — who also wrote the landmark 1982 book The Fate of the Earth, about the environmental fallout of nuclear weapons — brings up a house rigged with explosives to illustrate the inane character of “deterrence” as a personal and public safety plan. His point is that “deterrence arbitrates nothing.” Even in a best-case scenario, all it can do is ensure that all disputes are indefinitely suspended, or “kept in abeyance, without any resolution.”

Schell illustrates this point through a hypothetical anecdote about a neighbor who insists upon breaking into his house. The homeowner can settle the dispute through direct means (punching or shooting the neighbor) or through civil means (calling the police). Each of these amount to reactions to a violation after it occurs.

A policy of deterrence is fundamentally different:

Under deterrence I have, in anticipation of my neighbor’s depredations, filled my house with explosives, wired them to go off the moment any unauthorized person crosses my threshold and (an essential step) informed my neighbor of what I have done — hoping, of course, that he will then have the good sense to give up any plans he might have for stealing my furniture.

Schell’s point in The Abolition is to present an actionable plan for a worldwide drawdown in nuclear capacity — an argument he can make only after pointing out the obvious absurdity of a global safety plan based on the principle of mutually assured destruction.

But as far as technological metaphors go, “a house of dynamite” is a misleading one. To state the obvious, the American nuclear arsenal is not a house. It’s not something you can erect and then leave alone. It is a dynamic system that requires daily, even hourly, input from many thousands of persons, entities, and machines. The infrastructure that undergirds the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is not stationary and self-contained, but rather continuously reloaded and constantly in motion.

Writing seventy years ago, at a historical moment when the horrors of nuclear war could not be so easily euphemized, the philosopher Günther Anders offered a better metaphor: “The bomb is a deed.”

What does it mean to say the bomb is a deed? For one thing, it forces us to consider some much more recent history than the invention of the first nukes eighty years ago. The most relevant year for understanding America’s current nuclear predicament is not 1945 but 2010. This was when the Defense Department, under the leadership of Commander in Chief Barack Obama, began a comprehensive upgrade and expansion of the US nuclear arsenal.

According to the New York Times, this in-progress nuclear upgrade involves over 100,000 scientists, engineers, and subcontractors, working in all fifty states to produce “a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles and thermonuclear warheads” as well as “12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines” and a slew of other goodies. (For a glimpse into the lives and psyches of the people working on this nuclear expansion, check out the chilling Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons, by the science journalist Sarah Scoles.)

The nuclear upgrade is expected to end in 2042 and cost a total of 1.7 trillion dollars — that’s an expenditure of $108,000 per minute, every minute, for thirty years. Now, with the work more than halfway finished, suddenly there is a glut of cultural products commenting on the dangers of nuclear weapons. This emergent genre includes not only A House of Dynamite but also Oppenheimer, the New York Times series “At the Brink,” and Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario (which Denis Villeneuve is reportedly adapting for the screen).

It is curious and a little exasperating that the American entertainment and news establishment only discovered its profound anxiety about nuclear deterrence once the once-in-a-generation rebuild of the US nuclear system was already so close to completion that it could no longer be meaningfully opposed.

Who Built the House of Dynamite?

Thanks in large part to this disastrous timing, A House of Dynamite fails as political commentary before it even begins. The film begs the question: Who built the House of Dynamite? Then it answers: Who knows? And really, who cares?

It certainly wasn’t Elba’s flustered POTUS, who learned about his own nuclear policy from a podcast. Nor was it the dysfunctional secretary of defense — a squirming worm of a character, played to off-putting perfection by Jared Harris, who spends most of the film flecking his telephone mouthpiece with spittle. Nor was it even the bullheaded general at the helm of US Strategic Command: a no-thoughts-just-rules kind of guy, played by Tracy Letts, who wants only to talk baseball and nuke Moscow (in that order).

According to the movie’s moral logic, none of these officials are responsible for the predicament they find themselves in. They are not the architects of Armageddon so much as they are the victims of history. This is the thesis of Oppenheim’s op-ed. Our political leaders live in the dynamite house just like the rest of us do. Pity them. Heavy are the heads that wear the nuclear crowns.

A House of Dynamite sinks into what the nuclear scholars Benoît Pelopidas and Neil C. Renic have called the “tragedy trap,” in which “foreseeable and solvable problems are reconceptualized as intractable dilemmas, and morally and politically accountable agents are reframed as powerless observers.” The problem with such a framing, Pelopidas and Renic argue, is that it “indulges the very hubris the tragic recognition is intended to caution against.”

Confronted with the outrage of a civilization-ending nuclear war, we are asked to identify with the most powerful men in the world and to see in their anguish and indecision a sympathetic reflection of our own horror. It takes a twisted kind of movie-magic to make an audience relate more to feckless elites spluttering into their sat-phones than to the millions of ordinary people slated to become the first casualties of humanity’s terminal war.

To borrow a phrase from former US ambassador George F. Kennan, who infamously called America’s nuke obsession “a form of illness,” everything about A House of Dynamite is “morbid in the extreme.”

Some readers will think I’m nitpicking and nay-saying here. Critics and viewers alike have already begun describing A House of Dynamite as our generation’s answer to Dr. Strangelove (1964) or The Day After (1983) — movies that, whatever their blind spots, at least brought our unending nuclear peril to widespread public attention. By presenting the stakes of nuclear brinksmanship in such stark terms, won’t A House of Dynamite inspire a kind of awareness that can only tend toward greater caution, maybe even eventual disarmament?

I’m not so sure. The truth is that apocalyptic visions of nuclear genocide can just as easily fortify US nuclear doctrine as call it into question.

In his book People of the Bomb, the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson describes meeting a woman named Sylvia who, like him, was deeply affected by the Hiroshima nuclear bombing of 1945. Gusterson, an anti-nuke activist, had nightmares set in Hiroshima; Sylvia, a Japanese American, lost family members in the attacks. But to Gusterson’s amazement, Sylvia worked as a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she designed nuclear warheads.

As an anti-nuke activist, Gusterson had attempted to publicize the most gruesome and horrifying effects of the bombing, in the hopes that images of “the shattered bodies of Hiroshima” would convince people that maintaining a nuclear arsenal was insane. But Sylvia’s experience proved that “this is not the only way these bodies can be read.”

“For those who are persuaded by the arguments in favor of nuclear weapons,” Gusterson writes, a stark knowledge of what happened at Hiroshima may simply reinforce the notion that it is important for one’s own country to have such weapons.”

I worry that A House of Dynamite only reinforces that notion too. By treating the doctrine of nuclear deterrence as an inevitable feature of the twenty-first-century world order — not as a policy position that can and must be reversed — the film may leave viewers with the sense that what we need is more investment in missiles (and missile-interceptor technology), not less.

This is in keeping with an increasingly mainstream reading of the film, which treats its heart-pounding story of nuclear apocalypse as a ninety-minute ad for Donald Trump’s much-hyped “Golden Dome” missile defense system. This seems to be the position of retired general Dan Karbler, a consultant on the film, who is now a major proselytizer for Golden Dome. (Karbler was chief of staff for US Strategic Command from 2018 to 2023, and he makes a cameo in the film in that role.) Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s only response to A House of Dynamite has been to insist that the US missile defense systems actually have a slightly better success rate than the 61 percent referenced in the movie.

What we need is an overall drawdown in nuclear weapons development and war planning. The last thing we need is more auxiliary missile technologies, which are fundamentally unreliable and only serve to further ratchet up the stakes of bomb research and development around the world.

But A House of Dynamite seems determined to lead you to the opposite conclusion. It’s as if, after warning you about the explosive house, the realtor then asked for your support to buy more dynamite-filled bricks.

Despite its veneer of gritty realism, A House of Dynamite is a film in love with euphemism. Perhaps the filmmakers thought US nuclear policy was so abstract, so remote, that a dash of metaphor was necessary. But euphemism also happens to be how state planners obscure the cruelty and recklessness of their war plans, as the historian Joanna Bourke has written. By metaphorizing the unthinkable, military commanders create “an anesthetizing effect” that dulls the public’s capacity for criticism.

A House of Dynamite promises to educate and agitate us. But then, like political anesthesia, it puts us right back to sleep.