So I watched the Netflix movie A House of Dynamite yesterday, and here are some quick thoughts on the film which has been getting a lot of buzz. Scroll down to the final thoughts if you want to skip the spoilers.
The movie is the latest in the long tradition of the Hollywood nuclear apocalypse genre and some of the plot follows a predictable course. A lone nuclear missile is launched at the United States. No one knows who launched it or why and the government has about 15 minutes before it's going to hit a major US city. The film is part procedural drama and part morality play.
What I liked...
* The acting was generally solid and believable. There were some very sobering and emotional scenes that I thought were pretty realistic. This is not one of those Hallmark Christmas movies mom loved.
* Most of the people that would be involved in something like this are trained professionals. But they are also human with families. If it looks like it's really happening and the end may be imminent, folks are going to handle that in different ways. I thought the film did a good job showing that.
* For the most part, they got the procedural stuff right. Several news stories reported that people with personal knowledge even claimed the sets used for the the White House Situation Room and the command center at STRATCOM were so dead on, they are assuming one or more people who have been in those rooms helped with the film.
* The steps that would be taken in the event of a nuclear emergency were about right and mostly in the right order.
* The bagman and the nuclear football were also more or less correct.
* The organized chaos and stress that would be going on once you trigger C.O.G. (continuity of government) protocols and start evacuating critical persons was again, likely close to what would be going on. If anything, I think it would probably happen a lot faster and more brutally. Senior people in the line of succession would not be politely asked to come along with short delays to finish conversations or phone calls. It would be closer to the very realistic scene where POTUS is just grabbed and rushed by Secret Service out of a public engagement.
Where I think the movie fell short...
* The likelihood of anyone being able to launch a ballistic missile at the US and our not knowing who did it, either instantly or within minutes is in the same range as a lottery ticket. I realize they needed this for the plot, but their explanation is not realistic. We have multiple ways of identifying who was behind any launch. Even if it somehow happened, we would be able to identify the origin of a nuclear blast fairly quickly from various types of evidence related to the blast, types of radioactive material and so on. Think of it as nuclear fingerprints. The idea of someone being able to successfully carry out an anonymous nuclear strike on the US is Hollywood fantasy.
* In the film a couple of interceptor missiles are launched. One malfunctions and the other misses. The procedure here is pretty accurate. But they are wrong in suggesting we would only fire two missiles and hold the rest in reserve for a possible second wave attack. If a lone missile was launched at the US, the assumption would be that it was either an accident, a rogue, or (spectacularly improbable) a false positive in our computers and satellites. Knowing that millions of Americans faced imminent death and that a bomb going off would push the world to the edge of oblivion, they would throw whatever was needed to take that missile out.
* In line with the above, the scenes where the military are pressing POTUS to launch a massive retaliatory strike without knowing all the facts was unrealistic. They, perhaps more than anyone, would know that such an act would mean the end of civilization as we know it. The logic behind their arguments was also not credible. The launch now or we will loose all our nukes did not make sense in the face of a single inbound missile. A single missile was not going to take out our defenses or decapitate the government. Most likely, the military leadership would be urging restraint until we know for sure who did what and if the damned missile even explodes. The nightmare scenario is where the computers and satellites are telling us we have a wall of inbound ICBS and ~15 minutes to make a decision. Then we really would be in a bad spot because about a third of our nuclear defenses are in the form of land based ICBMs. Both Russia and China know where they are. So yeah...
* The US would almost certainly have given emphatic assurances to both Moscow and Beijing that we would not launch any attack until we knew who was behind it. And if it turned out to be North Korea, we would not need to overfly either Russian or Chinese airspace to turn that country into a glow-in-the-dark parking lot. Although not publicly discussed, it is well known that we have multiple nuclear ballistic missile subs on patrol in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean 24/7/365. They are more than capable of dealing with the Hermit Kingdom if needed.
* Word would have gotten out. For the same reasons some people would almost certainly break protocols and make calls to loved ones, someone would alert the press. Also you can't carry out emergency evacuation of top government leadership without the press taking notice. If the POTUS suddenly gets rushed out of a public event by Secret Service, that by itself is going to be the cause for special news bulletins. There would be widespread public panic.
* This would be made worse by a likely total lack of official communication from the government. Two reasons would be behind this. First, in that 15 minute window there isn't going to be time for a news conference. Secondly, there isn't much the government could do or say that would be terribly helpful. Here is a dirty little secret. There is no national Civil Defense program in the United States. It was quietly done away with in the 1990s when everyone assumed that history had stopped, there would be no more major wars, and the US would never actually be attacked. FEMA (created in 1979 to replace the Office for Civil Defense) still exists. But it's focus is now entirely on natural and non-military disasters. There are no more public fallout shelters. No evacuation plans. No functional air raid sirens. Except in Hawaii. Alone of the 50 states, Hawaii launched a major civil defense program in the wake of explicit threats from North Korea. They actually have plans, public shelters and warning systems in place. The rest of us are pretty much screwed.
Final thoughts...
All in all this is one of the better films in its genre. It's well acted and directed, highly suspenseful, at times depressingly emotional, and probably the most realistic film in terms of showing the procedural aspects of our nuclear defenses and how it all works. If at times, the plot strays a bit from the otherwise high levels of realism, it can be excused in the name of dramatic license. Bottom line, I don't see this getting an Academy Award nomination, but on balance it's a good movie
