You know how World War I started because all the European powers were tied to each other? If one started mobilization a general war was unavoidable. The same thing with MAD. All the nuclear powers have a button that will cause a cascade that will end in a general nuclear exchange. Nobody has a button that will prevent such a war.
At War College, we discussed how the interwoven treaties of 1914 were an example of groupthink. MAD. is like that. If one nuke goes off anywhere it would take a lot of wisdom and dumb luck to not have nukes going off everywhere.
Why is that? I mean, if Pakistan nukes India, that doesn’t mean that the US, Britain, France, Russia, North Korea, or Israel (we know they’ve got them) are going to join in the fun for shits and giggles. Some people keep saying it’s inevitable, but I don’t see it.
MAD was always a two-sided thing- NATO vs. Warsaw Pact, or more realistically US vs. USSR.
That’s the point I’m making- in the absence of the simple-ish decision making of the MAD scenario of the Cold War, it’s a whole different ball game, and that’s what the movie was portraying.
One thing though; it should be doable to work back to the launch site based on the trajectory of the missile- even in a MIRV type situation, you’d still have a sort of circle-of-error from which the missile could have come. And I’d be willing to bet that the early warning radars calculate that automatically when they detect an inbound ballistic threat. So I’m guessing the movie situation is a bit contrived, in that unless it just came out of the open ocean, there would be more information about where it came from.
The film mentions that the launch wasn’t observed by DSP, which is technically the Defense Support Program satellite system; while DSP is older than SBIRS GEO and (although you didn’t mention it) the Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS) (formerly SBIRS-Low) but the DSP system is still operation and colloquially the entire collection of ballistic missile tracking satellites is often just referred to as DSP. In the film, there is repeated conjecture about interference with the satellite surveillance systems either with physical technical means (i.e. laser blinding or interference), and cyberwarfare attack. Absent of direct tracking data, a missile type or at least class could potentially be identified by phenomenology, either plume signature or ballistic characteristics such as speed and staging times but apparently they didn’t have enough time or data for analysis.
It’s plot armor. An uncharacterized launch was needed for the plot. So they technobabbled up an uncharacterizable launch. Unlike e.g. Star Trek, they didn’t have to go too far afield to come up w a plausible-sounding reason.
That doesn’t mean such a thing couldn’t happen real world. No sensor system is perfect.
“Technobabble” is the pseudscientific goop that screenwriters produce to explain something that is physically unworkable like faster-than-light propulsion or a vehicle that can swim through the mantle of ‘restart’ the Earth’s core rotating. All of the technology described in A House of Dynamite is quite real and the terminology and jargon are accurate, as are the vulnerabilities of the systems shown in the film. Aside from a couple of minor technical gaffs (at one point they briefly show an ICBM in a silo that is clearly a Minuteman II configuration rather than the current Minuteman III) the set design, vernacular, and interactions between characters, while characterized by some reviewers as “soap opera-grade drama” and “too cheap to be an actual military command center” looked and sounded quite authentic to me.
The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation has a preparation and watchalong guide for the film assessing the accuracy and the narrative conceits of the film. (I am not affiliated with or published any work through the organization or its parent body, Council for a Livable World but find them to be a useful resource on nuclear proliferation and arms control regimes.) Of course, as you might guess from the name they have an inherent bias of being critical of ballistic missile defense and the effectiveness and expansion of nuclear deterrence to prevent war bit there is a lot of expertise and wonkish analysis applied to evaluating the accuracy of the technical and procedural elements of the film and plausibility of the story:
I don’t think that’s feasible. Launching some sort of counterstrike while the missile is in the air or within minutes of the confirmed detonation is one thing. Launching an attack days, weeks, or months later would be seen very differently. Just my thoughts on it.
I did find that the structure of the story––told in blocks of repeated segments from different points of view––undercut the tension that was developed in the first act of the film, and while the acting was uniformly good (with Rebecca Ferguson being the particular standout) I think some of the particular character conflicts really didn’t serve the story
I heartily agree with this. By the third one, I was emotionally checked out. The SecDef side story ending surprised me and it seemed that was all that was left. If anything, the later chapters having less details, rather than more, worked against it for me. I might have had more interest if I knew which plans he was considering.
I agree that a lot more would be coordinated with the State Department and other agencies. I wonder if they had to have so many concessions for the plot already to get to this dramatic point, they figured the countdown could push it forward on its own. The interceptors failing tracks, from what people here are saying. The failure to track the ICBM back its source failing was too much. They wanted ambiguity but created too many failures to believe.
Besides the bit about the satellites being subject to cyberwarfare and speculation as to who might have done that, they were not sure whether it was a North Korean sub or possibly a Chinese sub, just that it came from the Pacific Ocean. How easy would it be to positively identify the launching submarine if they did not have eyes on that exact spot?
The defense being unable to locate the launch source, unable to make a national attribution, and later being unable to achieve an intercept are all very much real world outcomes that may well occur w our real world systems. No need for Hollywood fakery there.
My point was simply that the storyline demanded those failures occur. With a bit more luck IRL one or all might’ve been averted. But they weren’t in the story. Because the story demanded it. That is all.
Once nations have started engaging in the unprovoked use of nuclear weapons, the scale of acceptability of mass casualty is fundamentally recalibrated. In wargaming scenarios, once one player starts engaging with even ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons on the battlefield, the situation almost inevitably spirals toward strategic nuclear exchange. Of course, it is unlikely that a response would be held back for months; the pressure to launch before your weapons are destroyed is what drives that apocalyptic cycle of ‘deterrence doom’.
Each segment of the film covers the same 20-something minutes between discrimination of launch to just before impact in Chicago. There isn’t really time for coordination outside of the President-Cabinet-STRATCOM ‘kill chain’. You saw a little bit of that with the FEMA representative just trying to get confirmation about an alert and how uncoordinated unassociated agencies were about responding to a potential attack, especially one that came out of the blue with no buildup. At the point that missiles are flying, the Department of State is kind of supernumerary, at least at the moment, and you can see that in how Tracy Letts’ General Brady is baldly contemptuous of the Deputy National Security Advisor who is basically doing State’s job in trying to communicate with other nations and negotiate a response.
Personally, I don’t find the DSP/SBIRS/STSS system failing to identify the exact source of a launch all that implausible, especially if it occurs in mid-ocean. Although the original DSP system had pretty comprehensive coverage, the current system almost certainly is optimized for known launch sites and a canny adversary could probably find holes in the coverage.
Not easy. It is possible that the type of the missile could be discriminated by plume and ballistic phenomenology as discussed above, but the DSP/SBIRS system isn’t intended to produce high fidelity imagine, just to distinguish the sudden burst of IR energy of a launch from other sources like wildfire, refinery/industrial conflagration, or sunlight reflecting off of clouds. Any single launch from a submarine is going to basically look like any other (save the different in plume temperature between solid propellant and liquid propellant boosters), so unless you get a count from a ballistic missile submarine firing a full salvo, just detecting the launch gives you no information about the responsible nation.
I’m not really sure what point you think you are making. With a bit more luck IRL the interceptor may also have stopped the missile but it didn’t because the story demanded it. Yes, that is how stories work.
It is vaguely reminiscent, and you can compare it to, Nuclear War: A Scenario. In that story, too, North Korea lobs a couple of ICBMs at the US, and the ABMs fail to intercept them. (Which lays the ground for the US retaliatory strike, the subsequent Russian launch, etc., which I think was the right dramatic move to keep all that out of the movie version).
Saw it last night. I thought it was great. It was very tense. When the movie first “reset” back to the beginning, I was mildly disappointed, but it worked. The tension just built back up again.
The main take away for me is we do live in a house of dynamite. Since we do, we need serious people who we can trust in charge. And we also need to take steps to not live in a house of dynamite.
I have worked the last 34 years at USSTRATCOM (and SAC before that) and I gotta say the set designs in this movie were scary good. They definitely did their homework there.
As for the movie itself, it was just ok. Having the same scenario replayed 3 different times without adding new details each time didn’t work for me. They also spent too much time on the people being shipped off to Site-R. I get it was there to show how the government has contingency plans but I just didn’t care about some random FEMA person.
We watched it last night. My takeaway was that this is what could happen when you have sane people running the government. Think what a catastrophe it would be with, say, the current administration in charge.
An aside: Raven Rock (Site “R”) is a real place in PA with its own Wiki page. By odd coincidence, I’ve been there. It was way back in about 2003. Our company had a contract to upgrade things inside the mountain and I went there to check up on the progress. Got a tour of the inside of the mountain. Really eerie to be inside of a mountain, traveling through the tunnels and seeing enormous blast doors designed to resist a nuclear attack. It didn’t help that there was a cicada outbreak in the area and that weird chirring noise they make lent an atmosphere of science fiction to the place. The oddest thing to me, though, was that there was a gift shop where you could by coffee mugs and tees and the like with “Site R” embossed on them.
I just saw this on Saturday, and I really liked it. There was a very human element to it that made it stand out from other movies in that genre. What would YOU have done ?! Honestly, I can’t say for sure myself.
It seemed like they wanted to present how other agencies would be informed and react to an alert but it was a character and plotline that literally went nowhere (and couldn’t have really have been developed within that timeframe). I think the movie would have been much tighter if they had really focused in on the analysis/decision process, and as much as I would really like to see a movie with Idris Elba as the President (“Close that Oval Office door,”) I think the movie would have actually been better as seen in the proverbial ‘fog of war’ from the point of view of the people in the loop without actually seeing the President or Secretary of State. I also thought they pretty thoroughly wasted Jared Harris in a role that didn’t really add anything to advance the story other than his surprised interjection at the odds of an ICBM intercept: “So it’s a fucking coin toss? That’s what $50 billion buys us?”
There is an interesting discussion to be had on this because (aside from the Hudson Institute wonks who are constitutionally predisposed to believe in a “survivable nuclear war”) while there is a broad consensus of what would happen in the case of a nuclear attack on a major power i.e. it would very likely spiral out into a general strategic exchange, there is a wide diversity of earnest opinions about what could be done to avert the potential for miscommunication or a false positive alert from progressing into a response going from ‘maintain the status quo but with greater focus on reliability and security’ to ‘reduce the number of weapons to the minimum consistent with some arbitrary deterrence posture and keep them on a standby status instead of prompt availability for launch’, with no particular position being clearly objectively superior. Nobody (other than some idealists) seems to think that we could get to a nuclear weapon-free world, and I suspect if you cornered most arms control wonks with a bottle of whiskey they would privately admit that there is a high likelihood of nuclear exchange in the foreseeable future, and especially in a rapidly proliferating multipolar world.
Overall, I found the movie to be fairly enjoyable. The part that I couldn’t believe was the idea that NOBODY had ever developed a possible scenario where “a single missile originates from an unknown location.” I mean, WarGames fictionalized over 50 scenarios (many of which are pretty darkly humorous), but nobody has ever asked what would be the appropriate actions given the events of this movie? I would have expected some stock, preprogrammed series of steps that are well-understood and rehearsed by the various branches and agencies. It seems like everyone here is just wandering around stunned.
I think the character of General Brady portrayed the “this is what we’ve rehearsed to do in this situation” when we don’t know who attacked us or why, as to what our pre-planned response would be. Based on the known facts, however poor, these are the available options. Pick one now. The fact that it was imperfect, insane, and that nobody else was really up to speed or prepared for what to do, was a big point of the movie.
If the deterrence plan is assured destruction, with only one nuke from an unknown origin, then you need to follow up and not bluff or everyone else could be emboldened to take advantage. That’s easy to say you’ll do, as the movie showed it’s very difficult for humans to make those decisions in real life.
What can be done? Without knowing anything about nuclear war or scenarios, etc., and thinking that is actually helpful to think of weird/oddball, but potentially good ways to help, I’d do this:
Change who can authorize a nuclear strike. Now, only the President can authorize a nuclear strike. Maybe that should not be the case. Maybe it should be some other elected official and not the President at all. Maybe an entirely new position and that’s all the person is elected to do. The idea is elected, but prepared.
The US will never strike first under any scenario. This should be our policy. It’s hard to deter if we don’t commit to this.
Is there anyway to tag a nuclear weapon? Or some other way to know “who” it belonged to. Like a registry or something. Using the geographic location seems like a bad way to “know” who launched it.
Anyways. Is there a planned scenario for what we do when we don’t know who attacked us or why?
And ultimately, the decision is up to a guy who’s in that position because the voters liked him more than the other guy.
I think it would’ve worked better if the timelines didn’t overlap exactly. Act 1 should’ve ended just after the interceptor failed. Act 2 could’ve ended after the general and the security advisor both made their arguments to the president. And then the final act goes to the president’s decision.