I expected to really like this movie, because I have an amateur interest in nuclear doctrine / strategy and because I like movies where people are forced to make decisions that are really too big for any one person to handle, so it’s right up my alley.
But the movie lacks a central dilemma and the one it tries to create is false and makes no sense. I’m not going to nitpick the technical details or decisions made in the movie, but rather the structure of the story itself.
Nuclear war stories can easily create really great dilemmas, because the subject material is so impactful, the pressure on the decision makers so intense, often information incomplete, and incredible time pressure, nuclear war is sort of an untested hypothetical and so there are various ideas of how it might actually happen, and the fate of the world is at stake.
The central (false) dilemma in The House of Dynamite is that the president needs to (immediately) decide if he’s going to retaliate and if so, how, for a single missile nuclear strike on Chicago, the perpetrator of which could not be identified.
His top general at StratCom tells him that he needs to attack the nuclear forces of what is implied to be every potentially hostile nation on Earth before they can continue their attack and launch the rest of their nuclear forces on the United States. Other advisors tell him that he’ll be viewed as weak if he doesn’t do anything to respond to this nuclear attack, that it’s equivalent to surrendering.
But the problem is: there is no reason he has to make this decision immediately, as the movie’s structure says is necessary. Losing Chicago does not damage the United States nuclear arsenal or its ability to command it. The time pressure in nuclear war scenarios comes from the fact that the first strike is almost always more than one missile, and it’s almost always aimed at a nation’s command and control and nuclear launch capabilities. In that case, you have a real dilemma because if you do not launch your assets within 20-30 minutes, and there is a real incoming attack, you will lose most of those forces on the ground. It’s use it or lose it, and you have a few minutes to make that decision.
But in A House of Dynamite, there are no enemy forces attacking our nuclear capabilities. The missile isn’t even aimed at Washington DC, where it would at least be disruptive to our command and control. There is absolutely no time pressure to respond immediately. The president could order an investigation into who launched the weapon and then decide an appropriate response then – hours, days, even weeks later. There is nothing to be gained from responding immediately. Our forces are now at their highest alert – if anyone makes a follow up attack we’re going to see it instantly and we’re going to be in a very aggressive posture and able to respond instantly. There is no immediate threat that requires an immediate response.
On the contrary, since the whole world is on their highest alert, the strategy suggested by the general cannot possibly work. The only way a nuclear first strike could actually work is if your enemy doesn’t expect it, and you can deceive them long enough to destroy their forces before they’re launched. When the whole world is on high alert, it’s now impossible to pull off a successful first strike – the enemy is going to know exactly what’s happening and immediately launch their forces as soon as you launch yours. So the general’s advice that we have to attack the rest of the world’s nuclear arsenals before they can launch them makes no sense – the only thing that would accomplish is that we FORCE them to launch all of their weapons on the United States.
And we don’t even know who made the attack! North Korea? China? Russia? Maybe even as unlikely as it is, some other nuclear power like India, Pakistan, Great Britain, or France launching a missile from the Pacific to make it look like perhaps China did it. We have no idea. So when the advisors in the film are telling the president he has to respond, and they’re showing him pages out of the attack selection book, are they telling him to attack everyone? It seems like they are – the advisor recommends a specific plan to “end the issue for good” or something like that, which makes it sound like he’s suggesting we attack all of the above. That’s an insane response that pretty much no one would ever do.
In a story like this, you need a dilemma where people can debate it either way, where you can see merits and difficulties on any course of action. The movie is clearly set up to imply that there is such a dilemma. Who does the president attack? How strongly? Does he do nothing (immediately) and effectively surrender? But because there is absolutely no reason to retaliate until you know who committed the attack, and there is no time pressure because the US nuclear forces are not being attacked, the obvious answer is not a dilemma at all. Wait until you figure out what happened.
They could’ve wrote a real dilemma into the movie. Like for instance if we have a limited strike involving a dozen missiles that are aimed at the command and control centers of the United States but we can’t figure out for sure who launched them – do you retaliate against everyone who might’ve launched them? In that case, since they’re targeting your ability to retaliate, there would be an actual time pressure to make a decision.
If you watch films like Fail Safe or even Crimson Tide, there are legitimate dilemmas, complicated decisions where you could argue both sides, and it’s reasonable for people to disagree. But this didn’t have that – the obvious choice was to wait and find out more and any other decision made no sense.