When the president in A House of Dynamite, played by Idris Elba, is weighing the future of all mankind as a nuclear missile hurtles toward Chicago, it’s made clear that he’s been thrust into a scenario he’s never rehearsed.
In fact, as screenwriter Noah Oppenheim and director Kathryn Bigelow found out in researching the movie, the lack of a presidential drill is based in reality: The last president to participate in a nuclear-decision making exercise was Ronald Reagan, even though other parts of the chain of command, through the U.S. Strategic Command, practice hundreds of times a year.
The movie, which debuted on Netflix last month, depicts the harrowing moments as the U.S. government weighs a response to an incoming missile heading to Chicago, despite a scarcity of facts and the prospect of world annihilation.
Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News, drew on contacts gained from his journalism career to write a screenplay that’s as accurate as possible. A House of Dynamite shuns partisanship, a reminder that what is at stake rises above politics, even in this polarized period.
“The people that we met and spoke to who had been watch officers in the White House Situation Room, who had been civilian officials within the Pentagon, who had been retired military, who worked for Stratcom or in missile defense — these are incredible public servants,” Oppenheim said. “They’re experts in their field. They devoted their entire careers to keeping us safe. The people we spoke to were as apolitical as you can imagine.”
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A House of Dynamite, though, has gotten some pushback from the Pentagon, which disputed the film’s contention that interceptor missiles have just a 61% success rate in striking incoming warheads. A Pentagon memo claimed the interceptors “displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.”
With a warning of plot spoilers, Deadline spoke to Oppenheim about a recent screening in Washington, why the movie is sparking a much-needed conversation and why world leaders still have it in their power and possibility to limit the nuclear threat.
DEADLINE: What what stands out in the reaction you’ve gotten in Washington, D.C.?
NOAH OPPENHEIM: Two things stand out. One is the number of people that we have heard from who work on the front lines at these agencies and in these institutions, whether it’s the White House Situation Room or Strategic Command or the Pentagon or the CIA — people telling us that they felt like we accurately captured their worlds, which was, of course, of enormous importance to us. So that’s been enormously gratifying. The second thing is the extent to which so many people seem eager to be finally having this conversation about the nuclear threat and what we all might do to help mitigate it. It’s a topic that lawmakers, scholars, activists, many of them feel like has been far too long neglected, and it’s been great to see how many have kind of used the movie as a jumping-off point to have these important conversations.
DEADLINE: As I understand it, your agent said, “Do you want to have a conversation with Kathryn Bigelow about this project?” And she had this idea, and you went ahead to write it. What was the biggest challenge just starting out to research and write it?
OPPENHEIM: The biggest challenge is that both Kathryn and I were really committed from the outset to realism and authenticity. I’m a former journalist. Kathryn takes a journalistic approach when it comes to her filmmaking. We both felt an enormous responsibility. If you’re going to take an audience inside these rooms, if you’re going to depict the work of these public servants, we wanted to do it in a way that was authentic, and so nailing down all of those details was a big part of the job.
Now, fortunately, the government has got 80 years of policies and procedures, many of which have been put down on paper, that govern what would happen if the United States was ever attacked. So there’s an enormous body of material that one can turn to, much of which is in the public domain. There’s an extraordinary community of journalists and scholars who have been writing about this topic, trying to draw attention to it for decades, and they were eager to speak. And then both Kathryn and I were able to draw upon, most importantly, our relationships in the national security community, folks that I knew from my time at NBC News, people that Kathryn had gotten to know making The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. We had a series of conversations with them and said, ‘Walk us through the steps.’
Those people were incredibly generous with their time and eager to talk. These are people who live with this threat in the back of their minds and work every day to prevent something like this from happening. As much as people have found the movie unsettling, and a lot of people have said, “I had trouble sleeping after I finished watching it.” Imagine how the people who work on the front lines of missile defense feel every day knowing that this danger is out there.
DEADLINE: The president — you see the weight on his shoulders and also how it’s not like they’ve been practicing for this moment.
OPPENHEIM: One of the scariest facts that we uncovered early in our research process was when we were speaking to a former senior official who had worked at the Pentagon, and we asked him, “How often does the president of the United States rehearse for this scenario?” And his response was, “Hardly ever at all.” And that’s particularly troubling, because in the United States of America, we have a nuclear monarchy. We have a system that’s based on sole authority. The president of the United States gets to decide if, when and how we use nuclear weapons unilaterally. He doesn’t have to take a vote of the Cabinet or the Joint Chiefs. He doesn’t have to build any kind of consensus at all. It’s all on his or her shoulders, and yet he’s the least prepared and practiced.
If you talk to the people at Strategic Command, they are rehearsing these scenarios, they told us, on average 400 times a year, but all they can do is advise. The president has to make the call. And the last president who participated in a live nuclear decision-making exercise, we were told, was Reagan. And so the human drama of that was one of the key things that we wanted to portray in the movie, this idea that somebody would have minutes to make a decision about the fate of all mankind while simultaneously being evacuated, running for their life and having very little preparation. It’s really the most extreme test you could imagine a character being put through. And yet, that’s how our system is designed in real life.
DEADLINE: Through the years, it seems like there have been moments when there have been false alarms. To what extent did you rely on that in doing your research?
OPPENHEIM: The history of near-misses is terrifying and was an important piece of inspiration for us in terms of crafting a story. We, collectively as a human race, have come close to annihilating ourselves many, many times since the dawn of the nuclear age. And some of those near-misses are very well known, and some we probably don’t know about still to this day. Perhaps the most famous is the story of a Soviet military officer named Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty [in 1983] when the Soviet missile defense radar detected what it thought were multiple incoming ICBMs, and he made a decision to disobey orders and not follow Soviet military protocol. And because he he suspected that it might be an error, and his decision to not raise the alarm up the chain of command may have spared all of us a Soviet retaliatory strike and the end of the world. There are many instances like that where technology has malfunctioned. There have also been moments in the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States where trust had fallen to such a level that we crept very close to nuclear war. The most famoues example, obviously, the Cuban Missile Crisis, where for several days we were on that precipice.
DEADLINE: The Pentagon has pushed back. Did it surprise you?
OPPENHEIM: I was delighted that they chose to join the conversation around the movie, and I welcome it. It is not a debate between the Pentagon and us as filmmakers. It’s really a debate between the Pentagon and the wider community of experts in missile defense. The track record of the ground-based midcourse interceptors, which is the missile defense system we show in the movie, is pretty much a matter of public record. They’ve done 20 tests of the system since 1999, and the success rate is roughly actually 57%, so we were being a little generous. Those are carefully scripted tests. The Pentagon, the defenders know when the incoming missile is coming, where it’s going. They don’t involve decoys or other counter measures, so they are the best-case scenario in many ways, and yet it’s still only a coin toss. What the Pentagon was referring to in that memo was the fact that of those 20, the last several have been successful, and they’re right, and the technology has improved. But that’s like saying I made my last two free throws, and so I’m 100% on free throws.
DEADLINE: And your figure is out there in the public record.
OPPENHEIM: Yeah, absolutely. Senator [Ed] Markey has issued a statement. Fred Kaplan, Tom Nichols, some of the great luminaries in the field have all immediately come out and said that the Pentagon’s position, that we have a system that’s 100% effective, is preposterous. But I think again, you know, this is the conversation we want to have, and we welcome it. There are a lot of levers that the Trump administration can pull if it wants to make this country safer from from the nuclear threat. One of those levers is missile defense. They can certainly invest many billions into building a Golden Dome. They can also engage in negotiations to renew that New START treaty that we have with Russia. They can think about the rhetoric that is used around the use of nuclear weapons. All of these are factors that influence how safe you and I are, and the more people who are involved in debating and discussing the issue, I think the better.
DEADLINE: Coming from a breaking-news environment, why do you think it is so hard for media outlets to focus on this?
OPPENHEIM: There’s a whole category of existential threats to humanity. They’re very difficult for news organizations to cover because they very often don’t have an immediate peg. There is almost always something that feels more pressing, and they can oftentimes feel abstract, and yet that’s precisely what makes them so dangerous. They feel like pie in the sky until it’s too late. And that’s why I actually think that movies and television and other forms of creative expression can sometimes be more effective drivers of conversation around these issues, because they can connect with people on an emotional level. They can bring the abstract to life.
DEADLINE: When you were at NBC News and you did stories on the nuclear threat, nuclear proliferation, what did you have to keep in mind in conveying it to the public?
OPPENHEIM: What’s tricky about conveying the scale of the nuclear threat is that it requires a fair amount of imagination. People do have a memory and a feel for what more traditional warfare looks and feels like. We’ve seen film and photographs of trench warfare in World War I, we’ve seen films of the concentration camps in World War II, we’ve seen films and TV broadcasts during the Vietnam War. We know what it looks like when people stand across a field from each other or in a jungle and fire bullets. We know what it looks like when there’s a bombed-out urban landscape. With the tragic exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we don’t really understand what a nuclear war would look like. And because the weapons now are so much more powerful than the ones that were used in Japan, those are actually not even illustrative examples. And so when you’re trying to convey to an audience how horrific this would be, it’s challenging because you don’t have the sort of file footage that you would be able to use for historical reference when you’re talking about other forms of conflict. It’s hypothetical in some ways.
DEADLINE: How did you set out to create the character of the president? What type of president did you want him to be?
OPPENHEIM: The goal for the president was that he be a normal president. And by that, I mean he is neither the heroic president of our TV and film dreams, nor is he the disastrous president of our nightmares. He’s not Jed Bartlet [from The West Wing], and he’s not Selina Meyer from Veep. He’s a normal guy, the type of politician and person who has held that office in real life. Historically, he’s trying to do the right thing. He’s not totally ignorant, nor is he an expert. He’s a regular person who is being faced with an impossible choice.
DEADLINE: It’s ambiguous who fired the missile. How much of a concern is it that in real life, the satellite just won’t detect who fired it?
OPPENHEIM: We’re trying to tell a story about this system that exists, this machinery that exists, that governs decision making and the use of nuclear weapons. If we had assigned blame to one hostile nation, it becomes a story about that, where Russia or North Korea are the bad guys. If we had depicted a president who was a fool, and it becomes about that — then as long as we elect the right leader, we won’t have a problem. We’re trying to shine a light on the system as a whole, the risk and the danger and the threat. In terms of the real-life likelihood of the United States not being able to determine who launched the missile, the satellites that we have actually are very reliable. If there’s a land-based launch, it’s very likely that we will be able to tell where the missile came from. The tricky piece comes when you start looking at sea-based launches. So if a submarine launches a missile, it’s much harder to know whose submarine that is. We track which countries have sub-based launch capabilities. As you see in the in the movie, there’s a debate over whether a new country has acquired that ability, and we’ve seen throughout history examples where countries thought that they had perfect early-warning systems, perfect surveillance systems, and they’ve been proven tragically wrong.
DEADLINE: The ending also is ambiguous. We don’t know exactly what happened and what the president decided. Why was it important to write it this way?
OPPENHEIM: We were in agreement on the ending from from the very beginning. And the reason for that is simple. We understood that there would be some people who craved the morbid satisfaction of seeing a CGI mushroom cloud, or maybe an orgy of many CGI mushroom clouds. We also understood that there would be some people who would want the relief of it all turning out to be some false alarm, and the disaster is narrowly averted, and we all go back to our lives.
But in our view, both of those endings would have been cop outs, and, more importantly, they’re not really the appropriate ending for the story we’re trying to tell. We’re trying to tell a story about this machinery that exists and invite the audience into a conversation and a debate so that people finish the movie and they ask themselves, regardless of what happens in the next frame, ‘Is this the world they want to live in, where what they just saw could kick into motion at any moment?’ And if it’s not the world they want to live in, what kind of ending do we want to for ourselves collectively?
DEADLINE: As you mentioned, Trump has said he wants to resume testing. Are we falling backward?
OPPENHEIM: It’s hard to know. First of all, I think there’s some ambiguity as to whether he’s referring to testing the delivery mechanisms or the actual warheads. People who cover the president and have spoken with him about this issue say that he does have a appreciation for how horrifying and dangerous these weapons are. It’s easy to fall into despair when it comes to this and so many existential threats, but I’m encouraged by the fact that there is historical precedent for making progress on the issue. There are actually fewer warheads now than there were at the height of the Cold War. There are examples of countries giving up their nuclear arsenal. Apartheid South Africa did so, and so it really is a matter of will.
DEADLINE: Do you think things will change, in terms of nations getting together to reduce nuclear weapons?
OPPENHEIM: It has happened before, so that means it can happen again. This is a threat that is entirely man-made. We’ve created, we’ve built this house of dynamite. We’ve stuffed the walls with explosives, so it is well within our power to take those explosives out of the walls and make the house safer. All we can do is hope, and again, try to draw more and more people’s attention to the subject, because if we just leave it to a small community of experts and politicians, things are much less likely to change. But if we all collectively pay more attention to it, I think there’s always hope.
