“Making the Rubble Bounce” – The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune

A House of Dynamite directed by Kathryn Bigelow, available on Netflix

Nuclear weapons were at the heart of the Cold War. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union ever sought to attack each other directly because each wanted to avoid triggering a nuclear cataclysm. Instead, they waged a proxy war in the Third World as the fear of mutual assured destruction loomed over the atomic age.

That fear seeped into almost every arena of American life and culture, not least Hollywood. By the early 1960s, a new genre of films about nuclear war began to emerge. In 1962, for example, the science fiction film Panic in Year Zero! appeared. It depicted the Baldwin family embarking upon a road trip into the Sierra Nevada mountains, gaping helplessly as a mushroom cloud erupted over Los Angeles. The film traces the almost instantaneous breakdown of society that follows a Russian strike on major American cities. The Baldwins set about procuring provisions so that they can hide away in a cave in the Sierra Nevadas until order is restored in America. “When civilization gets civilized again, I’ll rejoin,” the family patriarch Harry Baldwin explains to his wife and two children. 

Two years later, three new and more ambitious movies about nuclear combat appeared. The most famous one is Dr. Strangelove, a political satire written and directed by Stanley Kubrick. In its most memorable line, a crazed Air Force Brigadier General named Jack D. Ripper authorizes a preemptive attack on the Russian homeland on his lonesome. “I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” 

As B-52 bombers loaded with thermonuclear bombs fly towards the Soviet Union, Dr. Strangelove, a former Nazi played by Peter Sellers, exults in the prospect of the destruction of Western civilization. President Merkin Muffley, by contrast, seeks to recall the bombers but cannot reach one of them. The film concludes with nuclear annihilation in the offing and Dr. Strangelove hailing Muffley as “mein Fuhrer.”

Another film that appeared that year but has received somewhat less attention is Fail Safe. It featured Henry Fonda as the American president who is advised by a nutty German egghead, Professor Groeteschele. An anti-communist fanatic, Groeteschele, played by Walter Matthau, revels in the chance to fulfill political science game theories about waging and winning a nuclear war by launching a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union. “Every minute we wait works against us. Now, Mr. Secretary, now is when we must send in a first strike.” The President disagrees. But as in Dr. Strangelove, a single American bomber crew ignores frantic orders to abandon its mission and drops its payload on Moscow. In exchange, the President tells the Soviet leadership, he will destroy New York to avert a wider war. 

Then there was Seven Days in May, a thriller about a military coup to topple an American president named Jordan A. Lyman who is intent on concluding a sweeping arms-control treaty with the Kremlin. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Air Force General James Mattoon Scott has devised a plan called ECOMOCON to create a military junta, but is tripped up by his Marine aide “Jiggs” Casey, who opposes the treaty but is unprepared to connive at treason. Scott is based on the fire-breathing General Curtis LeMay, who resented John F. Kennedy’s refusal to provide air cover during the Bay of Pigs, and General Edwin A. Walker, who is explicitly mentioned in the film. 

The movie’s irenic credo is summed up by President Lyman. “Scott, the Joint Chiefs, even the very emotional, very illogical lunatic fringe: they’re not the enemy. The enemy’s an age – a nuclear age. It happens to have killed man’s faith in his ability to influence what happens to him. And out of this comes a sickness, and out of sickness a frustration, a feeling of impotence, helplessness, weakness.”

These very sentiments animate the latest Hollywood production about nuclear war, A House of Dynamite. Unlike its predecessors, it does not feature coups, lunatic generals or nefarious German academics. Instead, the strength of the film resides in its quiet plausibility, showcasing the palpable tension and duress that government and military officials are under as they realize that the incoming missile that they’ve detected isn’t a drill. It’s the real thing—an intercontinental ballistic missile about to detonate over Chicago.

Who actually lobbed the incoming missile at America is unclear. North Korea? China? Russia? The president, played by Idris Elba, has only minutes to make a decision about whether and how to respond. He faces an agonizing choice, as one official tells him, between “surrender or suicide.” Others take a more phlegmatic view. “If we do not take steps to neutralize our enemies now,” General Anthony Brady observes, “we will lose our window to do so.” But Brady has no clue about why the missile was launched or if it was even an accident. The message the movie wants to convey is clear — the doctrine of MAD, or mutual assured destruction, remains a form of madness.

New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis contended that the film does not have a central character, but actually it does. It’s the incoming missile which is never pictured but whose presence is never less than ominously oppressive.

A nuclear cataclysm may have receded from the public mind, but this past May India and Pakistan aroused apprehensions of a nuclear exchange during their military clashes. China is embarking upon a vast expansion of its nuclear force and recently simulated the effects in a laboratory of firing three nuclear missiles in succession on a target. North Korea showcased its hypersonic missiles and new intercontinental Hwasongs-20s ballistic missiles at its celebration of its 80^th anniversary of the Workers’ Party in October. Meanwhile, Russia is threatening a nuclear response should Washington send Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv.

One leader who regularly talks about the dangers posed by nuclear weapons is President Donald Trump. In January 2025, Trump said that “Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about …. So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.” One obvious starting point would be to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, which currently expires in February 2026. Trump also carried out a form of denuclearization by bombing three Iranian facilities this past June.

If A House of Dynamite serves any purpose, it will be to remind Americans and others of the perils of nuclear war. There are no grounds for complacency. As Winston Churchill put it at the dawn of the atomic era, “If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.” That is not a prospect anyone should welcome.