Spoiler warning.
A House of Dynamite? Try a House of Dolts.
Noah Oppenheim, writer of Netflix‘s hit new movie A House of Dynamite, told MSNBC that “What we show in the movie is accurate.”
His semi-namesake notwithstanding, Oppenheim is incorrect.
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, A House of Dynamite sees the president, White House staff, FEMA, and the Pentagon grapple with a rapidly incoming apparent nuclear strike by a single intercontinental ballistic missile. We see their various responses over a period of less than 20 minutes as the missile, launched by an unknown actor from somewhere in the Western Pacific Ocean, arcs its way toward middle America. If this movie is indeed “accurate,” America has a big problem.
One very big problem with A House of Dynamite is the insistence by the commanding officer of U.S. Strategic Command (responsible for U.S. nuclear forces) that the president needs to respond to this single strike from an unknown source with decisive action against all nuclear adversaries. It’s either that, he says, or the United States will lose the ability to respond.
Wrong.
After finishing the movie on Monday night at around 11:30 p.m., I went to the ADS-B flight tracking website to see if there was an E-6B aircraft in the air. Sure enough, as in the screenshot below, an E-6B had flown a zig-zag route from Strategic Command in Nebraska down to southern Florida, and was headed back up the East Coast. These Navy aircraft serve as command posts and communication links between the national command authority (the president) and U.S. nuclear forces such as B-2 bomber units, land-based ICBM forces, and nuclear ballistic missile submarines. The E-6Bs’ most critical mission is to provide for redundant command and control in the event that Strategic Command is destroyed. Fortunately, last night’s flight was just one of many training exercises the E-6B crews perform.
Still, it should tell you something that I thought an E-6B might be flying as I finished this movie. Namely, that the U.S. military does not play games when it comes to nuclear contingencies. These aircraft and their highly trained crews train hard. They reflect a nuclear command and control infrastructure (“TACAMO”) credibly designed to operate even amid the apex of a global nuclear war. Even if the president and vice president are ashes, and the speaker of the House has just been sworn in. There are more than a dozen of these aircraft, and their crews can communicate with submarines running deep and silent on the other side of the world, even in a worldwide radioactive blizzard. As important, the land-based ICBM sites are vulnerable, U.S. B-2 bombers are always on high alert status, and like their Ohio-Class ballistic submarine brothers, are extremely stealthy. Far more so than their Sino-Russian counterparts, something which underpins effective U.S. nuclear deterrence.
Sadly, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to A House of Dynamite’s disregard for reality.
After all, just about every character and capability in this movie is next to useless.
The midcourse interceptor, designed to shoot down the incoming missile, doesn’t work (which, although the Pentagon denies it, might well happen), but neither do their operators, who suffer mental breakdowns. It should go without saying that those assigned to these missions undergo extensive psychological testing to measure their ability to handle stress. So, too, do the White House situation room staff lose their collective minds. Panicking, a Navy captain and chief petty officer bring cellphones into the situation room (does Bigelow have an animus for the Navy?), allowing any adversary who might be using this attack as a first strike to gather priceless intelligence on how the U.S. is responding to it. The deputy national security adviser has an exceptionally highly classified conversation on his cellphone while running around outside the White House. Indeed, he spends so long outside of the executive residence that it appears he may be a foreign agent.
The military aide assigned to carry the “Nuclear Football,” or briefcase including nuclear command-communication links, options, and codes, is a Navy SEAL. But he appears to lack the defining prerequisite of Navy SEALs: confidence under pressure. Failing to do his job, provide the president with calm guidance and prudent advice, he recommends that the best response to this single strike by an unknown actor demands a full-scale strike to eliminate the Chinese, Russian, and North Korean command and control apparatus. To be fair, the borderline-insubordinate head of U.S. Strategic Command makes the same recommendation. Why not start a nuclear holocaust for no reason?
This brings us to another point. Bigelow says that the movie is a salute to the inherent ambiguity of nuclear war. And in some moral sense, that might be justified. But the movie stretches the ambiguity beyond the breaking point.
For a start, even accepting the movie’s excuses as to why this is problematic, the U.S. intelligence community would almost certainly be able to make a confident assessment as to who launched the missile and what type of missile it is. The U.S. expends very significant resources learning what nuclear weapons its adversaries are making, how they are testing them, how they aim to deliver them, and how the U.S. might defeat them. This includes highly sensitive operations deep inside adversary territory, for example. But whether left of boom (via data on the incoming missile’s form, speed, trajectory, and launch point) or right of boom (via analysis of the warhead and radioactive debris), it would be extraordinarily difficult to the point of near impossibility for a nuclear attacker to hide its culpability.
The movie’s accuracy pertaining to the Secret Service also leaves much to be desired.
For one, the presidential motorcade is significantly smaller than in real life, and civilian traffic is allowed to drive alongside the motorcade during the crisis. The Counter Assault Team vehicle also rides in front of the presidential limousine, utterly defeating its tactical purpose in providing disruptive firepower after an attack has begun. Prior to the alert of an incoming missile, the president’s lead agent sits with him in the back of the limousine (which doesn’t happen unless an attack is imminent or has occurred). But later, when the attack is well underway, the head agent fails to join the president when he is evacuated by helicopter. Instead, the two share a very strange goodbye wave. In reality, the Secret Service would immediately throw a fortress around the president. Certain adversaries (the Russians in particular) embrace leadership assassinations as part of their nuclear warfare strategy.
At a more aesthetic level, for such an inaccurate tale, A House of Dynamite is far too proud of itself. The nature and landscape shots are designed to pummel us in the head with mourning for the Lions who will die if we don’t give up nukes.
The movie’s ambiguity ends with us asking who launched the ICBM. My two cents?
NICK FUENTES CAN’T BE CANCELED, HE MUST BE CONQUERED BY DEBATE
Considering the location and nature of the strike, Beijing’s strategic caution and its present extreme (albeit rapidly declining) inadequacy against U.S. nuclear forces, that Pakistani and North Korean submarines are as loud in the Ocean as a small room full of crying babies is to an exhausted parent, and that the interceptor misses the missile, Russia is most likely responsible.
Vladimir Putin likes playing nuclear games, and Russia has the most advanced nuclear capabilities after the U.S. military. The single missile-single warhead nature of this strike would also fit with Russian strategy, serving as an admittedly very aggressive reconnaissance-in-force operation designed to assess U.S. defenses and responses. But because Russia knows it would lose a nuclear war with the U.S., the missile warhead would likely be inert. Moscow would also have taken very significant steps to hide its culpability.