On Oct. 24, Kathryn Bigelow’s new nuclear thriller, A House of Dynamite, will be released worldwide on Netflix. The first nuclear movie in the public eye since Oppenheimer and the first widely promoted anti-nuclear movie in recent memory, it is a pivotal reminder of the continued — but too often forgotten — threat of nuclear war.
The plot hinges on the failure of the US ground-based anti-missile system to intercept an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a nuclear bomb toward the continental US. After I saw the film, I recounted this part of the plot to my sister. In response, she asked: “Why don’t we just spend more on missile defense?”
We cannot allow this to be the public’s takeaway from A House of Dynamite. As this movie starts appearing on Netflix carousels around the country and beyond, many will likely have the same understandable but flawed response. The movie does not delve into why the anti-missile system fails; it just fails. If it had worked, it might have saved millions of lives and lessened the urgency of nuclear retaliation, a central drama in the film.
At a time when the Trump administration is marketing its so-called “Golden Dome,” a proposed “impenetrable” missile shield around the US, the energy created by A House of Dynamite could be directed to a plan that not only won’t work but will make the problem worse.
American missile defense is not suffering from a lack of funds. The country’s decades-old ground-based midcourse defense program — the one used in the movie — has already run taxpayers $63 billion as of fiscal year 2024. Despite being fully funded for 20 years, in scripted tests the system still only succeeds about half of the time, even when the tests have not been set up to be challenging for the system. As a group of distinguished physicists recently put it in a report, the ability of any anti-missile system to stop even one missile reliably “has not been demonstrated.”
Overall, all anti-missile programs all together have cost the US government about $400 billion, though this system still remains more aspirational than operational.
Despite that enormous monetary investment and general lack of success, it is reasonable to fear that this movie could drive support for Trump’s “Golden Dome.” The sequel to President Ronald Reagan’s failed “Star Wars” missile defense initiative of the 1980s, Trump has claimed he can use $175 billion over the next three years to create a missile defense shield that is mostly impervious to all incoming threats to the US.
The energy created by A House of Dynamite could be directed to a plan that not only won’t work but will make the problem worse.
To even attempt the comprehensive defense Trump wants, models predict it would take around $3.6 trillion over 20 years — 25% of the US defense budget each year in that period. If such anti-missile systems don’t work reliably or face likely countermeasures such as decoys and direct attacks on the system, the cost for a given coverage would increase further.
The new push for anti-missile systems comes against the backdrop of a world at the highest risk of nuclear arms racing since the Cold War. The last major arms control treaty between the US and Russia, New START, has been weakened significantly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and will fully expire in February 2026. China has substantially grown its stockpile, heightening fears of a tripartite arms race. There are now calls to expand the US nuclear arsenal, risking decades of arms control progress, launching a global arms race, and showing how little the country learned from the Cold War.
Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite gets a lot right about the threat of nuclear weapons, but it does make one interesting choice. Specifically, it portrays a single missile being launched at the United States with no apparent countermeasures included. The good news is this would be the most likely scenario for existing defenses to work. The bad news is it is unlikely that any nuclear missile attack on the US (be it by North Korea, China, or Russia) would only include one ICBM. These countries know if they launch a nuclear weapon at the US, the US will be able to respond before the missile even lands, so why would they send only one?
Even North Korea, the country with the smallest arsenal, could likely launch a 10-weapon salvo. It would take billions of taxpayer dollars and years of development to build a missile defense arsenal to even attempt to combat 10 weapons at once. In that time, what stops North Korea, who will know the US is building a shield from 10 weapons, from building 50 more? The cost and time ratio is not in Washington’s favor.
If the US were to try to build a system to protect itself from an attack from a near-peer state like China or Russia with incoming weapons, that provides ample motivation for those countries to build even more missiles or find other ways to attack the US. It creates a classic nuclear arms race, one that no one wins. In other words, the quest for absolute security through missile defense exacerbates the very cycle of insecurity it aims to end.
No matter how you parse it, the Golden Dome and other anti-missile systems are not the solution to the threat posed in A House of Dynamite, even if they seem like a natural answer. The key message of A House of Dynamite is that a better strategy, and not a bigger shield, is what is needed now.
There are cheap, feasible, and bipartisan solutions to the nuclear threat. Short of comprehensive arms reduction talks between nuclear powers, which even Trump has publicly supported, there are ways to clear the thick fog of war and prevent escalation like in A House of Dynamite. Steps to limit the president’s unchecked authority to launch nuclear weapons, open military-to-military communication lines, or establish a “no-first use” policy can bring down the temperature. If the film offers any lessons, it’s that the goal shouldn’t be to add more bricks — it’s to start taking the dynamite out.
