Rebecca Ferguson plays Captain Olivia Walker who fights red tape to stop a nuclear ICBM. (Photo: Eros Hoagland/Netflix)
Ever since the first atomic bomb exploded over Japan in World War II, nuclear anniailation has been civilization’s “Sword of Damocles.”
“A House of Dynamite,” now streaming on Netflix, is the latest addition to a genre established by 1960s “Cold War” dramas.
Classic films “Fail Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove,” both released in 1964, were the first to depict the consequences of the nuclear arms race through an accidental nuclear war
Human error, madness and technology glitches are the culprits. In the “1983” film “War Games,” a new threat of nuclear Armageddon was added — computer hacking.
(Caution, limited spoilers ahead)
Not so much with “A House of Dynamite.” In the Kathryn Bigelow film, all systems are go when a rogue nuclear missile of unknown origin rises from the ocean in the Far East.
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It’s on a 30-minute flight to its intended target — Chicago — activating U.S. defenses. But the effort is hampered by the enemy within — mindless bureaucracy, over-caution and stiffling protocols.
Is there a message in that? Maybe, but it’s undercut by numerous plot holes, not that previous movies were perfectly seamless.
In “Fail Safe,” an off-course civilian airliner flying over the North Pole triggers U.S. early warning radar. Strategic nuclear bombers are scrambled just in case.
When the alert proves to be false, the bombers are recalled, but one flight fails to get the message due to Russian radio jamming and continues on course for Moscow.
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A hawkish presidential advisor argues to follow up with a full nuclear strike, fearing the Soviet Union would retaliate with a massive strike of its own.
The president convinces the Soviet’s to lift their radio jamming, and the Air Force orders the crew to return. But they have been trained to be wary of false orders and ignore the directive.
Moscow is obliterated. To avoid a full-on nuclear war, the U.S. agrees to drop a nuclear bomb on New York City.
“Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is a dark political satire that follows a similar arc.
The Stanley Kubrick masterpiece charts an insane U.S. Air Force brigadier general, Jack D. Ripper, who locks down his base, blocks all radio communication and orders an attack by B-52 nuclear bombers on airborne alert two hours from Moscow.
Again, the military’s carefully drawn plans to prevent an errant U.S. strike work against it.
A nuclear protocol, known as “Plan R,” allows a single senior officer to launch an attack, if all superior officers have been killed in a first strike against the United States.
Only Ripper knows the code to communicate with the bombers. The president orders the Army to storm the base, arrest him and retrieve the cypher.
Like “Fail Safe,” an argument ensues in the Pentagon’s war room whether to follow up the lone bomber’s attack with a full-scale nuclear strike.
That’s when the Soviet ambassador reveals that nuclear bombs have been pre-positioned around the world and are set to automatically detonate if Moscow is attacked.
Obliteration is a foregone conclusion.
In “War Games,” the protagonist, David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) unwittingly hacks into a U. S. military supercomputer programmed for “Global Thermonuclear War.” He thinks its a video game not knowing it’s designed to automatically predict and carry out a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.
He starts simulating an attack, and the computer mistakingly thinks it’s real. It feeds false data to convince the military that a massive Soviet first strike is incoming. It pushes the U.S to launch a massive counterstrike that’s only narrowly averted by film’s end.
In “A House of Dynamite,” a technical glitch sets the stage, as well. The U.S. has ground launched intercept missiles based near the Arctic Circle that can destroy the rocket as it climbs over the pole.
But one missile fails on launch and the other misses. The U.S. has 50 other intercept missiles but based on protocol refuses to use them in the event the ICBM is a precursor to a broader attack.
As the missile hurtles toward Chicago, the movie reveals an eye-opening revelation, Our missile defense is only geared to stop a threat 50 percent of the time within a 30-minute launch window.
The Pentagon, in real life, disputed those odds, but Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) confirmed in an MSNBC column that only a one-in-two-chance exists of stopping a missile under those circumstances.
Like other Bigalow-directed war films — “Zero Dark Thirty” and “The Hurt Locker” — “Dynamite” strives for “realism and authenticity.”
But it conveniently leaves out other parts of the nation’s missile defense.
Ships are pre-positioned at sea precisely to destroy incoming missiles, and fighter pilots flying at high altitude are trained to launch long-range missiles to do the same thing.
Plus, it’s hard to conceive that all remaining ground-launched defensive missiles would be held in reserve after the first two missiles failed.
Still a miscalculation turned out to be catastrophic.
It’s frighteningly ironic that 80 years after atomic weapons were first used on Japan, the threat still exists now more than ever, especially with Russia’s nuclear saber rattling over its war in Ukraine.
As Markey argues, the “only real path to escape nuclear catastrophe lies in reducing global arsenals.”
That seems to be the message in all these movies.
Other movies that depict an accidential nuclear confrontation or war.
- The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961): Simultaneous nuclear tests by the U.S. and Russia accidentally alter Earth’s orbit and axis, causing global climate disaster.
- The Bedford Incident (1965): A tense Cold War naval thriller where an overzealous American destroyer captain, determined to confront a Soviet submarine, pushes a situation too far, leading to a fatal “mishap” that causes mutual destruction.
- Miracle Mile (1988): A man in Los Angeles receives a random phone call on a pay phone indicating a nuclear attack is imminent, leading to widespread panic and chaos as the city prepares for the inevitable.
- By Dawn’s Early Light (1990): Rogue Soviet military officials launch a non-NATO missile from Turkey at the USSR, which detonates and triggers an automatic, escalating Soviet response, with U.S. and Soviet leaders attempting to stop a full nuclear exchange.
- Crimson Tide (1995): While not a full war, a dispute over an unconfirmed launch order on a U.S. nuclear submarine nearly results in a nuclear strike, highlighting the dangers of potential miscommunication and human error in the chain of command.
- K-19: The Widowmaker (2002): This film depicts a serious accident on a Soviet nuclear submarine’s maiden voyage, where the crew must contain a reactor malfunction and prevent a full nuclear disaster.
- The Sum of All Fears (2002): A terrorist plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in the United States and frame Russia for the attack almost triggers a full-scale nuclear war between the two superpowers.