[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

“A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE” IS THE WRONG METAPHOR FOR US NUKES  
[[link removed]]


 

Jonah Walters
December 3, 2025
Jacobin
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, captures the
horror and insanity of nuclear war. But by portraying the US atomic
arsenal as an inheritance from the past rather than a product of our
own time, it lets our political leaders off _

Rebecca Ferguson in A House of Dynamite. , (Netflix)

 

_A House of Dynamite _is written like an op-ed. Its characters speak
in terse paragraphs that tend to close with punchy kickers. And true
to the op-ed genre, all the film’s big ideas are communicated
through metaphors.

“We’re talking about hitting a bullet with a bullet,” says a
deputy national security advisor after describing ground-based missile
defenses. “I call them rare, medium, and well-done,” says a Marine
officer after passing a binder of nuclear strike options to the
president, played by an uncharacteristically flat Idris Elba. Later
on, the president says, “I listened to this podcast, and the guy
said, ‘We all built a house filled with dynamite . . . and then we
just kept on livin’ in it.’”  Even the film’s title is a
metaphor.

Cringeworthiness notwithstanding — facing Armageddon, the president
really quotes “the guy” from a podcast? — this line summarizes
_A House of Dynamite_’s main message: the problems posed by the US
nuclear arsenal are impersonal, intractable, and inherited from the
past.

_A House of Dynamite_ is not an antiwar movie. It’s not even an
anti-nuke movie — at least not in any robust sense. Instead, it’s
an impotent and unserious exercise in handwringing.

The film illustrates the insanity of the American doctrine of nuclear
deterrence (the suicidal idea, axiomatic since the 1950s, that to
avoid nuclear attack we must credibly threaten to destroy the world).
But it also places that doctrine beyond the bounds of political
contestation by presenting it as an inevitable holdover from a history
nobody asked for and for which no one is at fault.

Too Late

Idon’t know whether the podcast Elba’s character references is
real. Considering how much oxygen podcasts suck up these
days, especially for news-junkie liberals like screenwriter (and
former NBC News head) Noah Oppenheim, I suppose it could be. But I’m
not about to go scrubbing through the archives of _Pod Save America_
looking for it. Instead, I’ll go out on a limb and guess that _A
House of Dynamite_’s title was inspired not by a podcast but by a
passage in a 1984 book called _The Abolition_ by the _New Yorker_
staff writer Jonathan Schell.

_A House of Dynamite_ is not an antiwar movie. It’s not even an
anti-nuke movie. Instead, it’s an impotent and unserious exercise in
handwringing.

Schell — who also wrote the landmark 1982 book _The Fate of the
Earth_, about the environmental fallout of nuclear weapons — brings
up a house rigged with explosives to illustrate the inane character of
“deterrence” as a personal and public safety plan. His point is
that “deterrence arbitrates nothing.” Even in a best-case
scenario, all it can do is ensure that all disputes are indefinitely
suspended, or “kept in abeyance, without any resolution.”

Schell illustrates this point through a hypothetical anecdote about a
neighbor who insists upon breaking into his house. The homeowner can
settle the dispute through direct means (punching or shooting the
neighbor) or through civil means (calling the police). Each of these
amount to reactions to a violation _after_ it occurs.

A policy of deterrence is fundamentally different:

Under deterrence I have, in anticipation of my neighbor’s
depredations, filled my house with explosives, wired them to go off
the moment any unauthorized person crosses my threshold and (an
essential step) informed my neighbor of what I have done — hoping,
of course, that he will then have the good sense to give up any plans
he might have for stealing my furniture.

Schell’s point in _The Abolition_ is to present an actionable plan
for a worldwide drawdown in nuclear capacity — an argument he can
make only after pointing out the obvious absurdity of a global safety
plan based on the principle of mutually assured destruction.

But as far as technological metaphors go, “a house of dynamite” is
a misleading one. To state the obvious, the American nuclear arsenal
is not a house. It’s not something you can erect and then leave
alone. It is a dynamic system that requires daily, even hourly, input
from many thousands of persons, entities, and machines. The
infrastructure that undergirds the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is
not stationary and self-contained, but rather continuously reloaded
and constantly in motion.

Writing seventy years ago, at a historical moment when the horrors of
nuclear war could not be so easily euphemized, the philosopher
Günther Anders offered a better metaphor: “The bomb is a deed.”

What does it mean to say the bomb is a deed? For one thing, it forces
us to consider some much more recent history than the invention of the
first nukes eighty years ago. The most relevant year for understanding
America’s current nuclear predicament is not 1945 but 2010. This was
when the Defense Department, under the leadership of Commander in
Chief Barack Obama, began a comprehensive upgrade and expansion of the
US nuclear arsenal.

According to the _New York Times_
[[link removed]],
this in-progress nuclear upgrade involves over 100,000 scientists,
engineers, and subcontractors, working in all fifty states to produce
“a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles and thermonuclear
warheads” as well as “12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines”
and a slew of other goodies. (For a glimpse into the lives and psyches
of the people working on this nuclear expansion
[[link removed]],
check out the chilling _Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear
Weapons_, by the science journalist Sarah Scoles.)

[[link removed]]

Still from A House of Dynamite. (Netflix)

The nuclear upgrade is expected to end in 2042 and cost a total of 1.7
trillion dollars — that’s an expenditure of $108,000 per minute,
every minute, for thirty years. Now, with the work more than halfway
finished, suddenly there is a glut of cultural products commenting on
the dangers of nuclear weapons. This emergent genre includes not only
_A House of Dynamite_ but also _Oppenheimer_
[[link removed]],
the _New York Times_ series “At the Brink
[[link removed]],”
and Annie Jacobsen’s book
[[link removed]]
_Nuclear War: A Scenario_ (which Denis Villeneuve is reportedly
adapting for the screen).

It is curious and a little exasperating that the American
entertainment and news establishment only discovered its profound
anxiety about nuclear deterrence once the once-in-a-generation rebuild
of the US nuclear system was already so close to completion that it
could no longer be meaningfully opposed.

Who Built the House of Dynamite?

Thanks in large part to this disastrous timing, _A House of Dynamite_
fails as political commentary before it even begins. The film begs the
question: Who _built_ the House of Dynamite? Then it answers: Who
knows? And really, who cares?

It certainly wasn’t Elba’s flustered POTUS, who learned about his
own nuclear policy from a podcast. Nor was it the dysfunctional
secretary of defense — a squirming worm of a character, played to
off-putting perfection by Jared Harris, who spends most of the film
flecking his telephone mouthpiece with spittle. Nor was it even the
bullheaded general at the helm of US Strategic Command: a
no-thoughts-just-rules kind of guy, played by Tracy Letts, who wants
only to talk baseball and nuke Moscow (in that order).

According to the movie’s moral logic, none of these officials are
responsible for the predicament they find themselves in. They are not
the architects of Armageddon so much as they are the victims of
history. This is the thesis of Oppenheim’s op-ed. Our political
leaders live in the dynamite house just like the rest of us do. Pity
them. Heavy are the heads that wear the nuclear crowns.

_A House of Dynamite_ sinks into what the nuclear scholars Benoît
Pelopidas and Neil C. Renic have called
[[link removed]]
the “tragedy trap,” in which “foreseeable and solvable problems
are reconceptualized as intractable dilemmas, and morally and
politically accountable agents are reframed as powerless observers.”
The problem with such a framing, Pelopidas and Renic argue, is that it
“indulges the very hubris the tragic recognition is intended to
caution against.”

Confronted with the outrage of a civilization-ending nuclear war, we
are asked to identify with the most powerful men in the world and to
see in their anguish and indecision a sympathetic reflection of our
own horror. It takes a twisted kind of movie-magic to make an audience
relate more to feckless elites spluttering into their sat-phones than
to the millions of ordinary people slated to become the first
casualties of humanity’s terminal war.

 

To borrow a phrase from former US ambassador George F. Kennan, who
infamously called America’s nuke obsession “a form of illness,”
everything about _A House of Dynamite_ is “morbid in the extreme.”

Some readers will think I’m nitpicking and nay-saying here. Critics
and viewers alike have already begun describing _A House of Dynamite_
as our generation’s answer to _Dr. Strangelove_ (1964) or _The Day
After _(1983) — movies that, whatever their blind spots, at least
brought our unending nuclear peril to widespread public attention. By
presenting the stakes of nuclear brinksmanship in such stark terms,
won’t _A House of Dynamite_ inspire a kind of awareness that can
only tend toward greater caution, maybe even eventual disarmament?

I’m not so sure. The truth is that apocalyptic visions of nuclear
genocide can just as easily fortify US nuclear doctrine as call it
into question.

In his book _People of the Bomb_, the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson
describes meeting a woman named Sylvia who, like him, was deeply
affected by the Hiroshima nuclear bombing of 1945. Gusterson, an
anti-nuke activist, had nightmares set in Hiroshima; Sylvia, a
Japanese American, lost family members in the attacks. But to
Gusterson’s amazement, Sylvia worked as a scientist at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, where she designed nuclear warheads.

As an anti-nuke activist, Gusterson had attempted to publicize the
most gruesome and horrifying effects of the bombing, in the hopes that
images of “the shattered bodies of Hiroshima” would convince
people that maintaining a nuclear arsenal was insane. But Sylvia’s
experience proved that “this is not the only way these bodies can be
read.”

“For those who are persuaded by the arguments in favor of nuclear
weapons,” Gusterson writes, a stark knowledge of what happened at
Hiroshima may simply reinforce the notion that it is important for
one’s own country to have such weapons.”

What we need is an overall drawdown in nuclear weapons development and
war planning.

I worry that _A House of Dynamite_ only reinforces that notion too. By
treating the doctrine of nuclear deterrence as an inevitable feature
of the twenty-first-century world order — not as a policy position
that can and must be reversed — the film may leave viewers with
the sense that what we need is _more_ investment in missiles (and
missile-interceptor technology), not less.

 
This is in keeping with an increasingly mainstream reading of the
film, which treats its heart-pounding story of nuclear apocalypse as a
ninety-minute ad for Donald Trump’s much-hyped “Golden Dome
[[link removed]]”
missile defense system. This seems to be the position of retired
general Dan Karbler, a consultant on the film, who is now a major
proselytizer
[[link removed]]
for Golden Dome. (Karbler was chief of staff for US Strategic Command
from 2018 to 2023, and he makes a cameo in the film in that role.)
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s only response
[[link removed]]
to _A House of Dynamite_ has been to insist that the US missile
defense systems actually have a slightly better success rate than the
61 percent referenced in the movie.

What we need is an overall drawdown in nuclear weapons development and
war planning. The last thing we need is more auxiliary missile
technologies, which are fundamentally unreliable and only serve to
further ratchet up the stakes of bomb research and development around
the world.

But _A House of Dynamite_ seems determined to lead you to the opposite
conclusion. It’s as if, after warning you about the explosive house,
the realtor then asked for your support to buy more dynamite-filled
bricks.

Despite its veneer of gritty realism, _A House of Dynamite _is a film
in love with euphemism. Perhaps the filmmakers thought US nuclear
policy was so abstract, so remote, that a dash of metaphor was
necessary. But euphemism also happens to be how state planners obscure
the cruelty and recklessness of their war plans, as the historian
Joanna Bourke has written
[[link removed]].
By metaphorizing the unthinkable, military commanders create “an
anesthetizing effect” that dulls the public’s capacity for
criticism.

_A House of Dynamite_ promises to educate and agitate us. But then,
like political anesthesia, it puts us right back to sleep.

Share this article

Facebook  Twitter  Email
Contributors

Jonah Walters is currently the postdoctoral scholar in the BioCritical
Studies Lab at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. He was a
researcher at Jacobin from 2015 to 2020.

 

* Subscribe [[link removed]]
* Donate [[link removed]]

_Jacobin_‘s winter issue, “Municipal Socialism,” is out soon.
Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful
print quarterly and get it right when it’s released.
[[link removed]]

* Nuclear war
[[link removed]]
* imperialism
[[link removed]]
* Department of Defense
[[link removed]]
* nuclear weapons
[[link removed]]
* NETFLIX
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]