The President, 'This is insanity.' 'No sir, this is reality,' General Brady, Stratcom commander.
The President to Lieutenant Commander Reeves, strike adviser: 'I always thought that having you following me around with that book of plans, for weapons like that, just being ready is the point, right? Keep people in check. Keeps the world straight. If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war, right?'
'It's like we all built a house filled with dynamite. Making all these bombs and all these plans, and the walls are just ready to blow. But we kept living in it.'
A House of Dynamite directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by Noah Oppenheim.
The 2025 film depicts a nuclear attack scenario. Notably everyone, even though they are facing a potentially catastrophic situation, behaves rationally and follows protocols, keeping their emotions in check as much as is humanly possible. So, one can't help but wonder whether with this current administration and president, such a situation might play out more like Stanley Kubrick's satirical Dr Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, who sets in motion a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, is obsessed with purity and conspiracies about fluoridation, hilariously resembling current U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, while Dr Strangelove and his Nazi salutes made by his out of control hand, resembles Elon Musk.
There was a response to Bigelow's film from the Pentagon. An internal government memo that was obtained by Bloomberg, in which it was claimed that contrary to the portrayal in the film, current missile defence systems have a 100 per cent success rate. Which is why, if any such situation were to occur at present it would be Dr Strangelovish without the comedy. 'Principals need hard facts, not speculation,' staff were reminded by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in A House of Dynamite. With a president and administration readily propagating lies and disinclined to understand that lies are not facts, the Doomsday Clock currently sits at about 23 seconds to midnight.
Brigelow was pleased to get a reaction though, for as she said, 'culture has the potential to drive policy.' And, indeed, there is a very relevant example of that. During Reagan's presidency he watched the 1983 film WarGames while he was at Camp David. It is about a teenager who unintentionally hacks into the computer of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and nearly sets off World War III. Reagan asked Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if something like that could really happen. The General looked into it and a week later, told Reagan, 'the problem is much worse than you think.' A classified national security decision directive, NSDD-145, titled 'National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security' was signed 15 months later.
Meanwhile Trump entertains delusions of a Golden Dome, like back in the eighties when Reagan had dreamed of lasers in space shooting down Soviet missiles. However, back then, a citizens’ campaign came together behind the idea of a verifiable, bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons development, deployment, and testing. More than 200 city councils and nine state legislatures passed resolutions endorsing the freeze and voters in nine out of 10 states passed freeze referenda. Although it was sharply criticized by the White House, growing congressional and popular support for the freeze proposal helped put public pressure on the Reagan administration to initiate strategic arms talks with the Soviets.
'At the end of the cold war global powers reached the consensus that the world would be better off with fewer nuclear weapons. That era is now over.' A House of Dynamite
'If a "nuclear deterrent" destroys all life on Earth, it is hard to say what exactly has been deterred.' Dr Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
