"It starts as a normal day, with a mom bidding her sick kid goodbye before heading to work. A few hours later, the president of the United States is helicoptering away from Washington with a laminated binder on his lap that lays out three escalating options for a retaliatory nuclear strike that could destroy the world-in the words of a military aide, 'rare, medium, and well done.'"
"A Rashomon-style story divided into three chapters, it shows multiple characters' perspectives on the same 18-minute window between when U.S. radar first detects the missile and the moments before it hits, weaving together an open-ended morality tale about a collective human failure that could spell collective doom."
"The risk of nuclear proliferation-and, perhaps, war between nuclear-armed nations-has risen sharply in recent years. Fighting between Ukraine and Russia, tensions between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, a rogue North Korean regime, and Donald Trump's threats to resume U.S. nuclear testing and war with Iran have created a perilously complex atomic landscape."
A House of Dynamite is a Netflix thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow that explores a hypothetical nuclear attack on Chicago. The film uses a Rashomon-style narrative structure divided into three chapters, presenting multiple perspectives on an 18-minute window between radar detection of an incoming missile and impact. It follows various characters, including a president receiving nuclear retaliation options, as they navigate this catastrophic scenario. The film serves as a morality tale about collective human failure. Its release is particularly timely given escalating global nuclear risks, including Ukraine-Russia conflict, U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan, North Korean threats, and deteriorating arms control treaties. Despite these dangers, American public concern about nuclear weapons has declined since the Cold War era.
Read at Slate Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]