More than 40 years ago, a made-for-TV movie, The Day After, shocked Americans of all ages. We were among the 100 million of our fellow Americans in nearly 39 million households (about 62% of the viewing public that night) who watched the film when it first aired on Sunday evening, November 20, 1983, on ABC.
The movie graphically portrayed the hypothetical aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. Unlike so many post-nuclear war movies since then (which invariably depict sci-fi mutant zombies), The Day After was a straightforward, no-nonsense dramatization, as seen through the eyes of a family in Lawrence, Kansas (led by the great actor Jason Robards) of the devastating effects of an all-out nuclear exchange between the U.S, and the U.S.S.R.
The movie so traumatized Americans (and later the Soviet people, who were able watch it a couple of years later) that it is credited with jump-starting the nuclear disarmament talks between then-President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, a few years later that resulted in the agreement between the two countries to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
However, the world’s political landscape has done a proverbial 180-turn over the past 40 years: Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine and has threatened to use nuclear weapons if the U.S. and Europe try to thwart his goals, and both Russia and China are developing hypersonic missiles that could reach the U.S. within a few minutes.
In addition, rogue states such as No. Korea and Iran have embarked on nuclear weapons programs that threaten their immediate neighbors.
The new Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite, dramatizes how the U.S. government would react to the detection of a potentially nuclear-armed missile that is predicted to strike Chicago. The launch of the missile went undetected by American radar systems — so no one knows which country, Russia, China, or No. Korea, fired it.
We won’t give too much of the plot away, except to say that Idris Elba plays an American president who is much like Barack Obama. In other words, he appears to be smart, rational, and on top of things.
But when confronted with the imminent threat of a nuclear weapon striking Chicago within 19 minutes, even Elba’s president (he is not given a name in the movie) is caught like a deer-in-the-headlights. He has not studied the nuclear “playbook” in advance, and he has advisors who are giving him contradictory opinions, much like JFK received during the Cuban missile crisis.
In our view, that’s the whole point of a House of Dynamite: In a nuclear age where leaders have only minutes to make a decision — “Do we bomb another country in retaliation? And if so, whom? Or do we wait to see if it was a mistake?” — even a theoretically-intelligent president has no good choices and at best will be making decisions about possibly annihilating the world based on a hunch.
We are now more than 40 years removed from The Day After, but we are living in a world in which there are more nukes in the hands of authoritarian rulers who have no guardrails in their own countries. The only advisors they trust are themselves because they deliberately have installed lackeys in key positions who only tell them what they want to hear.
The message of a House of Dynamite is simply this: If our nation’s leaders ever have to confront a nuclear crisis, we’re doomed — which means that we must take all means necessary to ensure that we never find ourselves in that situation.