Bulwark Takes - Tom Nichols: America Lost Its Nuclear Anxiety. That Was a Mistake.

Episode Date: November 8, 2025

Sunny Bunch talks with Atlantic writer and national security expert Tom Nichols about Catherine Bigelow’s new Netflix thriller A House of Dynamite—the most realistic nuclear movie in decades. They discuss how close we’ve already come to accidental Armageddon, why the real danger today is complacency, and how a generation that fears climate change has forgotten about the bomb. Become a Bulwark Youtube Plus Member here - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG4Hp1KbGw4e02N7FpPXDgQ/join

Welcome back to The Bullwark Goes to Hollywood. My name is Sonny Bunch. I'm culture editor at the Bullwark. And I'm very pleased to be joined today by Tom Nichols, who is a staff writer at the Atlantic and Professor Emeritus of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College. And we are here to discuss nuclear apocalypse, kind of, kind of sort of. Tom, thanks for being on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, Sunny. Good to be with you. So I wanted to get you on so we could discuss a House of Dynamite, which is the new movie on Netflix from Catherine Bigelow, of course, who is the director of the Hurt Locker, Zero Dark 30, a bunch of other great movies, one of my favorites, the vampire movie Near Dark, but we're not going to talk about that. We're going to talk about nuclear war today. That's a more pressing concern. And you've written about this movie, you've written about, I mean, obviously this is your kind of area of expertise, is the nuclear situation in the world. I don't know

how else to put it really. What do we call, how do we describe the state of things on a nuclear level what's the the strategic vantage what's what's what you call it um i wish i had a a just a clever phrase for it because you know in the old days we'd say the cold war we'd sort of go all this you know but now we have um nine countries with nuclear weapons in various you know i the way i always think of it since we're we're here on a movie program um is like the ending of reservoir dogs, with everybody standing around just pointing guns at each other, you know, and the first guy to pull the trigger is going to get everybody killed. The former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry had a good line on this. He thinks that global

thermonuclear war is maybe a little less likely now, but he thinks that someone using a nuclear weapon somewhere is a lot more likely. So that's kind of the weird change in the situation. During the Cold War, we were always about, you know, two inches from launching 20,000 weapons at each other and just melting the planet down. We still have thousands of weapons pointed at each other. I mean, you know, U.S. and China, excuse me, and Russia alone have 3,000 weapons pointed at each other. And that's the end of the world, too. But now this kind of two-player game is a nine-player game. Used to be 10, by the way.

It's always a great little bit of trivia to point out to people. that the white South African regime had six nuclear weapons that they didn't tell anybody about, which is always, you know, one of those things you wish you didn't know. But so it's an unstable multiplayer game now, and it's really dangerous. And that's one of the things that this movie gets at. Well, we can discuss the plot of it more in a second, but one of the, one of the key points is that when the missile launches, is nobody's 100% sure where it came from. And we can discuss the reality of that and what it would actually look like.

But before we get to that, I want to talk about something you had mentioned in a piece you wrote about a House of Dynamite, which was that, you know, when you were teaching nuclear relations classes to students, that you would show them the, what I have always coined, and I don't mean this derogatorily, just as kind of descriptive, but the nuclear panic movies of the 1980s, movies like the day after, or threads, which is a lesser scene here in America, but it was a BBC special about the after effects of a nuclear conflict. What was their response to seeing these movies from, you know, 1982, 83, 84, that sort of time period? How did they respond to them? You know, I started doing it because the students I showed them to were my civilian undergraduates.

I used to teach at night. I taught during the day for the Navy. And at night, I would teach undergraduates at Harvard Extension and during the summers at Harvard. And one day, you know, I was talking about nuclear weapons and walking them through all the strategies. And a young person, you know, 19, 20, she said, you know, almost. like with wonder, what were you so scared of? What was the big deal? You know, I mean, this is a generation of young people who worry a lot more about, like, climate change than they do about nuclear war. And I said, okay, it's time to go back to the classics. You call them nuclear panic

movies. I'm even a little harsher. I call them nuclear porn because they are so graphic. And I said, well, I'm going to show you these, not just to show you what a nuclear war would have looked like, but to explain to you the culture that we lived in where we were absolutely marinated in these kinds of images and always reminded that this was reality. And the day after had, you know, it was shocking to them. Of course, that's the United States, but threads, which is vastly more graphic. I mean, it would be in its time kind of NC17 probably. I think I don't know what the rating is for a woman in the room.

of a city chewing through her own umbilical cord you know what rating that gets um that one really just knocked them on their heels as it did to me when i saw it when i was you know 24 25 years old um and that that really had an impact they were like okay so you know it's not just going to be like ukraine but bigger or something you know that they because they can't really get their, and that's not their fault. You can't really get your arms around what it would be like to have hundreds of millions of people dead in the next 20 minutes. You know, I always, the students would say, well, we worry about climate change. And I said, look, climate change is legit worry. You worry about the planet getting two degrees warmer in 30 years. I worry about

the planet getting 10 million degrees warmer in the next 20 minutes. Yeah. And so it, it stunned them. You know, interestingly enough, some of the other, because I did a whole course on pop movies and TV and pop culture images about a lot of things from the Cold War, spy mania and, you know, paranoid thrillers and all that stuff. But they were even knocked back a little bit. You'd be surprised how many younger people have not seen the original Planet of the Apes, for example. You know, and I'm sorry, it's a 50-something-year-old movie, so I'm going to spoil it. Spoiler here. Rosebud was a sled. But, you know, when they get to the end, and Charlton Heston realizes that he's on a

nuked, ruined planet Earth with that majestic site of the, which, by the way, was a Rod Serling innovation. That's not in the original source material of the book. Rod Serling stuck that in their, in his first drafts of the script. And, you know, they thought, oh, it was kind of cute, monkeys. and, you know, Kim Novak, and I'd kiss you, but you're so ugly because you humans are ugly. And then at the end, there's just like dead silence where they kind of, you know, they weren't expecting that.

And I think it was a useful exercise to go through with a lot of them because I think they've just accepted that, first of all, nuclear war is yesterday's problem and that anything in the pop culture about it was just kitsch and nonsense. and, you know, not really that serious. And how could we take it that serious? I used to get that all the time. You know, you were a young guy during the Cold War. Why were you just constantly so scared by this?

And I said, okay, here, sit down and watch TV as if you were me in 1981. That's so interesting to me because I remember when Oppenheimer came out. There was a strain of criticism that went something like the movie. The movie is a cop out because it doesn't show you the effects of. the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And a lot of the times I came from kind of younger critics who were like, well, this is, you know, this is, this is just Americans trying to feel good about themselves, which is an incredible misreading of the movie.

But like, I set, set all that aside, understanding, understanding the horror of that imagery and what it would, what it would show, it feels like that should, it should be easy to extrapolate that to the rest of the world. But I guess that's not how they look at it. It's too localized. You know, I heard that criticism of Oppenheimer as well. And to me, Oppenheimer, I mean, it's a majestic movie in so many ways. It's a character study having, you know, it's about U.S. domestic politics during the Red Scare, a lot of things.

But it's also, like a lot of nuclear movies, it's kind of a mad scientist movie, right? Why do we build these things? because we can. I mean, Oppenheimer is the kind of, in that movie, at least. He's kind of an archetype, right? Of like, you know, God rest his soul. Tom Lerer recently died, the guy that used to do a lot of funny ditties in the 1960s.

And he had a very cruel song, a really nasty song about Werner von Braun, the Nazi scientists that we brought over to work on our space program. And there's a line in it. Once a missiles up, who cares where it comes down? That's not my department, says Werner von Braun.

And Oppenheimer was kind of in that. It's like, well, we have to develop this nuclear weapon. And what will happen when we do that, somebody else will figure out. And I didn't, I thought that the movie was absolutely admirable for not kind of dragging us into Japan to say, Oppenheimer is a villain. Look what he did. Look at these dead people. But there's another, and then I'll get off my soapbox about Oppenheimer, which I liked very much.

But there's another interesting problem when people said, well, they should have showed us what happened in Japan. I actually am glad they didn't because what happened in Japan, those bombs were actually quite small. The pictures you see of the destruction look worse than they are because Japan at the time is made out of wood and rice paper. The church that was ground zero for Hiroshima is still there. It didn't because it was made out of stone. And I think, you know, almost if they had tried to do that, it's almost too reassuring. It's almost too reassuring. It's almost like they'd be lowballing the actual amount of damage that a real nuclear conflict in the 21st century would cause, which is one of the reasons that I think threads in particular really got it right about sort of, you know, it's not just people dying under shattered buildings.

It's, you know, there's no fuel for the next five years. there's no pesticides, there's no medicine, there's no nothing, you know, that there has to be something beyond just the initial horror of fire and blast and damage. I thought that the movies that really thought about this more, they after to some extent, but really Threads was the one that kind of teased it out to say, you know, you're not just living in a world where everything's destroyed. You're living in a world where, you know, pretty much all the insulin that's ever been made is all the insulin that's ever going to be made kind of thing. And so I'm glad that Oppenheimer swerved away from that

because as horrible as what happened in Japan was, a nuclear exchange now would be magnitudes worse. And I think it would have been a disservice to tell people this is what a nuclear war looks like. Yeah. Did you go further back at all? Did you do like fail safe and Dr. Strangelove? Or was that, how did they,

How did they respond to that? I mean, Dr. Strangelove is obviously a different sort of thing. You know, it's a little bit more of a black comedy. I didn't explain them Strange Love because I assume they've all seen it. And I didn't want to play things for laughs. And I kind of dithered about failsafe because it's such a wonderful movie, but I decided to sign the book, which is even more intense. And then I made them write essays about it.

And the response to Failsafe was really shocking. They were like, they would come into class and they'd say, yeah, I read it, professor, but the president can't do that. And I would say, sure, you're positive about that? What do you mean the president can't? The president could do anything he wants with nuclear weapons. And then we talk about, which is why he has to have his close friend in the cockpit and doesn't want to give that assignment to just any, you know, American pilot. But again, if you haven't seen Failsafe, I'm sorry. But yes, he destroys New York as a sacrifice to the Russians.

So, yeah, I did go back. I actually took clips from things like them, the giant ant movie. Because, again, them, it's actually a horror movie. I mean, it's not just a goofy, drive-in movie. You have a scientist in it talking about this is biblical justice. this is like biblical revelation that man is being punished um you know i mean it's a pretty heavy movie and i also uh showed them clips from the original godzilla which is actually you know we i by the way i i don't know how you feel about these i love in fact i um should i maybe i'll just

tilt my screen there it is i have destroy all monsters in my office i tried to get them to understand what a dark, creepy movie Godzilla is and done less than 10 years done by a country, in a country, less than 10 years after an atomic attack in that country. Godzilla, you know, ends with a scientist committing suicide and Godzilla trudges back into the ocean. It's all very dark. The version of Americans know with Raymond Burr, that was all spliced in later for American audiences. Yeah. It is, it is really interesting. The evolution of Godzilla over the years has been pretty, pretty interesting, too. If you, uh, if you watch the 2000, what was it 14, uh, kind of remake in America where Godzilla is actually swimming with the American armed forces at

one point. And it was just like, this is a real inversion of the metaphor of this movie, guys. I don't, I don't, I don't mean to judge what you're, what you're doing here. Um, all right. So let's, uh, all right, let's talk about a house of dynamite then. Let's move. move to a house of dynamite because again this is it's on netflix now you can watch it you can you can stop listening to this and go go watch it and come back maybe that's a good thing to do because we'll probably get into some spoilers here um the setup of the movie is pretty straightforward i'll just uh i'll just lay out the basics here um uh we follow three different vignettes one is kind of in a situation room one is with uh more military and national security officials and then the

last is with the president and the secretary of defense, as they go through the decision process of trying to figure out who has launched a lone ICBM at the United States. They try to shoot it down. They fail to shoot it down. And then they try to decide how to respond once or before it hits the city of Chicago, which is where it's headed. Again, this is told, this, the same story is told three different times from these three different point of views. It's kind of a Roshaman thing, not really because there's no question of... It's not separate realities.

It's just separate venues. It's just different POVs, just different POVs watching this thing happen. The movie ends, we'll talk about the ending in a little bit here. I do want to avoid spoilers just for a minute, so people can listen to this. When you, you saw an early cut of the film. You were, you saw an earlier, earlier cut of the film and then wrote about it. What did you, what did you make of it when you were watching it?

Because I know, I know, look, the experts watch movies like this, and they're like, here's what you got wrong. What was your take as you were kind of going through it that first time? Yeah, I mean, I've seen it. I saw early cuts twice. I had access to a shooting script before I saw the cut. So I had been staying in touch with the filmmakers for about a year. And so when I went to the first screening, I got up and I said, look, I fully expected

to have a punch list where I was going to stand up and say you did that, you know, and here's all the stuff you got wrong. Yeah, there are some artificialities in, I mean, it's a movie. You know, you have to drive the drama with at least some difficult choices. But one of the things that I, well, a couple of things jumped out of me. First of all, everybody in that movie talks the way people really talk in the policy world. You know, I've worked in that world. I have briefed four stars and senators and, you know, people in government. And everybody in that environment in the movie are, they're doing the right thing.

And they're acting like people really do in these kinds of environments. That was really striking to me that they got to run. Nobody, you know, and fail, of course, we, I'm sure we both love fail safe. But of course, and there's that amazing moment where Fritz Weaver freaks out, right? as Colonel Cassio. And then they have, you know, people in Moscow, the general had to be in or leave, you know, he was overwhelmed. And none of that happens in a house of dynamite.

Everybody's good at their job. Nobody loses their shit. You know, they do what they're supposed to do. And yet things keep going wrong. That was one thing. The other was that, especially on a second viewing, I did notice where they kind of compensated for some of these questions. You know, one of the things that you brought up early on,

somebody fires one missile and we don't know where it's from. But the characters talk about this. They say, was that us? Did we have a glitch? Or did somebody hack us? Or did somebody blind our satellites? Or we just, did we did a, you know, did a Microsoft? chip pop somewhere. You know, you have plenty of time to figure that out later, but for the next

20 minutes, this missile is incoming. And this has happened, by the way. There have been some new documents released about a series of mistakes at NORAD that basically did come down to a microchip that happened in 79 and 80. And Harold Brown, the Secretary of Defense, could write to Jimmy Carter, say, I'm really concerned about this. We've screwed this up. You know, we've got to replace these things. At one point, they woke. What was the error? I'm sorry. We were, we were not able to see where missiles had come from or we were inventing missile. We were under attack. Okay. Like a microchip popped and suddenly, you know, on the screen, there's 2,000 incoming Soviet missiles. What? So, you know, they're dealing with that as well. Like, is this real? Or is what we're seeing

real? If it's, if it is, why didn't we see it launch and so on? Um, the one place I think a lot of people have trouble is that there are people in the in the movie saying when this you've this thing could be the beginning of a major attack so mr president you have to act right away now there are other people in the movie and I think some of the critics of the film it's like they didn't they heard what they wanted to hear there are other people in the movie saying listen this could be a dud don't do anything don't don't no sudden movements um but But there is a compelling case laid out in there. And remember, these are not people. The president, especially, is not a nuclear walk. We've never elected that kind of guy. Jimmy Carter served on a nuclear summary. He was not a nuclear strategist. So, you know, when someone says to the president, look, if we're about to lose Chicago, how long are you willing to wait to react? But of course, the answer is to react against whom? And throughout the movie, you start to see they keep reporting. The Russians are going to a high alert. The Chinese are on alert. The Pakistanis, the Iranians, everybody's doing very suspicious. Well, things that might make sense for them, but also could look pretty suspicious if you're in the United States about to lose a city of nine million people. And I thought, you know, at first I thought, would anybody really, you know, because my inclination, if I were advising a guy like that, I'd say, don't do anything yet. But as the president

keeps pointing out, that's easy for you to say. I've been leading country with 140 million people and nine million are about to die and it's not a very satisfying thing to come out and say, well, as soon as we know who did this and we did that during 9-11, right? We said, we're going to find out who did this and then we kind of went radio silent for two weeks while the Bush administration planned. But with a nuclear weapon, if that weapon was meant, and there's a wonderful conversation, they have inside Strathcom in the movie about, you know, what do you think causes? Russians could be the Chinese or as one of them says, could be a subcommander, got up one morning, found out his wife left him. But they do talk about if this is the point of the attack that it's meant to set us on our heels, put us into chaos, make us unable to respond by not being able to decide.

and then we get hit by submarine launched missiles, cruise missiles, whatever it is that pop up out of the water. And, you know, it's, I think it's a legitimate concern. I mean, if there were a nuclear weapon incoming, yeah, you would get the president out of Washington. You would hand him the book of, you know, plans, and you'd say, we've got to think about what comes next. Well, this is, so this was, when I was watching it, this was the big question I had. I was like, all right, why do we need to, would the rush to have an almost a pseudo preemptive response? Because that's kind of what we're talking about here.

We're talking about responding before the missile even falls. Is that what would happen? That feels wrong to me. Like you said, I lived through 9-11. I remember what happened after that. We were like, oh, we're going to figure out what's going on here. I guarantee you there would be somebody in most administrations, certainly in this one, but remember, I think one of the best choices Bigelow made was not to have any obvious villains or heroes here. There's no creepy Russians or diabolical North Koreans or crazy, you know, like in, remember the movie Dawn's Early Light?

By Dawn's Early Life, there's no crazy evangelical president who's going to, you know, do the work of Jesus by New York. everybody. But I think what the movie gets at with this artificiality, with this scenario problem, is World War III may not start the way we've always planned for it to start. We've always had this kind of very structured approach that says there's going to be a war. It'll be between us, Russians, or us in China, there's going to be escalations, somebody's going to use nuclear weapons in the theater of war. We're all going to go to alert. We're going to have to, you know, what if that's not the case anymore? What if it is, you know, the North Korean saying, we're going down and we're taking you with us.

What if it is, you know, there's a, there's a moment where some, the Stratcom commander says, well, the Russians know, we'll retaliate. And he says, do they? His deputy says, do they? You know, they're having this major war in Europe. They're killing dissidents, murdering people on U.S. and NATO territories. and what have we done? We see some yachts from San Trope. That kind of bothered me. But my point is, in at least some administrations, and I worked with people like this, there's going to be somebody in the room telling the president to do this crazy thing. I had conversations with people when I

worked back on SDI-related stuff, on Star Wars related stuff back in the mid-80s. It's partly what turned me into a nuclear dove was having conversations. with people that I thought were just completely bonkers. Even into the 21st century, I had routinely conversations with colleagues in the defense establishment and at think tanks, people would say, oh, yeah, we could we could do 15 or 20 nuclear, use 15 or 20 nuclear weapons and it wouldn't get out of hand, which I said, I said to one guy, that's the definition of out of hand. 20 nuclear explosions, I think is pretty much out of hand.

And remember that the guy who right now is the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in this administration wrote an article arguing that if we're hit by a cyber attack that's big enough, we should respond to whoever initiated it with nuclear weapons. Now, is that crazier than the advice the president? I think that's by a long shot crazier than the advice the president gets in a House of dynamite. And I think the people that are criticizing the scenario for being too out there, if anything, I think having studied this stuff and, you know, worked on these things for years, I actually think that the movie was pretty restrained given what actual people

have actually said. And I'll give you one last example. In 1995, the Norwegians launched a weather satellite. And they told the Russians, we're going to, you're going to see a rocket take off from Norway. It's a weather package. But somehow the Russian high command just, you know, like deleted the email or, you know, I guess the Norwegians didn't put, please read, you know, in the subject line, right? And this one missile from NATO territory takes off and they go into Yeltsin and they bring them the nuclear football. Say, what do you want to do? Because of one, one launch. And they said it could be, it could be decapitating or meant to blind. us or an EMP web or something and Yeltsin said oh you know pish posh I know Bill Clinton you can put

that thing away but yeah I you know I wouldn't want to replay that scenario right now Bullwork takes is sponsored by Zock doc remember that doctor's appointment you were supposed to make a while ago that one you meant to book but you got kind of sidetracked and completely forgot about it until now you know that overdue annual checkup that's been about three years in the making. I know one of the huge bottlenecks is actually finding a provider and being able to get on their calendar. So Zoc Doc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in network doctors and click to instantly book an appointment with more than 100,000 doctors across every specialty. I'm going to repeat that. 100,000 doctors across every specialty

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dot com slash bulwark takes to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash bulwark takes. Zocdoc.com slash bulwark takes. In the 1980s, again, you have this series of movies like the day after threads, war games, special bulletin, countdown to looking glass. You have all of these kind of, I have a very soft spot for countdown to looking glass. and a special bulletin but we can but the um you you have this sort of uh the series of movies that is fairly explicitly a reaction to Reagan and the idea that he is gonna he is this you know crazy

cowboy warmonger we're gonna you know um we are going to uh end the world because because of him do you do you get the sense that this movie is in response to the idea of kind of growing tensions. We've got Russia, Ukraine, obviously. But then China is kind of looking at Taiwan and you have North Korean efforts. You've got Iranian attempts at proliferation. India and Pakistan, we barely even mentioned. And that, you know, those, God only knows what could happen there at any moment. It does feel like there is more ambient nuclear tension in the air now than there has been for a long time. Well, you know, I asked both Catherine and Noah Oppenheim, the writer, you know, what kind of how they got there. And one of them I said, Catherine Bigelow, I know, thinks that this is long overdue, that just this is a threat that and we kind of both agreed about this as a cultural matter, that it's just dropped out of.

the popular culture. I mean, it's one thing not to be panicked and have your hair on fire all day. It's another to go, I'm trying to think of the last really good movie about nuclear stuff. And, you know, Dawn's Early Light was probably the last one from the Cold War. And that's 35 years ago. So the other thing that's important to point out about this movie, they actually started production, started writing this back when Biden was president. This was not about, you know, Trump and Putin or India, Pakistan. I think it was just this general sense that they had, that Bigelow and Opinidon, that nobody's talking about this.

And we really ought to be. And we ought to, you know, in a new way, not in the, again, not like remaking the day after. Because then you do have to see in a way, the day after and threads and fail safe. They were almost easier movies to make because you always had a clear path to how you ended up in a nuclear war. Now, you know, when it could be almost anything and you have, I mean, it is still as a man of a certain age and a Cold War veteran, you know, as somebody who lived through the Cold War, it is impossible for me to comprehend that a regime like North Korea has ICBMs. That's the world I didn't want to live in. So I think that it wasn't, and I don't want to speak for the director or the writer, I will. say that my conversations with them told me this was a more generalized issue rather than that

they zeroed in on one leader or one scenario. You know, even in the days of the early 80s, I think, you know, that you really had that tension kind of building in the late 60s and then in the 70s, and you know, I'm talking to a guy who's a movie expert, but as you know, in the mid to late 70s, some of that dies away and it gets replaced by films that are about government paranoia, right? All the President's Men, the parallax view, you know, all of these kinds of, you know, the calls are coming from inside the house kind of movies. And I would argue that it's the late 70s, early 80s. It's not just Reagan, but a renewed tension about things. Remember, Poland, even before Reagan comes in off, Poland is under martial law. We've had

these false alerts. This big Brzynski was the national security advisor, not exactly a reassuring presence when it comes to these things. You know, great man, but, you know, pretty scary guy when it comes to trading punches with the Soviets who had in 19, by 1979, had already invaded Afghanistan. I think when Reagan comes in and basically just, you know, turns that, he turns that one to 11, you know, by basically, he said, they'll lie. They'll lie. They'll cheat because they expected the Soviets expected Reagan to be Nixon right yack yeah yeah I hate communists but then let's make a deal and Reagan comes in and says no I really hate you guys that they freak out and that freak out kind of spreads throughout throughout the culture

I uh all right so let's uh all right back to back to uh house of dynamite uh the one thing that uh I think is causing the most discussion about like did get this right, did it get this wrong, is the question of the nuclear interceptors. And so, spoiler for the movie, one of one of the key moments in the film is that from the Alaska Air Defense Base, they launch two interceptors to take out this ICBM. One of them does not deploy correctly. The other one to deploy is, but does not intercept the missile, which in the film itself, they say there's a 61% chance of success. So basically a coin flip, a little bit better than a coin flip.

The Pentagon has said this is nonsense. We are much safer than this. If there's only one missile incoming, we're totally fine. Don't worry about it, basically. What's your take on that? Well, in terms of my punch list, I actually said to Catherine Bigelow, I said, I kind of gave her this look. I said 61% said, we're using the Pentagon's numbers, which were up until then the Pentagon's numbers. The missile defense agency has since said, no, no, our accuracy is 100%. First of all,

nothing is 100%. I'm sorry, you know, a kid's slingshot does not operate with 100% efficiency or aim. And it turns out what they're doing, and I have a piece dropping about this shortly in the Atlantic, they said over the past 10 years, we've had four tests, and each time we hit the target. So 100%, four tests, four hits. Well, as arms control expert Joe Serencion and others point out, these are staked down chicken tests, right? This is like proving how accurate a shotgun is by staking a rabbit to the ground and then shooting it. but only two of those tests since 2014 were actually against intercontinental ballistic missile style targets and even those are highly scripted we know when they're going we know where

they're going we're hitting a bullet with a bullet in space the 20 years tests or so since 1999 have had about a 57% accuracy, about a coin toss in terms of hitting them. And that's under the very best conditions. That's where you, that's under these completely artificial, you know, steak chicken tests, strapped down chicken tests. And I just think 61% was being generous. But even if you allow 61%, you basically are dealing with a coin toss, especially when this, like in the circumstance of the film where this thing pops up. Nobody knows where it came from. There's a great scene in the movie at Fort Greeley where one of the army people starts to get really jumpy. And the guy says, listen, you've got this.

We practice for this all the time. We know how to do this. but no one's ever done it under battle conditions. We've never had that kind of test. We've never really stressed tested this. These are very carefully scripted. I think one reason is that the Pentagon doesn't want to do more difficult test because they don't want to have more failures.

I mean, this thing, I worked on SDI. I know that it's a boondoggle. I think it had a noble and good purpose in the 1980s, but I don't think it's something that that's worth pursuing now. But even if you grant 60, 70 percent, I mean, Iron Dome, which the president is fascinated by, that's meant to hit things that are lower and slower and much easier to hit. And even that has something like 80 to 85 percent. And as a friend of mine who was living in Israel at the time, whose building got hit during a rocket attack said,

you know, this is one of those days where I think 85 percent isn't enough. So I had no problem. I personally don't believe U.S. missile defenses are going to do much against an opponent who's going to do something more complicated than the bad guys did in a House of Dynamite. I mean, they launched one missile with no decoys, no multiple launches, nothing. I mean, that, that was basically the simplest possible test. And you'll notice in the movie that when somebody says, well, why don't we fire more of them? It's like, well, we only have like 44 of these things. What if this is the first, what if this is meant to be a decoy or meant to drag out a bunch of launches so that whatever comes in next has a better chance of surviving?

I mean, it's, it's a Rubik's cube. And, you know, I don't know about you. I can't do a Rubik's cube in five minutes. I can't do them at all. So that's, you know, this is a... That was an eight point. Did I just date? We're talking 80s movies and I went right for a Rubik's cube.

Well, no, my kids have Rubik's cubes and I still look at that. They get me hives. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't, I've never been any good at those. One thing you had mentioned in your piece, just real quick. I think this is, this is one of the things I really liked about the movie is the depiction of the professionals in this as professionals. The professionalism versus panic. There is a, you know, there's a tendency to portray

military officials, national security officials in situations like this as general Jack Ripper or whoever. And that is, that is, you know, I think that's often unfair, but it's, you know, whatever. That's, a movie is a movie. This movie does a very good job, I think, of kind of just treating everybody. as like, okay, well, this is what we've trained for. This is what we're doing. You mentioned, you know, having dealt with people like this and basically seeing them react to this way,

not to this specific situation, but this kind of jutting between, you know, all right, we're joking, we're joking. And now we're serious. And now we're serious. Right. Yeah, I especially like the moment. I mean, Tracy Letts plays this four star. He was so good, right? I mean, he's just such a good actor. And he plays this four-star general, who's the chief of Stratcom. And they're such a real moment because they're, again, I've briefed lots of generals and admirals. I've dealt with them, you know, a good part of my career. And they can be a real pain in the ass. I mean, they can be a handful. You know, they're used to people that when their coffee cup is empty, they, somebody fills it, you know. And there's a great moment where the national security,

the deputy national security advisor is running. And he's trying to brief. everybody and let's he says son I didn't join the Navy because I get seasick can you stop with all that bouncing around and I'm like that's exactly the kind of thing a general like that would say and then

boom the next minute he's all business he goes from being a you know snippy Martinette to telling the president look I don't have to make this decision I'm just telling you this is what I think and it's not pretty and my job is

tell you stuff that isn't pretty. And, you know, they're all, it's all business. Nobody flips out. Nobody says anything crazy. You don't even have to go for a Jack, Jack Ripper. I mean, if you think about how often military officers are caricatured in the military, something I have never, you know, having taught military officers for years, something I've never really appreciated. You know, you ask about military officers and people see Jack Nicholson, right? You're goddamn right. I ordered the code right you know bulging eyes and freaking out um that's not the way it is these these are not people you know they can be a real like i said they can be a real handful administratively but when when push comes to the show of they are as cold as ice they do their jobs they train for it every day

and i thought the movie captured that really well let's all right so uh you know kind of famously after having seen war games and the day after ronald regan was affected by them you know the day after got to him definitely yes it changed his perspective on all this and was like what do we how do we how do we what do you what if you were in your heart in your in your hope against hope what would you hope that the current administration might take away from a house of dynamite oh dear what a what a nice underhand slope pitch um first i'll just point out that um contrary to popular belief Reagan was actually an abolitionist, and the movie got to him because he only had two positions on nuclear weapons, which was complete abolition or American superiority.

And he actually was something of a nuclear peacnik, which people just don't believe. The only guy that ever got it right was John Newhouse, who in 1990 wrote a piece in the New Yorker called The Abolitionist, where he talked about Reagan as, people really needed to understand how much Reagan really hated nuclear weapons. And that's important because that affects the rest of the administration. What bothers me about this administration is the completely kind of blithe way everybody takes their cues from the boss. He said, I'm very concerned about the nuclear, about nuclear. I don't know what it is with me.

He doesn't he says, he doesn't say nuclear. He says nuclear, okay. But then he does things like, well, Dmitri Medvedev, the former president of Russia. He pissed me off. So I'm moving submarines closer to Russia. I mean, that is, these are not toys. These are not, this isn't a game of battleship. You know, um, you don't talk about stuff like that. And if you're going to do it, you certainly don't talk about it. You do it quietly. Let the Russians notice. You don't announce it. I mean, it's, it's just a, um, it's really an irresponsible approach. And the fact of

the matter is that the top advisor, you know, in the cabinet on this is going to be Pete Hegeseth, the Secretary of Defense, we don't have, and I think people need to understand this again, we do not have a two-man rule at the top. The Secretary of Defense is there primarily or someone is there to say, the person who just read you these codes, I am verifying that this is the president. So it's not to approve the president's choices. It's to be a second person verifying that the person doing this is actually the president. in the United States. And I mean, I would hope that, I mean, I don't know, you know, replace Pete Hegsef, you know, create a real national security council instead of having a bunch of people

wandering around the White House, or at least one wing of the White House that's left, instead of having Marco Rubio, you know, being the sex state and the national security advisor and the National Archivist. but you know if these were people who were capable of taking these things seriously then you wouldn't need to show them the movie i mean it's kind of a catch 22 really about what would i hope if they saw it i would hope that they would say hey this stuff you know i think one of things that bothers me in general about this administration and about american society today i'm going to be and be grumpy old man that's good um go for it but to say

But to say, people don't seem to think that anything in the world has consequences, right? Let's shut down the government. What could go wrong? Well, nothing, you know, there's that line, you know, the line I'm thinking of Ernest Hemingway talking about bankruptcy. When one of his characters has asked, how did you go broke? And he said, gradually and then all at once. That's how government functions decline. You get a little bit of corrosion, degradation, and then things start to fail.

You know, a nuclear crisis is not something where the president can pick up the phone and say, you know, Vladimir, cut it out or put something on truth social. That's not how any of this works. And I think it bothers me. And I, this is one reason I really think it's important for people to see the movie to say in the real world, that is a real world that is full of serious and dangerous people. Things have consequences. People you choose to lead the Pentagon. on that has consequences. The way the president speaks,

people forget everything the president says is policy. You don't want to live in a country. People say, well, the president just says stuff, but nobody has to take that seriously. Every time the president of the United States speaks, that is policy. So I would hope that maybe this White House isn't going to watch it,

but I would hope that other people would watch it and say, you know, the most important thing I can do as a voter is to put, sane, responsible, sober-minded people in office and not to be satisfied with, you know, government by shit posting. That is. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. You know, we talked, you talk about, I would say, I would say that the dream of nuclear abolition is probably more realistic than this.

And that is not particularly realistic. So we are, we are in bad, bad dire straits right now. It's not, not ideal all the way around. Here's the cheerful part. When I was a young guy back during the Hoover administration, when I was in college, I started college when Jimmy Carter was president and graduated in Reagan's first term. The United States had an arsenal of about 20,000 strategic nuclear weapons. I mean, we had the Soviets had like 12. I mean, we were pointing 30,000 nuclear weapons at each other. And of course, I did one year of grad school at Harvard. Harvard where every 10 seconds there was a demonstration in Cambridge, you know, no nukes and you can't, but like I, you live in Cambridge and you see all the bumper stickers. You know, one nuclear bomb can ruin your day. My favorite was you can't hug a child with nuclear arms. And so I would have said, you know, if somebody had said, listen, by the time, you know, you're a grandfather, we'll be down to 1,500 nuclear weapons each. I would have said, you're completely high. and yet here we are. We've done it. It can be done. I mean, Reagan, the great boogeyman of nuclear weapons, he and Gorbachev literally crushed and buried an entire class of nuclear weapons, made

the world vastly safer. Of course, Trump and his guys are trying to put those weapons back and undo that. They've canceled that treaty from 1987, which is lunacy. It's one of the best arms treaties we ever signed. So, you know, the bright spot is, even though it would have been unimaginable to me 35 years ago, here we are. Things are, you can do these things, but they require some, they require skill, diplomacy, seriousness of purpose, all things that I don't think this administration has. But also, I hate to say this, Sonny, I think that millions of Americans just don't have.

you know you need the public to be engaged and to say you know we don't want to live like this we don't want to live with this kind of threat hanging over our heads let's do what we can do and i think most people have just checked out and because they've had 30 years of peace and prosperity and i don't think they really want to think about this very much yeah that sounds about right all right uh i always like to close these interviews by asking if there's anything I should have asked if you think there's anything folks should know about this movie, about, you know, anything we've discussed here today or the state of the world. You know, we got a little bit of state of the world there at the end.

But anything, what did we not discuss that we should have? Well, I'm glad that we didn't discuss because I thought it was going to come up. I'm glad that we didn't discuss the ending of a House of Dynamite because I don't want to spoil it. I don't think you should spoil it. But I will say this. at first you may kind of raise your eyebrows about it, but I think given what the movie is about, there was no other way to end it.

I think it had the only ending it can have given everything that happens because I think otherwise it would be, no matter without, I'm trying to do this, you know, highly redacted. I think had Bigelow chosen any other end that would be the only thing we'd talk about. Yeah. No, I agree.

I've heard some... I've had some people complain to me about the ending, and I will just say that I think it... I think it is the perfect ending for what this movie wants to be. Right. What this movie is trying to demonstrate, which is not the same as saying that it is a completely satisfying ending for some people. Right.

but it is it is uh i i i think it is uh it works for the movie that it's trying to be and that's all any movie can do so right um and as far as you know other things we should have talked about i think you know we've we've gotten there about the world situation i mean what what's left to say um you know it's a dangerous world it's full of nuclear weapons this is a good movie about that uh you know other other than that uh we get depressing it's like you know sleep well remember that there are 1,500 nuclear weapons targeted against the United States. And, you know, that's just the reality we live with every day, whether we want to think about it or not.

Yeah. And most people do not. That's the, yeah, I don't, look, I don't blame them. Existential dread is exhausting, you know, but that closing your, we can't be like little kids, right? Closing our eyes does not make things go away just because we can't see them. Yeah. Well, Tom Nichols, thank you for being on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Sunny. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

And my name again is I am Sunny Bunch. I am Culture Editor at The Bullwark, and we will be back next week with another episode of The Bullwark Goes to Hollywood. We'll see you guys then.