Nuclear War & A House of Dynamite

29 October 2025

Throughout the Cold War the end of the western world was always a possibility. When it comes to looking for weapons of mass destruction, it really isn’t all that hard. The Soviet Union and the United States had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other and all their allies. With the fall of the Soviet Union the fear of nuclear war diminished, even while thousands of the weapons themselves remained. But no one really gave nuclear war much thought.

Then in 2022 Vladimir Putin returned war, and with it fear of the nuclear variety, to the forefront of western consciousness.

As a result books and films are being made that make us think again about the reality of a world with an increasing number of nuclear armed nations including some that can only be described as rogue. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer showed us the origins of the atomic bomb and gave us a hint of what it means to be a ‘destroyer of worlds’. For the first time ever mankind had invented a weapon that could kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of people with a single bomb. Yet today’s hydrogen bombs are exponentially more destructive than those first bombs and can kill millions. Oppenheimer has slain tens of thousands, and Teller his tens of millions.

Then last year Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario¹ hit the bestseller lists around the English-speaking world. In her scenario North Korea, in all its paranoia, launches a surprise attack on the US and through a series of catastrophic misunderstandings and inevitable escalations all-out nuclear war happens.

If, I’ve read it correctly, the book is not arguing for the plausibility of the political scenario but to show you the processes of what happens in any nuclear scenario. Through interviews with politicians, scientists, policy makers and military personnel she illustrates that once in motion these things are almost impossible to stop. As she says, nuclear deterrence works, until one day it doesn’t.

What Jacobsen focuses on is the incredible pressure such an event puts on decision makers: there is never enough time to respond adequately. The people in the decision making role will not have time and they will be unprepared. No one is ready for this.

And it is this pressure cooker of having to make immense decisions in a highly compressed time-frame is at the heart of the latest movie, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite. The film shows from three different angles what happens in the 18 minutes between detection of and landing of a nuclear missile in the continental USA. The film superbly captures the tension and pressure as regular humans show up to work and then have to deal with, not a training simulation, but the real thing – a nightmare come true.

Jacobsen reminds us that a lot of people have been thinking the unthinkable. In one war planning scenario in the 1960s US war planners calmly calculated the deaths of 600 million people. This at a time when the world population was only 3 billion.

CS Lewis in discussing the nature of evil observed: “But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.“

What else can you call plans that lead to the deaths of 600 million civilians in just a few hours than evil? There’s no Christian justification for that.

A House of Dynamite ends, much to many viewers disappointment and frustration, at the moment of decision leaving the viewer with no resolution. That’s actually a wise decision given what happens next. Jacobsen does not hold back but describes in vivid detail the horrendous destruction a nuclear missile unleashes if one were to land.

These are not bombs aimed at tanks or bases or even soldiers, these are city destroying forces that will wipe a major modern city off the map almost permanently. The blast, the fires, the shock, the radiation, the obliteration of hospitals and all hope for help. They kill millions indiscriminately. How is anyone to make a film out of that?

And once started it is almost impossible to go back. Time and time again Jacobsen points out that there is no recall. Once launched a nuclear missile can’t be stopped. Any country targeted will have less than 30 minutes to respond.

This then is one of Jacobsen’s most important points: massive nation ending destruction will happen extremely quickly. Cities cannot evacuate in 30 minutes. The moment tens of thousands people head to the same roads at the same time then the result is that no one is going anywhere and they will all die anyway. You cannot escape, you can’t run and there’s virtually nothing you can do. But don’t worry you probably won’t be told in any case.

The book is not without its weaknesses. Jacobsen persistently paints the picture as world ending but that’s not true. It is America ending. It is also probably northern hemisphere ending but it is not world ending. If nuclear war happens the world will suffer but America will be over, not the other way around.

No one is planning on wasting a nuclear weapon on Bujumbura or Quito. And while nuclear winter will affect everyone, the vast majority of people in South America and Africa and Oceania will survive more or less intact. This conflation of the north with the entire world is problematic. And when discussing nuclear winter Jacobsen only gives one possibility, the worst one. Yet there are other possibilities here and it is so unknown and with so many variables that it is almost impossible to say although if you happen to live in the northern hemisphere you won’t be around to see any of it.

That we live in a world that will not give up nuclear weapons and instead seems set on getting more of them is worrying. MAD is a perverse policy from start to finish. As Christians we must be peacemakers and futile as it may very well be, we must be against such evil.