“We Did Everything Right, Right?”
A House of Dynamite is a movie about humans trying to do everything they can to salvage one very bad morning when the unthinkable—here a single ballistic missile pops up out of nowhere and flies toward an American city—plays out over eighteen minutes. Each main character has a real-life job in the U.S. national security enterprise facing thousands of threats, though few so grievous as this one. “We did everything right, right?” asks the exasperated officer of the 49th Missile Defense Battalion in Fort Greely, Alaska, after the two ground-based interceptors miss their target.
Do the characters in this movie do everything right?
White House Situation Room Staffer Olivia Walker defies fault. She’s up at 3:30 am with a sick kid before heading off to work soon after that. Precision and efficiency guide her entrance through the White House security and breakfast lines and throughout the crisis that follows. The next time you get flustered with modern technology think of Olivia. Since the countdown plays out three times in this movie, we get multiple vantage points for such moments as when the teleconferencing hardware will not allow her to merge a call. When Olivia orders a subordinate to leave the Situation Room to come back with her own personal cell phone, it’s to stay at her post. As any human would do, she calls her loved ones to bid them to safety—they can still make it sufficiently west of the National Capital Region.
Olivia’s boss, Situation Room Director Admiral Mark Miller, initially strives to buck up his team. The whole thing is probably a false alarm, he tells them and next reassures them their job is not to solve the puzzle – rather, it is to find the pieces and “send [them] up the chain.” Miller is imbued with a dark, nervous humor, and I’m honestly not sure what to make of him. He confides in Olivia early on that the prognosis is grim and dutifully follows protocol when it’s time to move to the bunker. Here and elsewhere, emergency operations staff intervene according to well-rehearsed plans. Cabinet officials mid-level bureaucrats grouse about it yet tend to comply.
In scenes from Fort Greely, Alaska, just before the crisis commences, we hear complaints about stale potato chips left on a workstation during a routine shift change. From an undisclosed location in INDOPACOM, we hear locker room banter (“You take your dates to Applebees? She works there, dumbass.”) before a routine B-2 bomber patrol. Such is surreal juxtaposition of the mission of U.S. early warning and nuclear deterrence and humdrum everyday life. Unheralded are these first-line defenders who for eighty years have never yet failed us.
As they were instructed to do, the crew in Alaska launched two interceptors. Why only two? The movie preempts this question with the casual explanation that it is necessary to keep the other forty-eight in reserve. This would be small consolidation to the now-despondent crew in Alaska. They did their job. And as they loiter closer to their target, the crew of the B-2 prepares to execute a mission not of their choosing.
Who are the ones in this movie crafting the fates of the others? Among them, who are the ones making the decisions to kill? Are they making the right decisions?
The unseen National Security Advisor made what he figured to be a responsible decision: schedule a colonoscopy—he spends the morning blissfully sedated and unaware. In his stead, Deputy National Security Adviser Jake Baerington must remind the president and others who he is before he can plead with them not to take actions that immediately spiral into World War III. As with multiple other characters, Baerington appears in the background before the camera focuses on him in a subsequent iteration of the eighteen minutes. When we first properly meet him, he’s dour and disappointed that his wife apparently learned from The View (or a friend who watched it) of an upcoming summit in Helsinki that excluded him.
Still, she’s six months pregnant and he understandably wants their child to be born. Baerington bounds back to the White House—in and out of cell phone coverage—missing some key plot developments. In a typical Hollywood treatment, Baerington’s subsequent call to the Russian Foreign Minister would be the moment that defuses the crisis. Not here.
Baerington gets on the line with the president the National Intelligence Officer for North Korea. She answers from Gettysburg, PA, on a day off with her son, and responds as best any could: yes, they have been seeking a Strategic Submarine Ballistic Nuclear capability. She speaks with authority—yet how on earth does Baerington think this answer clarifies what the President ought now to do? During his call with the Russians, it is clear to the viewer that they do not know what to make of him. He’s sincere and candid about not speaking on behalf of the President. A few moments later, he’s candid with the President that he was sincere with the Russians and they promised no actual deal. None of this accomplishes anything.
“I would be happy to sacrifice 10 million Americans if that meant no further losses,” the head of United States Strategic Command, General Tony Brady, tells the president. “We’ve already lost one American city.” (When it becomes clear that the incoming missile is closing in on Chicago.) In an homage to Dr. Strangelove, General Brady presides over “The Big Board.” Yet A House of Dynamite is not that movie, and Brady is not General Jack D. Ripper. In Brady’s formal introduction he dispenses blandness about the All-Star Game. Yet his job is to be ready for this precise type of occasion. His mission – when the president gives him the green light – is to take out whatever enemy nukes out there that might hit America before they get off the ground. It is *not* simply to blow up everything and restart civilization underground, as in Dr. Strangelove. Whatever else, his mission has clarity and logic.
Back at the Pentagon is the already grieving Secretary of Defense Reid Baker. One cannot say that his character does everything right here. To his daughter in Chicago, he devotes his last minutes. Resigned to her fate (and his own), he spares her the knowledge of what is about to happen. Watch the movie to see what he does next.
We never learn the name of the President, who emerges fully only in the third iteration of the eighteen minutes. Fans of the The Wire will recall how Stringer Bell always came up with a smart plan and acted on it. Twenty years later, Idris Elba’s unnamed Commander-in-Chief cannot do either. He exports the burden of choice at all opportunity. When he calls his wife in the serenity of an elephant enclave, it’s not to say goodbye but to ask for her advice—though in fairness we do not hear the entirety of the call. Had he prompted ChatGPT at some point I would not be surprised.
Toward the end, the President is alone on Marine One with Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves, the President Military Aide who carries the nuclear football. As would a waiter at a high-end restaurant explaining a fancy new menu, Reeves takes the President through different options, recommending a heavy three-course-meal.
We never know what the president chooses. We cannot say whether he made the right choice.
It is tempting to watch this movie and think at specific moments whether a certain character did the right thing—and whether a different action on the part of that character would have led to a different overall outcome. However, whether any of these characters did everything—or anything—right during the 112 minutes of screen time is completely irrelevant.
In the world of A House of Dynamite, all that matters is a choice that the President made before the movie that we watch. That choice was to allow such a catastrophic breakdown in U.S. intelligence capabilities to fail to detect the origins of the single incoming missile.
Whether it was an accident or some rogue element or rogue state matters. Under such circumstances you certainly would not launch 4% of your interceptors—you’d launch 100%. And in other circumstances—for instance, some diabolical plot involving Russia and/or the People’s Republic of China—A House of Dynamite would proceed much differently. And in that scenario “we did everything right” might matter.
James Graham Wilson works on Soviet and National Security Policy volumes for the Foreign Relations of the United States series in the Office of the Historian at the Department of State. He is the author of America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024) and The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government or the U.S. Department of State.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
