OPINION:
After a brief run on the big screen, Netflix brought Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” to the small screen on Oct. 24. It drew an audience of more than 20 million in its first week.
The plot: A land-based crew in Alaska detects an intercontinental ballistic missile launch after a satellite failure to spot the threat. U.S. Strategic Command determines that the missile is on a trajectory to destroy Chicago, but it cannot attribute the source of the weapon.
Setting aside distracting technical errors and an implausible premise, the movie gets two fundamental facts correct. First, the ticking clock accurately signals the limited time available to the president and the National Military Command Center to make momentous decisions. One wonders whether the ticking clock was intended as a warning to the previous administration.
The requirements for rapid decision-making may have proved problematic in the Biden administration, which featured an enfeebled president many considered incapable of making choices quickly, as well as a secretary of defense whose whereabouts at one point could not be ascertained for days.
Second, the characters reveal the reality of the “fog of war,” the inevitable uncertainties and exigencies that exist in times of crisis, which muddle decision-making. The lesson here is that the nation must be ever vigilant in assuring that all phases of national security, including our response to a scenario such as this, are impeccably planned and executed. The predicate for impeccable planning and execution is having competent leaders in place to execute nuclear response plans.
The writer and director of the film hint that they share the goal of nuclear abolition. Stepping back from the movie, viewers can likely conclude that the writer’s and director’s policy intentions are the opposite.
The movie presents the case for the Golden Dome missile defense system, a priority of the Trump administration. The dome is ideally suited for identifying and disabling an attack from a small number of incoming missiles, such as the one depicted in the movie. If the U.S. were subjected to an attack by a rogue state or an accidental launch by China or Russia, the Golden Dome provides some assurance of avoiding the destruction of, say, Chicago.
Moreover, if the world order is unstable now with nuclear weapons, how much more unstable would it be after atomic disarmament? Just imagine South Korea the day after the world allegedly disavowed nuclear weapons. Its citizens know they could wake up any morning being threatened by the dictator on the other side of the 38th parallel, who might reemerge one day as the world’s sole nuclear power. This scenario is the opposite of security and stability. Perhaps counterintuitively, a nuclear-free world is vastly less stable and secure than the imperfect one we now have.
Some seek to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons as the basis for our national security. Unfortunately, as seductive as that sounds, we tried that recently, and it didn’t work. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. paid itself a peace dividend by reducing reliance on its nuclear deterrent.
That dividend came at the expense of underinvesting in the nuclear assets deployed by the Department of Defense, as well as the production and laboratory facilities managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration. The investment required to modernize the entire enterprise now approaches $1 trillion.
Our elected officials now understand “the price of liberty is vigilance,” and they have accepted their responsibility to pay the price. In doing so, they echo the majestic words President Kennedy made in his inaugural address. The U.S. will “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
• David S. Jonas is a partner at Fluet in Tysons, Virginia, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown and George Washington University law schools. Patrick Rhoads leads the nuclear research efforts at the National Strategic Research Institute. These are the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of any organization with which they have been or are now affiliated.
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