“It’s like we all built a house filled with dynamite,” the President of the United States bemoans toward the end of A House of Dynamite, ‘making all these bombs and all these plans and the walls are just ready to blow.’”
Outrider | February 26, 2026 outrider.org
A House of Dynamite depicts the tense, shrinking window of options leaders have as a nuclear weapon of unknown origin hovers over Chicago—a scenario complicated by human judgment, defense failures, and political uncertainty.
“We did everything right, right?” asks a missile defense officer, as things go awry.
While director Katherine Bigelow’s tense drama was fiction, it might be a good time to use A House of Dynamite to illuminate the historical nuclear missile scares of the past—all of them terrifying, but nearly all of them forgotten in the popular consciousness—and learn from them.