A special holiday crossover with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Van Jackson and Lyle Rubin are joined by the preeminent nuclear scholar Scott Sagan to discuss A House of Dynamite, the 2025 political thriller that imagines nuclear catastrophe not as spectacle or obvious madness, but as an orderly sequence of decisions made under crushing time pressure. Structured as interlocking vignettes rather than a single command-room drama, the film moves between the White House, STRATCOM, missile defense sites, continuity bunkers, and civilian spaces, sketching a system that largely works as designed and still produces annihilation.
The film’s opening establishes its governing logic. Inclination is flattening. Timelines shrink. Judgment collapses into procedure. “Nineteen minutes to impact.” “Sixteen minutes.” “Confirm impact.” Across locations, professionals do their jobs calmly while the meaning drains out of their actions. A senior officer tells a junior colleague to keep the cafeteria line moving. A staffer compiles names and Social Security numbers for the dead. Phones come out. Final calls are made. The end of the world arrives not with hysteria, but with etiquette.
Much of the tension turns on probability. Missile defense is described as “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” Sixty-one percent becomes the moral threshold, a coin toss bought with billions of dollars. Baseball chatter at STRATCOM blends into DEFCON alerts. A Civil War reenactment at Gettysburg unfolds alongside real-time catastrophe, collapsing past and present forms of American mass death into a single frame.
Scott is critical of the film’s portrayal of nuclear command and control. He argues that its depiction of retaliatory decision-making is wrong, that no president would order nuclear strikes against loosely defined adversaries without firm attribution or confirmation, and that the film risks backfiring by encouraging faith in ever more elaborate missile defenses rather than disarmament. Lyle pushes back, questioning whether this confidence in institutional sanity is warranted, especially given the political moment. Either way, the film lands a disturbing insight. The danger is not wild irrationality, but systems that normalize impossible choices. Nuclear war here would not look like collapse. It would look like competence.
Further ReadingScott’s Wiki page
“Just and Unjust Nuclear Deterrence” by Scott
The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons by Scott
“Thinking and Moral Considerations” by Hannah Arendt
Review of A House of Dynamite in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists by Scott and Shreya Lad
“Peacecraft and the Nuclear Policy Dilemma” by Van
“Fresh Hell: Unjust Nuclear Deterrence and Nuclear Testing” by Van
47 mins