Can "House of Dynamite" Change the Nuclear Debate?
Art Against Armageddon Goes Welll Beyond Hollywood
This is an updated post with some details at the end about resources available to educate the public about the issues raised in the film.
Kathryn Bigelow’s “House of Dynamite” goes up on Netflix this Friday, where it should reach a far larger audience than it did in its limited release in theaters.
The film is a nerve-wracking, non-stop thriller about the U.S. government’s reaction to a nuclear attack. Chaos reigns, nerves fray, and the wishful notion that anti-missile systems will save us goes out the window as U.S. interceptors miss the incoming target time and again. At one point a junior staffer points out that the interceptors have failed almost half of their tests, and a general bellows “and this is what we paid $50 billion for?”
Precisely. But the reality is even worse. The United States has spent far more than $50 billion on missile defense since Ronald Reagan first promised a leak proof shield against inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in his 1983 “Star Wars” speech. Donald Trump has gone Reagan one better, promising a “Golden Dome” shield that will have a 100% kill rate against ICBMs, hypersonic missiles, and low flying drones and cruise missiles. At one point President Trump promised that this perfect defense system could be built in 3 years at a cost of $175 billion.
These claims are so off-base that it isn’t clear where to stop. Point one is that most scientists who are not on the payroll of the Pentagon or the arms industry have long agreed that a leak proof shield is physically impossible. In a real attack, the United States would have to intercept multiple warheads, likely accompanied by realistic decoys, all coming unannounced, at speeds of 15,000 miles an hour. None of the missile defense tests performed over the past 40 years have attempted anything approaching a realistic scenario of that sort. The tests that have failed nearly half the time have been heavily scripted, usually involving only one incoming warhead, and done under conditions where the intercepting team knew when the attacking missile would be launched.
President Trump’s claim that a system can be built in three years adds insult to injury. In the modern era, the Pentagon has NEVER finished a complex project in three years. The F-35 has been over 23 years in the making, and it still isn’t ready for prime time.
None of the above has stopped Congress from forming a pro-Golden Dome caucus, or arms firms from setting up Golden Dome units, or the Pentagon and Congress hatching plans to throw tens of billions of dollars at the program as a down payment.
The problem is as much psychological as technological. The idea that our own ingenuity can save us is attractive. What could be better than a scenario in which can-do American technology protects us from any and all adversaries, without the need for messy negotiations or the need to trust another country? Only reality is standing in the way. And reality has been having a bad patch in terms of its influence over U.S. foreign and military policies in recent years.
Unfortunately, Golden Dome could be more than a colossal waste of money. It could also accelerate a dangerous nuclear arms race that is already under way. Despite the fact that it can’t possibly work as advertised, military leaders generally plan according to worst case scenarios. What if it worked, adversaries will ask? Will it make it possible for America to strike first and fend off any counterattack on our part, giving them a first strike capability? The result of this sort of thinking will be an offense/defense arms race of the kind that the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972 attempted to head off, until it was abandoned under the administration of George W. Bush.
We are at a moment when U.S.-Russia arms control hangs by a very thin thread. The last bilateral agreement, the New START Treaty, expires early next year, and the best hope for the moment would be a handshake agreement between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to voluntarily abide by the treaty’s limits.
What is needed is a vigorous dialogue about how to put some limits back on nuclear arms racing, seeking the roots of a new nuclear arms control architecture, with the ultimate goal of eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.
Will “House of Dynamite” help revive public interest and pressure towards nuclear arms reductions? Perhaps. It certainly makes a strong case that technology will not save us, and that once nuclear weapons start flying there is no easy way out, if any. But the question is who will see the film, and what their takeaway will be. Will they accept the idea that missile defense is not the answer, or will they decide we just haven’t spent enough to solve the problem? Will the fear generated by the film lead to pressure for control or an urge to “outpace” China and Russia?
The simple answer is that the film will not do the job of building opposition to runaway nuclear spending and arms racing alone. If the film raises the visibility of the issue, it will be up to organizations and individuals working to rein in the nuclear danger to reach people whose interest is sparked by the film and move them to action (see a list of resources at the end of this post.) And we have to keep in mind that no one film or television program has the reach it had before the era of social media. It will take a whole ecosystem of cultural products, from films to TV to podcasts to Tik Tok video to – heaven forbid! – in person events and interactions to have the kind of impact “The Day After” did in the 1980s.
But movies like “Dr. Strangelove” and “The Day After” didn’t come out of the blue. Dr. Strangelove came out in 1964, after years of anti-nuclear organizing by the “Ban the Bomb” movement, led by organizations like The National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (SANE) and Women’s Strike for Peace. “The Day After” came out in November of 1983, almost a year and one half after the one million person disarmament march in Central Park and well after the Nuclear Freeze movement had caught hold with communities large and small across the United States. The movements came first, and the movies followed.
There is in fact a growing ecosystem of anti-nuclear movies. The task is to get them in front of more people. A recent example is the film “Ways of Knowing: A Navajo Nuclear History,” directed by Kayla Briet and Sunny Dooley, Lovely Umayam, and produced by the anti-nuclear arts collective Bombshelltoe and Adriel Luis. The film, which premiered this year at the SXSW festival, gives the history of the nuclear age from the point of view of Navajo communities that have seen their sacred sites contaminated and their lives put at risk by uranium mining and the radiation from nuclear testing. One lesson of the film, echoed in many other quarters, is that the development, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons kills human beings even if the bomb is never dropped again.
As I have mentioned before, another indispensable film that underscores the generational damage done by nuclear development is Lois Lipman’s “First We Bombed New Mexico,” the story of the fight by Tina Cordova and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium to get compensation people who have been killed or made ill by the impacts of the Trinity nuclear bomb test on their New Mexico communities – a fight that continues even after a partial victory in Congress this year.
As Arjun Makhijani points out in his essential piece that appeared this August at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists website, the U.S. decision to continue the Manhattan Project after it was clear that Hitler had abandoned pursuit of the bomb opened the door to a world of toxic landscapes and unnecessary deaths, all grounded in the notion that nuclear weapon would cement and extend American global primacy in the post-World War II era. These few paragraphs from his essay offer a preliminary sense of the damage done, starting with the extensive uranium mining that was done in the Congo to gather material for the bomb:
“The toxic archipelago of Congo’s uranium extends from Congo itself to Staten Island in New York, where the uranium was first stored, then to Tonawanda (New York), Cleveland (Ohio), Ames (Iowa), and downtown St. Louis (Missouri). From Cleveland, the uranium went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it was enriched for the Hiroshima bomb. From Ames, it went to the “atomic pile” in Enrico Fermi’s lab at the University of Chicago to make the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. From St. Louis to Hanford, where the uranium was irradiated in reactors to make the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb.
Uranium mining and milling wastes scattered throughout the world in countries with no atomic bomb program and no nuclear power plants are perhaps the most underappreciated toxic legacy of the nuclear age. There are over 500 abandoned uranium mines on the lands of the Navajo Nation alone. Between one and eight billion tons of radioactive uranium mine wastes and about 200 million tons of radioactive uranium mill tailings are spread across the United States.
In Iowa and St. Louis, uranium tetrafluoride (also known as “green salt”) was put into crucibles with metal flakes and heated. If it is not done exactly right, there is a risk of chemical explosion, scattering radioactive uranium in the air. Such explosions were common in the 1940s. Workers breathed uranium dust, risking cancer. Uranium is also a heavy metal toxin for the kidneys.”
And that’s just part of it – read Makhijani’s article to get the full picture.
On the cultural front, there are projects large and small across the world that underscore the danger and inhumanity involved in developing and wielding nuclear weapons. One example of many came from an artists collective and gallery in Harlem – the Children’s Art Carnival – that did an exhibit on the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, curated by Yasuyo Tanaka. Among her many other projects was “Under the Sky: The Manhattan Project,” in which she worked with a group of teenage students who researched the Manhattan Project and made a hand made book and map of project sites in and around Manhattan, followed by research on similar sites throughout the United States.
And from March to September of this year the Poster House Museum in Manhattan put on an exhibit, “Fallout: Weapons for War and Peace,” which contrasted pro-nuclear propaganda produced by the General Dynamics Corporation in the 1950s to promote every imaginable use of nuclear energy, from powering airplanes and submarines to excavating construction sites, with anti-nuclear posters from Europe and the United States from the 1950s forward.
There are other examples of anti-nuclear art all over the world, like the work of the international network Artists Against the Bomb. Italian author Enrico Muratore Aprosio’s kaleidoscopic book, Promemoria: Sending Out an SOS, explores and denounces the existential threats that put us all at risk, from pandemics to climate change to nuclear weapons. I tried to portray the feel of the book and its multiple modes of expression in this review, but there is no substitute for reading and taking in the book itself. One of the beauties of the book is that while it drives home the risks we face, it does so against the backdrop of stunning artwork that reminds us of the creative impulses we need to nurture our souls and gather the energy to fight for a better world.
Organizations like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have been in the forefront of highlighting and promoting anti-nuclear art projects. We all need to pitch in, so that the cumulative impact of these smaller, non-Hollywood projects grabs public attention in a way no one film or story can.
Probably the biggest challenge to bringing attention to the existential threat of nuclear weapons is the proliferation of threats to life. Climate change and pandemics are existential threats. But depending where you stand in the hierarchy, and what community you are a part of, there are more immediate existential threats to you, your family, and your community. Worrying about whether your kids will make it back and forth to school alive is an existential threat. Wondering if you can put food on the table is an existential threat, as is lack of health care, the prevalence of police violence, and the upsurge in militarized immigration raids.
Which gets back to the point that fear alone will not mobilize people against nuclear dangers. As a society, we are already overdosing on fear. We need to build bonds of respect and affection across communities and issues if we are to have any hope of rolling back the nuclear arms race or dealing with any of the other threats to our lives and livelihoods in time to make a difference. In preparing to do so, films like Ways of Knowing and First We Bombed New Mexico offer guides to how to come together in service of our common humanity and against the greed, divisiveness, and hatred that have infected our politics and our world. It’s not too late.
Resources:
Union of Concerned Scientists, “We Don’t Need to Live in a House Made of Dynamite” and “Five Things to Know Before Watching A House of Dynamite”
Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, “One Person’s Pre- Watch Guide to A House of Dynamite”
Nuclear Threat Initiative, “Breaking Down A House of Dynamite”
Media Coverage:
Forbes (William Hartung): “House of Dynamite Shows That Missile Defense Is a Dangerous Fantasy.”
CommonDreams (Kevin Martin, Peace Action): “House of Dynamite and the Nuclear Threat.”
The New Republic: A House of Dynamite Explodes the Missile Defense Myth