Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for “A House of Dynamite.”
Silence filled the room as the frail Japanese figure sat down and met our gaze. For the next hour, 95-year-old Chieko Kiriake spoke vividly of the moment on Aug. 6, 1945, that changed her life forever. This summer, less than two weeks after the 80th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb attack, I arrived in the Japanese city of Hiroshima to learn about reporting on this legacy. As a living survivor of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb, Kiriake recalled with agonizing detail her classmates’ skin peeling from their bodies in the aftermath of the devastating moment. The entire room of journalists listening alongside me, some of whom had seen active war zones and reported on our world’s most hostile regions, sat in silence and tears.
Then came 80-year-old Koko Kondo, who was just a baby when the blast buried her under the Hiroshima rubble. Showing journalists the delicate white blouse she had worn that day, Kondo recalled how her family came to terms with the devastation, loss and forgiveness in the years that followed. Kondo is the daughter of Kiyoshi Tanimoto, one of the six bomb survivors John Hersey profiled in his acclaimed 1946 book, “Hiroshima,” published less than a year after the blast. Even then, facts surrounding the bomb were already being lost: Hersey accidentally identified Kondo as a boy in early versions of his book.
It’s been over eight decades since the U.S. dropped two devastating atomic bombs on Japan, killing over 200,000 people in a catastrophic moment that reshaped our world. Kiriake and Kondo are among the “hibakusha” (“bomb-affected people”) who have advocated for a nuclear-free world ever since, standing as a living reminder of the utter brutality of such weapons. Hersey’s book also remains a cornerstone of nuclear storytelling, still rightfully appearing on lists of essential nonfiction reads. But as visceral memories of the nuclear attacks fade further with age, the way we convey such stories must evolve, especially as politicians assert their commitment to their nuclear arsenals once again.
Cinema is one of the most powerful means of conveying what the world stands to lose. Kathryn Bigelow’s new Netflix film, “A House of Dynamite,” feels timely in that sense, and may actually signal an evolving role for filmmaking in articulating nuclear risk.
The premise is stark: As a nuclear missile closes in on modern-day Chicago, the U.S. president (played by Idris Elba) has just moments to make a decision that may determine the survival of humankind. For the last 18 minutes of the fictional catastrophe, alarmed U.S. staff watched a tiny red triangle arc across situation room screens toward mainland America — and a suspected 10 million fatalities.
“Being ready is the point, it keeps people in check, it keeps the world straight,” Elba’s character laments as he ponders how to respond. “If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war,” he says, flicking through a folder of nuclear targets while confronting the fact that deterrence failed to prevent the exact scenario it was meant to preclude.
The final scenes of “A House of Dynamite” cut to black as the fictional president single-handedly decides between “surrender or suicide.” Defense systems designed to thwart the incoming ballistic missile have failed, with the secretary of defense lamenting America’s missile defenses as “a fucking coin toss.” There’s scant optimism about the fate of Chicago in the movie, panic among those trained to handle this situation and even more uncertainty for the fate of humanity — all while designated survivors and the elite rush to underground nuclear bunkers. In this film, 80 years of campaigning against nuclear proliferation appear to have meant little.
It’s also a fresh perspective on a nuclear attack — one without a sense of closure. And this seems to have frustrated viewers accustomed to Hollywood endings in which the good guys avert a crisis. A one-star Google review put it this way: “You’re expecting a whole action scene on the explosion or some sort of drama to happen.” Rather than ending with some sort of solution, there are no heroes in “A House of Dynamite.”
The recent resurgence of nuclear-anxious movie plots isn’t coincidental. U.S. President Donald Trump just broke with a three-decade trend and announced renewed nuclear weapons testing, while falsely claiming that the U.S. possessed the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear warheads (experts estimate that Russia possesses 5,459 warheads, while the U.S. has approximately 3,700). Anxieties about the start of a new nuclear arms race have circled for a while, amid rising tensions from Iran to Russia to North Korea. Yet for many, it’s still difficult to imagine the unthinkable actually happening.
Written by Noah Oppenheim, the “House of Dynamite” storyline has already been disputed by the Pentagon, which argues that, contrary to the film, U.S. missile interceptors have been “100% accurate” in tests going back more than a decade (the film claims they work around 60% of the time). The writers, based on their own conversations with nuclear experts, respectfully disagree. Beyond the interceptors’ accuracy, the unsettling lack of catharsis viewers are left with once the credits roll is by design. Even more unsettling is how rarely audiences have been forced to reckon with nuclear anxiety in the present day — especially as leaders become more vocal about nuclear readiness.
A look back reveals a clearer picture of how entertainment has influenced perspectives. Since the 1950s, various films have been set amid nuclear catastrophe, such as “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), “WarGames” (1983) and “Threads” (1984). Albeit more abstract, the cult classic “Godzilla” franchise’s reptilian monster also first manifested in 1954 as a result of a U.S. nuclear test. Produced in a fraught world where countries really were testing catastrophic weapons, these films helped inform viewers, while adding to a collective anxiety about nuclear risks. A study following the 1983 film “The Day After,” which portrays the fallout of nuclear war on a Midwestern U.S. population, found that the film brought “the unthinkable into awareness” and made this reality feel more visceral to viewers. Some who watched the film became “instant pacifists,” the 1986 study found.
While early nuclear films, except for the satirical “Dr. Strangelove,” were primarily traumatic, the post-Cold War landscape saw a shift to plots about averted crises. Films such as “Crimson Tide,” “True Lies” and “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” end with lead characters thwarting nuclear risks. These films reflected a time when nuclear weapons were in decline and diplomatic agreements, like the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) between Moscow and Washington were being forged. (The 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which banned all nuclear tests, was not ratified by the U.S.) As the prospect of nuclear war appeared to diminish, films shifted in the decades that followed to dramatizing other existential threats, including from pandemics, the climate crisis, biotechnology and artificial intelligence.
It wasn’t just films that shaped the public consciousness. A look at other imagery also paints a stark picture of how nuclear weapons have been perceived. In 2024, Fairpicture, an organization that focuses on ethical representation in visual storytelling, suggested that the way nuclear weapons are depicted in popular culture is “full of cliches,” adding that missiles are almost always pointing up and away — a protective, defensive posture — rather than pointing down toward our own annihilation.
Search Google for images of “nuclear bombs,” and the results turn up an array of unmistakable mushroom clouds and rockets instead of images of their human impact. Set among arid backgrounds and featuring fantastic beams of light, these images feel abstract, devoid of emotional weight and, as one writer in The Guardian described in 2012, “beautiful.” The devastation of life, not just in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also among the countless local communities at the front lines of testing sites — where service members, scientists, children and wildlife have suffered public health consequences — barely makes the footnotes of nuclear history, let alone the first page of Google searches.
Only after visiting Hiroshima this summer did I start to fully confront what isn’t taught in Western classrooms about nuclear history and modern-day risks. From seeing thousands of personal items immortalized in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum, like twisted spectacles and clothes stained with black rain, to hearing bomb survivors share their own stories, the stakes felt more human than ever before. Yet even in Japan, there were ever-so-subtle signs that public sentiment was shifting away from that of older generations. A younger Japanese visitor at the peace memorial even seemed open to the country owning nuclear weapons in the future.
Memories of nuclear attacks may have faded into the rearview, but modern-day geopolitics should bring the reality back into focus. Although the estimated 12,400 nuclear warheads possessed by the world’s nine nuclear states are considerably less than Cold War stockpiles, attitudes toward nuclear weapons have been shifting for some time. Treaties previously designed to control nuclear risks have quietly expired, one by one, and have not been renewed amid mounting concern of a new nuclear arms race. The New START Treaty, the final nuclear arms agreement between Russia and the U.S., is set to expire in 2026.
Despite this, the public remains largely muted even as the Doomsday Clock, maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, edges closer to midnight. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets for the “No Kings” and pro-Palestine movements, but there’s little public outcry when Trump says he wants to start testing nuclear weapons again. The reasons are probably multifaceted: part bad news fatigue, part disbelief and part difficulty in imagining what a modern-day nuclear attack would even look like. There’s also still a large knowledge gap. I don’t recall learning anything about nuclear weapons, treaties or nonproliferation in my schooling — and, like many, I metabolized such existential risks through the movies I grew up with.
But there has been a marked shift as of late. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” (2023), which chronicles J. Robert Oppenheimer’s involvement with the Manhattan Project and the development of the first nuclear bomb, helped revive discussions about weapons and disarmament. Instead of closure and the good guys of ’90s cinema, we follow a character plagued with deep unease in a film that ends without showing the bomb exploding. There has also been a flurry of TV shows in recent years that seemingly depict civilization in a postnuclear world, from the Apple TV series “Silo” to HBO’s “Fallout” — both of which have been renewed, suggesting that these shows are resonating with viewers.
“A House of Dynamite” leans into yet more uncomfortable anxieties: Audiences never see the missile, learn who launched it or see the consequences. Yet the broader message is clear. “At the end of the Cold War, global powers reached the consensus that the world would be better off with few nuclear weapons,” the opening text reads. “That era is now over.” Both “Oppenheimer” and “A House of Dynamite” return to an era when films explored greater nuclear stakes, asking audiences to confront some hard truths. Signaling a more brutal reality in the rise of nuclear-anxious entertainment, Avatar’s James Cameron is also reportedly working on yet another film titled “Ghosts of Hiroshima.”
Viewers anticipating an explosive finale or satisfying resolution in modern-day nuclear war films may hint at just how desensitized we’ve become to real-life nuclear threats. At the time of writing, “A House of Dynamite” has earned a 6.5-star IMDb rating, with some viewers left truly unsatisfied. “Maddening, unrealistic and deeply disappointing. And don’t get me started on the ending,” writes one Google reviewer, while another adds: “It makes the USA, the most powerful military in [the] world, look like a sitting duck.”
The resurgence of the nuclear war genre is, at least, an opportunity for audiences to start questioning the systems designed to keep us safe — to start asking what’s really at stake. It’s a message that’s echoed by Elba’s character. “I listened to this podcast, and the guy said, ‘It’s like we all built a house filled with dynamite,’” he says. “Making all these bombs and all these plans, and the walls are just ready to blow. But we kept on living in it.”
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