“It’s negative. Negative impact. Object remains inbound.”
These three sentences—spoken by a U.S. Army officer in Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite—are said quietly and with clipped military efficiency, but they are laden with dread; they mean that millions of people are minutes away from being incinerated or buried beneath the rubble of an American city.
Americans, along with billions of other people on this planet, once had a healthy fear of nuclear war. They knew, even if they did not dwell on it, that they could wake up and make a cup of coffee, and then, before they had a chance to finish breakfast, they and the civilization they took for granted every day could be extinguished. That fear seems mostly gone now, and Americans have long needed a movie set in the 21st century to remind them of why they should still be worried about nuclear war. Finally, they have one.
In recent decades, nuclear war has all but vanished from American movie screens, replaced since the end of the Cold War by special-effects blockbusters about zombie plagues, alien invasions, and errant asteroids. (One of the last major releases about a possible War World III, the HBO movie By Dawn’s Early Light, premiered on television more than 35 years ago.) But the world’s nuclear weapons ha
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