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In Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, A House of Dynamite, the clock is ticking. The film’s fictional president of the United States has less than 20 minutes and very little information to decide whether or not to retaliate against a nuclear missile, launched at the United States, from an unknown source. The story is, of course, fiction, but as with Bigelow’s other war movies, it feels disturbingly plausible. During the Cold War, the likely scenario was a war with the Soviet Union. Now there are nine nuclear powers, which makes the possibility of error, rogue actors, or a total information vacuum more likely. And the arms race is only heating up.

Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim make some deliberate choices in the movie, which is out in select theaters and arriving on Netflix this Friday. The president is a rational—even affable—character. The military personnel follow all the correct protocol. The general in charge is reliable and unruffled. “We did everything right, right?” one of the officers asks his colleagues. The answer the movie provides is yes, but that doesn’t change the underlying insanity of the situation: The house of dynamite we’ve built could explode in a matter of minutes and wipe out cities’ worth of people.

In this episode we talk to Oppenheim about why he and Bigelow structured the movie the way they did and why they focused on nuclear war now. And we talk to Tom Nichols, a national-security writer at the Atlantic, about the realities of nuclear proliferation at this moment, and how a nuclear scenario might unfold with a president driven by very different motivations from the film’s fictional creation.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: The new movie A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, begins with some banal chatting between two military personnel at a base office. Like it could be an SNL skit about your corny, annoying colleague. And then all of a sudden the movie takes a sharp turn.

The office is Fort Greely, a U.S. missile-defense site in Alaska. And the military personnel there notice that this ICBM they’ve been tracking on their screens? Its arc is flattening. In fact, it’s headed straight towards the U.S., and they have no idea who launched it.

The missile has about 20 minutes until it hits a major American city. And they have just one chance to shoot it down.

Female military officer (from A House of Dynamite): Three … two … one … (Phone rings.) Male military officer one: Confirm impact. Confirm impact! Male military officer two: Standby. Standby confirm.

Rosin: The movie maintains this level of intensity the whole way through. It’s definitely funny at moments, cleverly constructed, but it’s so realistic, so obviously relevant to the world we live in, that it’s very hard to relax while watching it.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. A House of Dynamite forces us to live inside a reality that’s mostly too big and too awful to contemplate.

But the thing is, the threat of nuclear war hasn’t gone away. In the decades since the Cold War, it’s just evolved. Instead of a Soviet Union, there are now nine nuclear powers, which makes the situation more volatile, less predictable.

The movie just reminds us of this reality, that we are all still living in a house of dynamite that could explode at any moment and easily get out of our control.

President of the United States: This is insanity, okay? General Anthony Brady: No, sir, this is reality. Male voice: Six minutes to impact.

Noah Oppenheim wrote A House of Dynamite, and staff writer Tom Nichols, who covers national security, consulted on the film. I’m talking to them about the making of the movie and how close it is to reality.

Noah, welcome to the show.

Noah Oppenheim: Thank you.

Rosin: Tom, welcome.

Tom Nichols: Thank you, Hanna.

Rosin: So, Noah, there is a clock running on this movie the whole time. Why did you choose that as a form of narrative propulsion?

Oppenheim: For the very simple reason that it was among the most terrifying aspects of the nuclear problem, which is to say, if someone were to ever lob one of these missiles our way, it would land very, very quickly. So, as we say in the movie, if somebody launches from the Pacific theater, you’re talking about a flight time of under 20 minutes. If a submarine—a Russian submarine, for instance—off our Atlantic coast were to launch, the estimate is 10 to 12 minutes to impact on the East Coast.

So you’re talking about something that would happen with extraordinary haste, and therefore, the people who would be responsible for responding and figuring out how to defend against it, whether or not to retaliate, they would have an incredibly short window of time to make any kind of decision or to even make sense of what