Pentagon criticizes ‘A House of Dynamite’ for ‘underestimating US power’

The film of the week in Washington is titled A House of Dynamite, a drama that plays with the idea of an imminent nuclear attack against the United States.

It enjoyed a limited release and a brief run in theaters before arriving on Netflix last Friday. And it was on the occasion of its streaming release that the city where the main bulk of the film directed by Kathryn Bigelow takes place — one more concerned with the news cycle than with the achievements of cinematic art — began to comment on it with apprehension.

The film presents a scenario that leaves viewers with a chill after contemplating what could happen in the country with the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons if one of its many enemies were to slip up, or have a bad day with its trigger finger.

This chill is explained by a plot that seems credible down to the last detail to viewers familiar with Washington protocols. Not so for the Pentagon, which is upset about the part that focuses on the U.S. land-based missile defense program in Alaska and California, with a budget that the film estimates at around $50 billion.

An internal Missile Defense Agency (MDA) document, obtained by Bloomberg and dated October 16, argues that the catastrophic scenario depicted in A House of Dynamite is “inaccurate.” The memo — classified as “for internal MDA use only” and “not for public release” — was circulated, it explains, to ensure agency leaders “are aware of the situation and are not surprised by the topic, which may come up in discussions or meetings.”

What worries the document’s authors is the film’s portrayal of the missile interception program, which ultimately proves ineffective in its mission to stop an existential threat headed straight for Chicago. The Pentagon complains that the fictional depiction “underestimates the power of the United States.” “The fictional interceptors in the movie miss their target and we understand this is intended to be a compelling part of the drama intended for the entertainment of the audience,” but results from real-world testing “tell a vastly different story.”

The Trump administration, and especially its Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, have declared war on anyone who criticizes or questions American supremacy. A day before Bloomberg obtained the memo, reporters from major U.S. media outlets walked out of the Pentagon after refusing to sign a list of demands with new restrictions that, under the guise of national security, would limit the press’s ability to report on classified Defense Department matters.

The document, in which MDA officials play the role of film critic, pauses, according to Bloomberg, to offer arguments for discussing the price of the defense system, maintained by Boeing and the U.S. Northern Command, whose cost it defines as “high, but not as high as allowing a nuclear missile to strike our nation.” An official 2020 report set that price at around $53 billion, not including an additional $10 billion annually for maintenance.

The “Golden Dome”

In May, Trump unveiled a plan to bolster U.S. defenses that, if implemented, would increase the budget by tens of billions of dollars. This is the Republican’s Golden Dome project, which envisions building a massive missile defense shield comprised of a network of satellites and interceptors. This shield would protect the nearly 3.8 million square miles of U.S. territory from all types of enemy missiles, including hypersonic missiles, launched from any distance. Beyond a grandiose presentation in the Oval Office, few details have emerged about how the U.S. president intends to make it a reality.

The Pentagon has also been bothered by a line in the film where the Secretary of Defense, played by Jared Harris, is surprised to discover that the missile defense system has a success rate of around 60%. “So, basically, it’s like flipping a coin,” Harris’ character says. According to the MDA document, this figure is inaccurate because in real life the system has “displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.” In a conversation published by The New York Times about the plausibility of the plot of A House of Dynamite, W. J. Hennigan, the newspaper’s defense expert, lowers that probability to 55%.

Noah Oppenheim, the film’s screenwriter and a former president of NBC News, told MSNBC on Sunday that he “respectfully” disagrees with the Pentagon’s assessment. “I’m not a missile defense expert. However, I did talk to many missile defense experts who were all on the record,” he said. “I’m so glad the Pentagon watched, or is watching and is paying attention to it, because this is exactly the conversation we want to have.”

Oppenheim denied that they had sought the Trump administration’s approval in preparing the film. During the promotion for A House of Dynamite, Bigelow — the author of political cinema masterpieces such as The Hurt Locker, which made her the first female director in history to win an Oscar in 2010, and Zero Dark Thirty, about the U.S. assassination of Osama Bin Laden — also denied that her team sought the collaboration of the same officials who now, while Washington is abuzz with talk of her film, claim that it “does not reflect the views or priorities of the [Trump] administration,” and write reports to discredit it.

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