A House of Dynamite. Anthony Ramos as Major Daniel Gonzalez in A House of Dynamite.
Eros Hoagland/Netflix
Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping doomsday thriller A House of Dynamite explores the ripple effects across the military and high levels of government if the U.S. were attacked by a nuclear missile. Now the No. 1 film on the platform, how accurate is it, and did anything remotely close to the events in the movie happen in real life?
A House of Dynamite takes viewers through the same day from three perspectives: first, the tense White House Situation Room; then, the United States Strategic Command; and finally, the President himself. Officials from all three locations communicate via a national security conference call. They have roughly 18 minutes to decide what to do before an unattributed nuclear missile is expected to detonate in a major U.S. metropolitan area.
“The film is a portrait of people at the highest level of government being called on to make impossible decisions in the most extreme circumstances imaginable,” Bigelow, who also helmed The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, told Netflix’s Tudum. “When there’s just 18 minutes to react, a lot of these political talking points tend to fall away pretty quickly.”
Is A House of Dynamite A True Story?
A House of Dynamite. (Featured) Gabriel Basso as Jake Baerington in A House of Dynamite. Cr. Eros Hoagland/Netflix © 2025.
Eros Hoagland/Netflix
No, A House of Dynamite is not a true story. Although the film is fictional, it draws on real-world nuclear protocols and government response procedures, as well as specific real-life defense locations and military command centers, such as the missile defense system in Fort Greely, Alaska.
The thriller was written by Noah Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News, who spent decades covering politics and foreign affairs. The acclaimed journalist told TIME that he’s always been fascinated by the way institutions handle crises and respond under pressure.
“When I got my first significant job in news, somebody said to me, ‘I’ve got bad news. There is no floor of grownups that know what to do,’” Oppenheim explained. “It’s just people, and we’re all doing the best we can. And that’s true in every organization, including the White House and the Pentagon.”
The screenwriter, who conducted extensive research on the topic, told Netflix that he and the filmmakers wanted to showcase how little time the U.S. government — or any government, for that matter — would have to respond to a nuclear attack. “During that same 18 minutes, we wanted to show what was happening throughout the entire apparatus of the government,” he said.
How Accurate Is A House of Dynamite’s Depiction Of A Nuclear Crisis?
A House of Dynamite. (Featured L-R) Tracy Letts as General Anthony Brady and Gbenga Akinnagbe as Major General Steven Kyle in A House of Dynamite.
Eros Hoagland/Netflix
When making A House of Dynamite, Bigelow and Oppenheim consulted a range of experts, including policy analysts, journalists, former intelligence directors, and government officials, to authentically recreate a “real doomsday scenario,” according to TIME.
The filmmakers also worked with Dan Karbler, a former Army officer who served as STRATCOM chief of staff, who acted as the film’s technical advisor and even made a brief on-screen appearance.
Karbler told Tudum that in reality, officials conduct hundreds of nuclear response exercises each year across STRATCOM, the Pentagon, and other agencies.
“[The film] does such a good job of capturing a piece that we never really capture when we are running through these exercises — being able to see the human reaction, which we don’t practice,” he explained. “So what the movie really drives home, in addition to the authenticity about the process and all that, is just the human element and how different folks are affected, whether it’s those young soldiers at Fort Greely to the STRATCOM staff all the way up to the President of the United States.”
While A House of Dynamite depicts a nuclear strike happening without warning, several experts say that scenario isn’t realistic.
“The real dangers of nuclear war mainly have to do with escalation from some non-nuclear crisis that evolves to armed conflict,” Matthew Bunn, a nuclear policy expert at the Harvard Kennedy School, told NPR.
Bunn added that if a surprise attack were to occur, it would almost certainly involve multiple warheads designed to disable the United States’ ability to launch a counterstrike. “No one in their right mind is going to fire ONE missile at a major U.S. city out of a clear blue sky,” he clarified.
What’s definitely real is the national security video conference that serves as a key communication channel for the officials throughout the film, according to Stephen Schwartz, an independent scholar who has extensively researched the history of America’s nuclear command systems.
If a missile is detected, then “the National Military Command Center (NMCC) convenes a Threat Assessment Conference Call with multiple lower-level duty officers,” Schwartz also told NPR. “If the threat is validated, it becomes a Missile Attack Conference Call joined by more senior officials (and the president, if a senior conferee requests it).”
Then there’s the president’s options for nuclear retaliation, aka the football, which is carried by a military officer and travels with the president everywhere he goes. “The ‘Football’ looked exactly as it should and that the Presidential Decision Handbook was a reasonable-looking facsimile,” Schwartz added.
What Did The Pentagon Recently Say About A House of Dynamite?
This picture taken 26 December 2011 shows the Pentagon building in Washington, DC. The Pentagon, which is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense (DOD), is the world’s largest office building by floor area, with about 6,500,000 sq ft (600,000 m2), of which 3,700,000 sq ft (340,000 m2) are used as offices. Approximately 23,000 military and civilian employees and about 3,000 non-defense support personnel work in the Pentagon. AFP PHOTO (Photo by STAFF / AFP) (Photo by STAFF/AFP via Getty Images)
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The Pentagon, which was not consulted for A House of Dynamite, recently weighed in on the film’s depiction of a nuclear crisis, according to Bloomberg.
An internal memorandum from the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), dated Oct. 16, stated that the film’s doomsday scenario is inaccurate. The memo, obtained by Bloomberg News, noted that it was being circulated to ensure agency leadership “has situational awareness and is not ‘surprised’ by the topic, which may come up in conversations or meetings.”
While the MDA acknowledged that the film “highlights that deterrence can fail, which reinforces the need for an active homeland missile defense system,” the agency said its fictional portrayal also underestimates US capabilities, according to the memo.
“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,” the memo reads, noting that the results from real-world testing “tell a vastly different story.”
The agency declined to disclose the system’s cost, writing that “the cost is high but not nearly as high as the cost of allowing a nuclear missile to strike our nation.”
According to Bloomberg, a Government Accountability Office report from 2020 found that the Pentagon had spent about $53 billion on the ground-based missile defense system and planned to spend roughly $10 billion more through this year to continue developing and maintaining it.
The memo also pushed back on a scene featuring actor Jarden Harris, whose character claims the current missile defenses have only a 50% chance of intercepting a missile despite a $50 billion price tag. The MDA said that the statistic is based on earlier prototypes, adding that today’s interceptors “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.”
A House of Dynamite is streaming on Netflix. Watch the official trailer below.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/monicamercuri/2025/10/27/is-a-house-of-dynamite-a-true-story-how-realistic-netflixs-nuclear-film-really-is/
