In the fifth grade I was in Sister Helen Jude’s class at Visitation School, a few steps from LAX Airport. It was the era of nuclear drills, when we would drop under our desks. I remember imagining the blast wave, the shattering of our classroom windows and shards raining down on us.
Kids today have active shooter drills. They are more likely to imagine a classmate or a neighbor going crazy than the Russians or Chinese or North Koreans. Our capacity to live in terror is finite and our memories short. But the nuclear threat has not gone away.
In the past half century, the number of nations with nuclear weapons have grown, and bellicose threats and counter threats have increased the perception of risk. The Doomsday Clock, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is now 89 seconds to midnight. The possibility of a nuclear strike remains ever-present, as does the chance of error, of malfunction, of misjudgment.
In 1983 the U.S. bishops wrote a sober-minded assessment of the nuclear peril, a pastoral letter called “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.” It was a controversial, powerful reflection on nuclear weapons and strategy, bluntly declaring: “Nuclear war threatens the existence of our planet; this is a more menacing threat than any the world has known.” (3)
Quoting St. Pope John Paul II, it continued, “From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.”
Yet since then, a number of arms control treaties have lapsed, and the number of nukes worldwide is estimated to be above 12,000, with many of them exponentially more powerful than what we dropped on Japan. President Donald Trump recently suggested he wanted to renew nuclear testing, which inspired Russia to promise the same.
Film director Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty”) has chosen this moment to remind us of the peril we continue to live in. Her new film, “A House of Dynamite” (streaming now on Netflix), is a dramatization of a nuclear nightmare. The U.S. government is given 20 minutes to decide what to do when a nuclear missile launched by an unknown adversary is heading toward a major U.S. city. In those fleeting 20 minutes, efforts to stop it fail and the president must decide how to retaliate. A variety of advisers give him a maddening range of options up to and including a massive nuclear assault on our enemies, which would in turn trigger their massive nuclear assault on us.
The short time frame to decide on what level of Armageddon to unleash provokes the U.S. president to say, “This is insanity,” to which his general responds, “No sir, this is reality.”
Bigelow’s film illustrates a point made by U.S. Gen A.S. Collins Jr., and quoted by the bishops: “From my experience in combat there is no way that [nuclear escalation] … can be controlled because of the lack of information, the pressure of time and the deadly results that are taking place on both sides of the battle line.” (144)
At the time, the bishops’ letter was controversial in part because it was questioning the morality of our nuclear strategy: that deterrence could only come from Mutually Assured Destruction. If we were wiped out by a rain of missiles, we would wipe out our enemies as well.
The letter did not outright condemn the strategy, in part because of a great concern at that time on the part of European bishops that loss of a nuclear shield would render them defenseless from Soviet threats. But it was grudging in its tolerance, quoting John Paul again that “it is indispensable not to be satisfied with this minimum which is always susceptible to the real danger of explosion.” (173)
Forty years later and counting, the moral conundrum remains, since the use of nuclear weapons would involve the slaughter of massive numbers of noncombatants, and still “threatens the existence of our planet.”
What Bigelow’s movie illustrates, however, is that our guardrails preventing a catastrophe are imperfect, while decisions to unleash catastrophe must be made in minutes. Given the lack of trust between superpowers (and lesser powers like North Korea), everyone will assume the worst in terms of intentions and preemptively retaliate. “Your choices,” a national security official in the film tells the president, “are surrender or suicide.”
Bigelow structures her film around three different takes of the same 20 minutes. We see the early warning systems and the incredulity of their operators, the efforts to shoot down the missile, the speculation of the military experts on what might or might not be happening, and the demands on the president to decide not if, but how to retaliate.
Then there are the secondary characters — the soldiers, the staffers, the secretaries — who are bystanders slowly coming to realize all that is at stake and all that will be lost.
What the bishops in 1983 called “the most pressing moral questions of our age” (332) still remain before us in 2026. While our technology is ever more lethal, humanity is no wiser than it was in 1945 or 1983.
Perhaps Bigelow’s film can inspire a reconsideration of our willingness to live indefinitely in a house built of dynamite. And perhaps the bishops will challenge us once again to come up with a better solution than hiding under our desks.
