The thriller film A House of Dynamite was released on Netflix on October 24th, 2025. The film goes through a scenario where a single, unattributed nuke is launched towards Chicago (of all places) and follows several government officials trying to figure out what to do about it. It’s a great movie, and I’d recommend you watch it on its merits as a thriller alone; but since having a sizeable interest in nuclear strategy and policy is one of the consequences of my mother taking Tylenol while she was pregnant with me, I thought I would weigh in on its geopolitical/strategic elements. (And yeah, there will be spoilers).
Before we get into the details, I have to give my little spiel about nuclear policy. It is insane that nuclear policy has not been a core focus of elections and government in decades. A full-scale nuclear exchange would result in potentially billions of fatalities.* That’s crazy. There is NOTHING else we have right now that can kill that many people, unless someone has developed a very potent biological or chemical weapon under the radar. But at least in that case we might be able to do something about it, like stay inside; but we can’t do shit to hide from nukes. And somehow, we don’t talk about it, we don’t call our representatives about it, and we don’t ask our presidential candidates about it. Instead of demanding our leaders to reduce the size of the nuclear arsenal, we’re sitting back as a historic $1 trillion modernization plan of America’s nuclear forces is underway. (To be fair, a major goal of the modernization is to make the command and control systems more secure, in order to prevent a false alarm or accidental launch, which is great; all I’m trying to say is the primary focus should be on having less or, ideally, no nuclear weapons in the first place). To make a big difference, the military wouldn’t even have to get rid of the nukes - just reduce the level of nuclear readiness like China, India, and Pakistan (see http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/misra1/docs/ucs-jan16.pdf for an excellent review of this topic). But to my knowledge, there’s no real effort to do this, which makes me very sad and upset. Now, back to the main event.
I. Realism of a Single Strike
The likelihood of a single missile with a single warhead being launched - the premise of the film - is a complicated topic. Let’s understand why through a simple example concerning example countries A and B, both with substantial arsenals. Country A launches a single warhead at Country B; this attack causes, on the grand scale, little damage to Country B, but it will provoke a strong response from Country B. To deter further attacks, Country B would be expected to launch either multiple nuclear weapons back at Country A, or, to prevent a nuclear escalation, launch a large conventional attack (with non-nuclear bombs, missile strikes, and so on). In that first scenario, a nuclear response (even a limited one) might provoke an even bigger retaliation from Country A, which would provoke a bigger retaliation from Country B, and so on. Maybe diplomatic efforts could prevent this from happening, but maybe not. In the latter scenario, the same spiral could appear, only with conventional weapons, and it’s widely believed among experts that a conventional war is the most likely route to a nuclear one. Either way, it’s bad for both countries. One has to ask, given the consequences for Country A are negative, potentially to the point of its annihilation or conquest, why it would decide to launch a single strike in the first place. You might think they could get away with it like they do in the movie by making the initial strike anonymous, but I will discuss in a later section why this is difficult.
This is just a simple game theoretic analysis - an actual country may go straight for the jugular and skip the escalation steps. Heck, post 9/11, the US invaded Iraq even though Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. If the US was Country B, as it was in the movie, a single nuclear warhead would be more than enough to prompt an unprecedented counter-attack from the get-go.
Returning to the example, what Country A could do to prevent retaliation from Country B is to undertake a counterforce strike, targeting military installations like launch facilities, government buildings, military bases, and communications infrastructure. This could be accomplished with any combination of nuclear and conventional forces, and nuclear-equipped nations no doubt have plans on the books for both a pre-emptive counterforce strike (attacking first) or a counterforce counterstrike (retaliating after being attacked). In the 21st century, though, the time is long gone when such an attack could disable an enemy’s nuclear forces. The major nuclear powers of the world all have thorough monitoring systems that can not only detect nuclear launches, but also infer the origin and destination of such attacks. In other words, Country B would see Country A’s missiles just seconds after they launched, determine that Country B is the target, and launch its own missiles in kind. As a result, Country A’s missiles would land at emptied missile silos.
Country A, reasoning along these lines, would therefore not bother to send warheads at Country B’s nuclear facilities, but instead concentrate its attack on military installations (Country B would do the same to Country A). The US has somewhere north of 500 military bases around the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_installations; I found an estimate elsewhere but feel free to count each one), which would not be an issue for the thousands of warheads in the Russian arsenal. (Countries with less nuclear weapons, like China, India, and Pakistan, would have to be more selective with their targets but could probably deal significant damage nonetheless). Country A and Country B would be able to get some of their really expensive stuff off the ground (think fighters and B-2 bombers), and many ships at sea would be unaffected, but it’s not clear to me that either country would be able to fight a war in the aftermath of such an attack. What would the war be fought over? Smoldering ruins? The counterforce attacks would, as a bonus, also result in a few countervalue strikes - damage to the enemy’s ability to wage war (e.g. factories, ports/airports, roads, and most somberly, civilian populations), since many military bases are located in or around major cities. My goal here isn’t to exhaustively describe the outcome of a major exchange targeting military installations - honestly, I haven’t given a lot of thought to things like how territory would be conquered/occupied with all the fallout and the role of allies/other countries in all this.
So, before getting too deep in these weeds, let’s summarize: Country A launching a single warhead would likely lead to either a nuclear war spiral or conventional war spiral (and if Country A is losing the conventional war, they would likely use nukes). The war could end with diplomacy, but I think it would be relatively harder to negotiate a peace treaty with a country that nuked you. Country A launching a counterforce strike against Country B’s arsenal would prompt a full-scale counterforce strike against all of Country A’s military assets, so that’s also a no-go. What scenario is more likely? It doesn’t seem like there’s a clear answer to this question if we’re considering two strong nuclear powers like the US and Russia; it seems like whatever happens is just bad, which is the idea of the strong deterrence that having a large arsenal creates. Whether it’s a single strike or a larger one would depend on the situation: Putin, for instance, has threatened a small-scale strike on Ukraine. If this were to happen, the US might choose to get involved - this decision would depend on things like the administration in office, public sentiment, perceived Russian vulnerability/anticipated strength of their response, etc.
What does a single strike accomplish, then? I think the movie does a great job of illustrating that its main advantage is sowing chaos, and possibly causing an adversary to overreact out of fear, sparking a larger war. (There might also be wide-ranging effects in country morale - imagine how it must feel to be nuked, but not know who nuked you, and therefore not being able to retaliate - and an economic panic that could cause widespread social and economic damage). Again, though, there is a big risk that even if the country that initiated the nuclear attack is never discovered, it would still be destroyed either by being nuked directly out of being a suspected perpetrator, or from collapsing after environmental damage from a subsequent nuclear war causes famine. So it’s still a huge risk even if the strike remains unattributed, but let’s consider the question of attribution for the sake of completeness.
II. Attribution
If Country B doesn’t know where the missile is coming from, or who launched it, then everything downstream described in the previous section can’t happen - unless Country B is willing to attack everyone, as one general in the movie advocates. So how confident is America when it comes to detecting who launched a missile? The answer is, for all the major powers, very confident. Satellites use infrared imaging to detect launches; the plumes from the missiles are unmistakable, and the coverage is global. What sometimes can’t be inferred is whether the missile is carrying a nuclear payload or something harmless, like food for the ISS. Countries are generally pretty good with informing each other that what they’re launching isn’t a threat to anyone else, although there is one infamous incident where communication failed. Someone in the movie does suggest initially (to calm the nerves of the staff) that the missile was bound for space, and someone just “forgot to file the correct paperwork”. I do think that’s correct - in the first few minutes, it would be most likely for officials to conclude this to be a fluke, both because of the theoretically low chance of anyone launching a single nuke, and because of historical precedent.
Okay, so merely detecting that a launch occurred, and where it occurred (to within tens of kilometres - a very high resolution) is not an issue. The bigger issue is attribution. If you see a launch has occurred right in the vicinity of known missile silos, it’s a good inference that the missile was launched from one of those silos. We can dream up a hypothetical of some other nation surreptitiously inserting one its missiles near known launch sites of another country, in a very big-brain Sun Tzu-style deception play; but that possibility seems very remote. We can also think of a similar situation with submarines - let’s say a US destroyer is shadowing a Russian sub, and unbeknownst to both, a Chinese sub in the vicinity launches a nuke, making the American ship report a Russian launch. All this naval stuff is not really my wheelhouse, but I suspect this situation is also very unlikely. Where it could get tricky, as shown in the movie, are those instances where a missile is launched by a launch vehicle that is not tracked by the US or a country that shares intelligence with the US. The conversation now shifts direction entirely - we’re entering the realm of intelligence gathering, a subject I know very little about. My general gist is that the US and its allies are very, very good at figuring things out; here are some of the reasons why I think so:
- The US has comprehensive satellite coverage and very good analysts. If you want to build a new missile silo, you have to bring construction equipment and whatnot to that site, and it’s going to leave a hole in the ground that is probably temporarily visible even if it's covered later. Ditto for naval/air force bases and sites for enriching uranium, building and testing missiles, and storing nuclear weapons.
- The US, I’m assuming, has ears everywhere. Maybe this is just what happens when you grow up watching too many spy movies, but it seems very difficult to keep things a secret now (perhaps it always has been) in the age of wireless communication. Not to mention that traditional espionage (having double agents in other countries) is probably still alive and well too.
- The US has a global reach. As long as you know where a submarine is making port/surfacing/otherwise revealing itself, maybe from one of the other two strengths, my understanding is there’s often a destroyer or other submarine not too far away to keep track of its whereabouts.
With all this background established, we can now start to think about the realism of the scenario in the movie. It really all boils down to how good US intelligence is. I think it’s unlikely there would be a missile silo in the area the missile was launched in the movie that the US doesn’t know about, for the reasons given above - it just seems like a really big thing to miss. I could see NATO intelligence failing to track every SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile)-capable submarine possessed by other countries, and therefore giving a window for a country to launch a SLBM near or even in the coastal territory of another country, to cause confusion. (In the context of the movie, we could imagine an untracked Russian sub launching the missile from the vicinity of Chinese or North Korean waters). Some missiles are launched from large trucks - maybe one of them could have been disguised well enough to launch a missile near the coast, to make it unclear whether it was a sub or land-based launch. I would need to hear several intelligence experts weigh in on US intelligence capabilities and see if they reach a consensus on how likely any of these scenarios are.
III. Conclusion
To summarize, if the US were attacked with a single nuclear weapon, it would become a singular American objective to locate the perpetrators in the already unlikely event that the first strike is unattributed; and given the resources of US intelligence, I’m very skeptical that an event as complex as a nuclear launch would fly completely below the radar. In geopolitics, we always have to consider the benefit that a country thinks it will gain through a particular course of action; and there doesn’t appear to be a scenario where the attacking country benefits in the long term. Of course, when dealing with leaders like Kim Jong-Un, Trump, and Putin, all bets are off. The theoretical perspective is of no use when dealing with rash decision makers who generally seem to have questionable understandings of what’s going on. One might think that creates a vulnerability, but I’d wager these leaders will jump to using force immediately.
There is at least one group of people who don’t see their potential annihilation as a downside, however - millenarian terrorist groups. Anyone willing to be a suicide bomber is no doubt also willing to die in a nuclear war if it means a lot of other people do, too. It’s just really hard for them to get nukes, and if any country was revealed to be helping them to obtain some, that country would immediately become a target. In addition, it is often said of Kim Jong-Un that he would let millions of his people die, and I don’t doubt that either, but he wouldn’t have much of a country to run if his was ruined by war, and he seems to really enjoy running things in North Korea. I’ll also throw in this science fiction scenario to be thorough: imagine that the US develops some incredibly powerful technology, like AGI, and some other country or countries believe a world dominated by the US with the help of this technology is worse than no world at all; under these circumstances, a first strike to end everything would be plausible.
A note to conspiracy theorists: if you’re the kind of person that thinks 9/11 was set up to benefit the Bush administration and its funders, and therefore that it wouldn’t be unheard of for Trump to allow the US to be nuked to stop the Epstein files from being released or something, then I encourage you to think about how much easier hundreds of other paths to the same goal would be. If you’ll allow me to be cynical for a moment here - 9/11 claimed almost 3,000 victims in the US, and it prompted a response that claimed hundreds of thousands to millions of lives over the next 20 years. For the American public, evidently, it takes relatively few casualties to motivate an extraordinary response. A nuclear attack on a major city would claim hundreds of thousands to millions of lives in the long term, and would take an enormous amount of planning to create a believable false flag. Probably far fewer resources for far fewer casualties would be sufficient to achieve a goal like distraction. (In other words: even conspiracy theorists should treat the US being nuked as legitimate, although I know they won’t).
* Xia et al., 2022 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0) estimate that a 150 Tg injection of soot into the atmosphere following a full-scale exchange between the US and Russia could result in a famine affecting over 5 billion people. Whether all of those people will die is up for debate; Rivers et al., 2024 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912424000695) highlight adaptations that could mitigate the ultimate toll. However, a lot of their adaptations are geopolitical (e.g., maintaining global trade) and I don’t think that countries are going to be getting along very well in the aftermath of a nuclear war and the looming threat of an unprecedented famine. That said, I haven’t done a deep dive into this very complicated question of how many people might die, and what could be done to prevent it (and what barriers those mitigation efforts might have).