Trump’s Odd Nuclear Threat and America’s House of Dynamite

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Yesterday, as part of the end of Trump’s trip through Asia and as he was meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, he tweeted a highly nonsensical and half-baked announcement that he was instructing the Department of Defense to restart nuclear testing:

Trump’s announcement, not surprisingly, is something of a muddled mess. In fact, there’s almost no part of his tweet that’s factually accurate. For one thing, it’s the Energy Department that runs nuclear weapon testing, not the Defense Department. (In fact, it’s an agency known as the National Nuclear Security Administration, which the Trump administration already this year chaotically devastated with DOGE cuts before it realized that that agency was in charge of the nuclear weapons stockpile, backtracked, and then tried to rehire and reinstate all but 28 of the 350 or so people it had fired.) For another, Russia actually has a larger nuclear stockpile than the US does; nor did Trump actually update our arsenal during his first time, a process that began in the Obama era and will continue into the 2040s at the earliest.

No one today really knows what Trump’s announcement really means. Does he intend to restart aboveground nuclear testing, which no one has done since the 1980s? Does he mean a full-on nuclear explosion or the underground lab-based experiments that have become the norm? Is he intending to end the US participation in the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which has kept the world’s nuclear peace since the 1990s? Or is he just talking about continuing or expanding the regular testing of nuclear delivery systems (e.g. ICBMs) — as opposed to nuclear devices (e.g. bombs) — that the US already does routinely?

The US has a long strange history of nuclear testing, which I traced in my book RAVEN ROCK — before gambling, one of the major tourist attractions for Las Vegas in the 1950s was the chance to watch atomic mushroom clouds rise over the Nevada desert to the north, where the military tested dozens of nuclear weapons. Today, that same secret government facility — known as the Nevada National Security Site and as large as the entire state of Rhode Island — is still the only place legally and security-wise where the US could carry out nuclear tests. There are presumably a lot of people wandering around there today wondering what this announcement holds for them. (The War Zone has a good explainer of the possibilities if you want to dive in.)

For the President of the United States to make such a bizarre and unclear announcement isn’t exactly great for anybody. Trump’s strange announcement stands as another reminder of how precarious the nuclear umbrella is — resting entirely, as it does, in the hands of a single individual. There’s no second voice, authority, and check-and-balance when it comes to presidential launch authority — a fact I had hoped Congress would attempt to address after the instability of the first Trump administration.  

Which brings me to this week’s other nuclear headline….

America’s House of Dynamite

I’ve spent a bunch of this week doing interviews about FEMA, nuclear weapons, and Kathryn Bigelow’s new nuclear thriller movie A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE, whose screenwriters have name-checked my book RAVEN ROCK in multiple interviews about their inspiration. RAVEN ROCK, which traces the evolution of the US government Doomsday plans and the evolution of presidential succession and continuity of government, has become something of a cult favorite in certain Washington circles. The book caused real consternation at the Justice Department and Pentagon, as officials wondered about the secrets revealed inside, and still today is a major primer for personnel at places like FEMA and certain secure facilities. Even now many people don’t realize that FEMA has a huge classified role in the nation’s continuity programs.

Today, people will sidle up to me at events and whisper that they’ve been to the secret bunker facilities named in the book; author Mary Laura Philpott wrote about how her dad casually mentioned the book — leading to the realization that her dad, unknown to her or her family, had been intimately involved in the government’s Doomsday plans during the Cold War while they were growing up.

Now, the closing scene of the movie takes place at Raven Rock, which is the name of the massive government bunker in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, that serves as the backup Pentagon.

The premise of HOUSE OF DYNAMITE is simple (don’t worry: only the most minor of spoilers follow!): A single nuclear missile of entirely unknown origin is launched out of the Pacific Ocean toward the United States and, over the course of 20 terrifying minutes, the US government has to organize a response and contemplate the unthinkable.

The movie is a quick hour and 55 minutes, and while I had some technical complaints — the White House Deputy National Security Advisor is not some young nobody nor is the president’s military aide; the Black Hawk helicopter the Defense Secretary uses to evacuate is from the wrong Army unit; etc. — most of the movie seemed to live within the realm of a standard deviation or two allowed for the Hollywood creative storytelling.

Over the course of my career I’ve had the chance to visit many of the places where these decisions would play out — from the NORAD bunker in Cheyenne Mountain and Space Force bases nearby in Colorado Springs to the Strategic Command bunker underneath Offutt Air Force Base to a missile silo in the American plains — and the movie largely accurately captures how mundane and outdated these rooms are. They’re less 24 and more Officespace.

Most importantly, it gets right — and has this week provoked a valuable public debate over — what to me are the four core truths and components of a good nuclear thriller:

1) There are only about 20 minutes to make a decision and/or evacuate. The exact time window to response to a nuclear strike is incredibly small; for a long while, it was a highly classified secret that if a hostile missile submarine launches off the east coast, you could be looking at as little as seven minutes before impact on the nation’s capital. But even if the missile is coming from Asia, it’s still getting here in just 30 minutes. During that time period, the nation’s national security establishment would be trying to do two things simultaneously — evacuate key officials as part of presidential succession and so-called Continuity of Government, as well as formulate, decide, and launch any retaliatory response. For much of our nuclear age history, the expectation was that the president couldn’t do both of things at once and that he would stay at the White House and launch the response while the Vice President or Speaker of the House was evacuated, die in the initial strike, and then whomever was the designated presidential survivor would pick up the pieces from Raven Rock, the presidential bunker at Mount Weather in Virginia, or another secure relocation site.

2) The decision to launch nuclear weapons is made at that moment in that moment — with whomever happens to be around/available, wherever they are. Much of what we think as the shiny flashy toys of the presidency, from Air Force One to Marine One to The Beast armored limousine, exist in no small part so that the president can launch nuclear weapons wherever he is in the world at any moment. The most consequential decision in human history would be made on the world’s most impromptu and weirdest Zoom call — reaching people at the office, home, golf course, official travel, school field trip, backseat of a speeding motorcade, and anywhere else they happened to be. It’s entirely possible that some key figures — say a Secretary of Defense or National Security Advisor — might join late or miss the conference entirely, depending on the day or the hour. (Remember on 9/11, President Bush was in Florida and Secretary of State Colin Powell was in South America, among others out of normal place.) Yes, the government’s video teleconferencing system is more secure/specialized than Zoom, sure, but it’s still going to be a bunch of talking heads in little boxes on a screen where people are all independently getting different pieces of information in an incredibly compressed and stressed timeline; some people will be on video, some will be on the phone only.

For many of those decision-makers, they’re going to be wrestling with these decisions with little actual preparation. Most presidents don’t spend much time on nuclear war planning — and, in fact, as I’ve written before, for important reasons, none of the regular exercises the government hold about nuclear launch scenarios involve the president playing himself — so it’s highly likely that even the president, the only person who actually makes the decision and who does so without requiring any second opinion or corroborating okay from another official, will only be looking at the nuclear retaliatory scenarios for the third or fourth time, if even that.

3) There’s no reliable way to stop an incoming ICBM. A core scene in the movie is that the US launches its ballistic missile interceptors, which fail to hit the incoming nuke. That’s an entirely possible — if not even likely — scenario in the event of a real surprise nuclear strike. We’ve spent about $50 billion on intercepting ballistic missiles — ranging from Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative to now Donald Trump’s much-vaunted “Golden Dome” — and the reality is we face roughly coin-toss odds that any interception would work. The Pentagon is bent very out of shape about this inconvenient fact and put out a memo complaining that actually the success rate of its ground-based interceptor is actually perfect if you only count the small handful of tests that successful. The Missile Defense Agency wrote that its interceptors “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade,” a number that I don’t think anybody outside of the Pentagon believes. Yes, there have been some successful tests, but the overall number of recent tests, countable on approximately one hand, is so small it should hardly inspire confidence — and considering that we’ve spent upwards of $50 billion on the project, the American taxpayer deserves more confidence. The Union of Concerned Scientists noted after a “successful” 2017 test, “It was not held under real-world conditions … [and was] only the second test of five held since 2010 to succeed.” A previous MDA director also told that the Senate that the tests are so expensive and complicated to do that they’re conducted “in a controlled, scripted environment,” which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

4) Most of all, the whole thing is insane. At the core of any nuclear movie, as someone said to me this week, is the closing conclusion of 1984’s Matthew Broderick movie WAR GAMES: The only winning move is not to play the game. The moment a missile is in the air, you’ve already lost. Any cursory examination of nuclear strategy shows that there is none.

Yet today — even before Donald Trump’s latest reckless nuclear saber-rattling — we face an era where the next decade is going to see multi-trillion-dollar upgrades of the nuclear arsenals of the United States, Russia, and China, and the high likelihood that other countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe will move toward developing their own domestic arsenals. Similarly, any cursory examination of nuclear history shows that we’ve avoided nuclear war over the last 80 years as much by luck as by skill or strategy. Nuclear weapons are a Sword of Damocles over the daily existence of the human race. And, as I wrote in my new book on the Manhattan Project this summer, it’s now up to all of us to carry forward the dream and vision of the last survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as they pass away: We must do everything in our power to ensure that they’re the last survivors of nuclear weapons.

I don’t know that HOUSE OF DYNAMITE ends up as part of the pantheon of the “great” nuclear movies — to me that tier is probably DR. STRANGELOVE, FAIL SAFE, WAR GAMES, THE DAY AFTER, and CRIMSON TIDE — but it’s great as a nuclear historian to see a movie use nuclear war as the central plot point and not merely as a plot background for some far-fetched post-apocalyptic story.

If you’re looking for some escapism this weekend, I recommend it.

And yes, given the state of American politics, watching a movie about nuclear war counts as “fun” escapism.

GMG

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