house of dynamite rings true to me
Disaster movies are ones I always try to watch. Most of those movies these days have a natural disaster as the premise for impending doom. However, a new NETFLIX movie House of Dynamite uses nuclear war as the risk facing the United States and the world. I watched it last night and found many aspects of the movie accurately portraying what might happen if a rogue nation fired one missile at the United States.
Here’s some thoughts on the movie:
All the various operations centers either being 24/7 or standing up seem very real to me. Cool, efficient operations with well-rehearsed teams of staff following procedures that they have trained for and rehearsed multiple times. This is what they do when not facing Armageddon.
The personal stories are integrated into story line to provide drama. I don’t necessarily buy that…maybe it is my military training. If you have only 19 minutes to help decide the fate of the United States, you don’t have the time to think about your personal or family life. You are very busy trying to do your job in a what was portrayed as a very chaotic situation.
The ability to get everyone “online” for a national command authorities call seem a bit “rapid” for me. You only have nineteen minutes…
The “hustling out” of the President would be very appropriate. If you look back at the approach taken when President George W. Bush was told of the twin towers attack on 9/11, it is an example of a failure of immediate action.
In the movie there was only a scant nod to the role of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) which still has significant missions when it comes to Continuity of Government (COG) and Continuity of Operations for the government as a whole.
The bunker where key staff were being hustled out of town to would certainly be a primary target for any coordinated attack. I slept a couple of nights in a similar bunker in the early 1980’s that was right out of the 1950’s when it was built. At the time we were working on national COG issues with me representing the 4th Army at the time.
Then there is this. We have let “civil defense” atrophy here in the United States since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As I shared recently in another blog post, it was around 1993 when I was at the State of Washington and it was part of my duty to shut down the Civil Defense Shelters and Supplies, and Radiological Programs that where the last vestiges of Civil Defense here in the USA. Federal funding went away and so did the staff and programmatic funding for those functions. Now there is “nothing” related to nuclear attack planning or practice happening at the state and local levels—to the best of my knowledge.
There was an excellent article in the New York Times The Staggering Price You’re Paying for America’s Nuclear Makeover (1.7 Trillion) about the national surge in funding to reinvigorate and update our nuclear attack capabilities across the board, warheads, missiles, ships, aircraft and submarines. My question, what are we investing for the civil defense of the nation as a whole? The military side of things is getting wheelbarrows of money shoved at it while the survivability of our civilian side of government and citizens is being left unattended to.
I cannot tell you what “21st Century Civil Defense” should look like, but it should not be “performative” so that it just “looks like” we are doing something to placate people.
As for the end of the movie—“If I was President” I’d let the missile hit _____ and then decide on a counterattack option. There was still time since other missiles are not in the air—and they did not know who fired the one missile entering US airspace to begin with.
