Do you know what to do in the event of a nuclear attack – one aimed at Chicago?
Director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, “A House of Dynamite,” is appearing today on Netflix and at select Chicago theaters, including the Davis Theater and Landmark Century Centre Cinema. In the movie, Chicago faces getting blown off the map by an enemy missile. Idris Elba stars as the U.S. president who is racing against the clock to intercept it.
Bigelow’s movie will spark much-needed conversations around nuclear threats on U.S. soil, said Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in Chicago.
“As somebody who used to be in the literal rooms that they represented on film, [“A House of Dynamite”] is extremely accurate,” said Bell, who previously worked at the U.S. Department of State, where she managed nuclear affairs under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The apocalyptic thriller, which also stars Rebecca Ferguson as White House senior official Captain Olivia Walker, starts at Fort Greely in Alaska, the real-life site of the U.S. Army’s launch site for non-ballistic missiles. Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and his team detect something amiss: An intercontinental ballistic missile, known simply as an ICBM, is headed right for the continental U.S.
Chicago actor and playwright Tracy Letts portrays General Anthony Brady in the film. Letts, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his play “August: Osage County,” is a member of Steppenwolf Theatre’s ensemble.
Most people don’t think about nuclear threats regularly, Bell said. But more of us should, she said, as they are a very real concern as tensions between the U.S. and China and North Korea continue to rise.
Plus, the New START Treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between Russia and the U.S., is set to expire in early 2026. Bell worked on the ratification of that treaty in 2010.
“If there is nothing to replace it, it will be the first time in about half a century that the U.S. and Russia don’t have some legally binding arrangement trying to create stability between their two nuclear arsenals,” Bell said.
Both countries control about 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, she said. “So people should be asking, ‘What is President [Donald] Trump doing?’ and ‘What is Congress doing to pressure President Trump to show a plan of how we’re going to continue to manage that problem?’”
Bell said “experts could always quibble with details here and there,” but given that it’s a movie, Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheimer “really did a service to the broader public.”
The Bulletin has been writing about man-made threats such as nuclear warfare for 80 years. The organization is also behind the Doomsday Clock, which measures the time humanity has left to reduce threats from nuclear weapons, climate change and the potential misuse of biological science and emerging tech, including AI.
The clock is currently at 89 seconds to midnight. It’s down 1 second from 2024 as “humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe,” according to the Bulletin. For Bell, reaching “midnight” means “there’s nothing left for us to do.”
As for the likelihood of a present-day attack, Bell said, “even though the threat has ebbed and flowed over the years, we’re really in the worst condition that we’ve been in some time, if not ever.”
Just like in “A House of Dynamite,” life can change drastically in an afternoon if the U.S. is targeted by a nuclear attack, Bell said. “We’ve experienced this in the past,” she continued. “We’ve just been lucky enough to not experience it with nuclear weapons.”
But Bigelow’s new feature has a significantly larger reach than the Bulletin.
To help with the film’s rollout, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists hosted a screening of “A House of Dynamite” at AMC River East last week for its subscribers and supporters.
Bell said starting the conversation about nuclear weapons with peers is the first step to preparedness.
“Your elected leaders, whether local or in Congress, rarely hear from their constituents about what [they] are doing about containing and reducing the nuclear threat,” she said. “It is a scenario that can happen … While there’s so many other problems everywhere in the world to deal with, if we get the nuclear problem wrong, nothing else matters.”
For those looking to discuss the film with the professionals, the Bulletin is hosting an online forum on Nov. 6 featuring Bell alongside other nuclear experts.