The reality of a nuclear threat is far more complex than game theorists or nuclear strategists would have us believe

Most people who have studied nuclear weapons in depth eventually crash into this wall of absurdity: Humanity has not only built the means to destroy itself but has even set up international constellations that could force world leaders who are acting rationally to initiate that destruction. Never mind the leaders acting irrationally.

The pressure of these situations would overwhelm any human being having to make such decisions. Ronald Reagan was briefed early in his presidency that in case of an incoming attack he would have six minutes to decide whether, what and whom to nuke. “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon!” he wrote in his memoirs. “How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”

In A House of Dynamite, director Kathryn Bigelow sets the time window at 19 minutes. That is the span from the appearance of a lone nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile in the Pacific to its detonation at the target, which is soon revealed to be Chicago. (Apologies for this and other spoilers.)

Many psychological lifetimes pass in these 19 minutes for each of the characters, which Bigelow reveals by telling the same story three times, from different perspectives—those of the soldiers on missile-defence duty in Alaska, of the people in the White House Situation Room, at Stratcom in Nebraska or FEMA in Washington, and of the defense secretary and the president.

We learn a lot during these hard-to-watch journeys. For instance, that ground-based interceptors (GBIs) based in Alaska have only a 61% chance of taking out an incoming missile.

Unsurprisingly, the Pentagon is annoyed that the movie used that number, as Donald Trump—[who has ordered a restart of nuclear tests]—will be while he tries to spread enthusiasm about a new missile-defence shield called Golden Dome.

Whatever the correct percentage is, Bigelow is making a bigger point—that safety is an illusion, and a form of escapism. (In the movie, one GBI fails, the other misses its target.)

Briefly, I also pondered the plausibility of one lone missile arcing towards the US, which can’t definitively be traced to the North Koreans, Russians, Chinese or anybody else. Wouldn’t a real-life attack come in the form of hundreds of missiles?

Perhaps, but so what? Bigelow’s point, again, is bigger: It only takes one launch to set off a nuclear chain reaction that is hard to stop and will probably incinerate the entire planet seconds after the movie’s timeline ends.

Bigelow doesn’t show the world going up in flames. She doesn’t need to, and such descriptions are probably better suited for text anyway, as in Annie Jacobsen’s disturbingly good Nuclear War, published last year.

As before in her career—for example in The Hurt Locker, which is about Americans defusing bombs during the Iraq war—Bigelow is interested in the psychology of individuals, and in human limits.

Hers is a world of well-intentioned, rational and professional decision-makers (another premise that may seem implausible) who nonetheless live in the world as it is, not as nuclear planners and game-theory strategists imagine it to be. That is the world of Murphy’s Law.

The national security advisor, for example, is having a colonoscopy as the missile launches, so his young but impressive deputy must step in. But he’s stuck in traffic, then hotfoots it to the White House while taking the conference call on his iPhone, then gets stuck in the security line, and so on. Reality is a world of dropped calls, traffic jams and other banal nuisances, a world that never appears in white papers or nuclear force postures.

This existential context shines a horrifying light on not only nuclear policy but the human condition, starting with the inevitability of uncertainty. Not only does the US not know who launched the attack and why. It also doesn’t know whether more nukes are to come, aiming at more American cities.

Stratcom rationally advises the president to launch devastating counterstrikes at all potential adversaries, to decimate their nuclear arsenals and make an opportunistic second wave survivable (a relative term at this point).

All eight other nuclear powers, meanwhile, face the same uncertainty, knowing that the Americans are likely to strike back at, well, somebody. So everyone mobilizes and prepares to launch, according to the perverse logic of ‘use it or lose it.’ A Russian nuclear submarine near the American coast goes into stealth mode, silos open, bombers take to the air.

In a phone call, the American deputy national-security advisor and a Russian counterpart try to come to an understanding that would let the American president forgo launching, and triggering Armageddon.

The Russians want to know how they can be sure that the US, in a limited response, wouldn’t target them. They want assurances that no missiles aimed at others will fly over their territory. But American missiles targeted at North Korea, China or even Pakistan can take no other path. The uncertainty is in the geography, the physics, the plans, everywhere.

Extreme uncertainty, combined with an absence of trust and superhuman pressure: This is what real-life nuclear escalation would look like.

This reality mocks concepts such as deterrence, or finely tuned escalation ladders from ‘tactical’ to ‘strategic’ nukes, or much of the available doctrine the nuclear powers have today.

Nonetheless, the US, Russia and others are now ‘modernizing’ their arsenals; China is adding about 100 warheads a year to reach parity with the US and Russia; North Korea is building as many nukes as it can; other countries are thinking about joining the nuclear club; and the last remaining arms-control treaty between the US and Russia expires in fewer than 100 days.

As someone who writes regularly about the threat of nuclear weapons, I loved—if that is the word—the film. A House of Dynamite ends in ambiguity, and ambiguity describes our world at this point in the nuclear age, with a new arms race underway.

It forces all of us to face the insanity of our reality—whether we’re sitting in the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai or anywhere else.

Let this film be mandatory viewing in the halls of power, a global Defcon 2. Let it be a call for leaders to begin new arms-limitation talks now, while humanity still has more than 19 minutes to decide whether to commit suicide. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics.