The war didn’t end. It was put on hold. The system never slept – men like Gonzalez kept watch, women like Walker stared at screens, bureaucrats like that man filled out paperwork. Routine is the most dangerous state of all – it fits catastrophe into an ordinary morning.
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The opening sequence puts these words on-screen: “AT THE END OF THE COLD WAR, GLOBAL POWERS AGREED THAT THE WORLD WOULD BE BETTER OFF WITH FEWER NUCLEAR WEAPONS.” Then a single sentence remains: “THAT ERA IS NOW OVER.” Director Kathryn Bigelow doesn’t tell us whose perspective we’re looking from. “Global powers” had reached a consensus – but which powers, whose world? The film moves past the question without asking it. It only tells us: That era is over.
9:33 a.m. In the Situation Room, Captain Olivia Walker glances at her watch: “Initiate national security call.” Minutes earlier, she had left her sick child at home. She had kissed a toy dinosaur. She had locked her personal life into a phone box and walked inside.
At Fort Greely, Daniel Gonzalez was arguing on the phone – the line cut out, he rolled his eyes at the sky. Inside, one soldier was eating chips, another had written “HAVE A NICE DAY :)” in a notebook. In Washington, a man was dealing with a performance review: “Let me know if the world ends.”
Before the catastrophe began, everyone was in the middle of something. When the system engaged, life was left unfinished.
The Cold War Didn’t End. It Was Suspended.
The Cold War itself ended. Its residue remained – its doctrine, its infrastructure, its reflexes. Fort Greely is still operational. MAD is still operational. DSP satellites are still operational – this time they missed the launch, but that doesn’t mean the system failed. It means the system has always worked exactly this way. The war didn’t end. It was put on hold. The system never slept – men like Gonzalez kept watch, women like Walker stared at screens, bureaucrats like that man filled out paperwork. Routine is the most dangerous state of all – it fits catastrophe into an ordinary morning.
The missile launched. The DSP satellites missed it.
Gonzalez: “It doesn’t matter who fired it – we just need to shoot it down.” The ethical question was swallowed by procedure.
MAD doctrine was built for this – if no one can win, no one will start. But the system brought humanity to the very threshold it was designed to prevent.
The power of thermonuclear weapons was never military, it was psychological.
The West had built a system against a threat that didn’t exist. Deterrence feeds not on reality but on perception.
The missile hasn’t detonated yet, but the Situation Room has already collapsed. Kathryn Bigelow constructs the film through confined spaces – command rooms, helicopters, corridors – where the machinery of state replaces ordinary human time. The camera rarely escapes these interiors; catastrophe emerges not on battlefields but inside rooms where procedure moves faster than thought. The weapon had done its work – without exploding. Kubrick asked this question as black comedy in Dr. Strangelove (1964). Bigelow asks the same question in 2025. She isn’t laughing.
What is a human being worth when the system is working perfectly? Walker runs the procedure, but there’s a toy dinosaur at home. Gonzalez wants discipline, but his phone argument isn’t over. That man learned the world was ending in the middle of a performance review.
Catastrophe is not a technical failure. Catastrophe is the moment the system works perfectly and the human being is left incomplete.
Goodbye, Daughter
In the Pentagon, Baker keeps the line open. Louisville low, St. Louis medium, Chicago medium-high, Indianapolis high, Cleveland and Columbus primary. “Did you say Chicago?”/“My daughter lives in Chicago.” The Secretary of Defense has already given the order. Now his daughter’s city is among the coordinates of that order.
A basketball court. The President is playing. A sailor in uniform grabbed the bag from the ground – the bag carrying the nuclear codes – and ran toward the president. Sirens in the car. “The United States is under attack, sir.” A second ago he was shooting hoops.
Baker calls his daughter. The line goes to voicemail. Carrie picks up – an everyday voice, a normal lunch hour. She talks about her therapist, her mother. Baker listens, knowing about Chicago, Carrie not knowing. “I love you, Carrie.” “Talk soon, Dad.” The catastrophe detonates here – not a missile but that “talk soon.” We see in his face, in his eyes staring at nothing, what he cannot say. Bigelow doesn’t show us what comes next. Only the evacuation order, Baker not leaving, then silence. That “talk soon” has already said everything. Some things don’t fit in a protocol. Some things don’t fit in a frame. Some things fit only in the heart.
One Breath
In the helicopter, Reeves holds the Nuclear Decision Handbook open. The president looks at the page – three options, each one a city. MAD doctrine was built precisely for this – but now the president holds a book from which he must choose one. The system is working flawlessly. Only the decision is missing. The president asks for a minute. The film cuts – and asks us, too, for a breath. If the decision had been shown, the film would have offered an answer. Because it isn’t shown, the question remains: the system prepared everything, the human asked for a minute, life asked for a minute – to gather strength, to breathe again, to go on.
Negative Impact
“Negative impact.” Gonzalez freezes. “We did everything right, didn’t we?” No answer. Everything was right – procedure, authentication, launch, tracking. And still the missile is going. Sometimes even the most correct decisions produce wrong outcomes. Sometimes the arrival of the inevitable cannot be stopped. Gonzalez was in the middle of a phone argument that morning, the line had cut out. That half-finished conversation still hasn’t closed. The system worked, the human was left incomplete – both that morning and now. Catastrophe is not a mistake. This is the system working exactly as designed.
Final Order
Reeves asks: Would being this prepared ensure that no one would ever start a war? The president says, “I always thought so.” But someone did. The code is read. Brady: “Your orders, Mr. President?” The film pulls into darkness one last time.
When all options are bad, the least painful is to choose none at all.
Works Cited
Kathryn Bigelow, dir. A House of Dynamite. Netflix, 2025.
Stanley Kubrick, dir. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Columbia Pictures, 1964.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
