18 Minutes From Nuclear Annihilation

Summary

Radio Atlantic: "18 Minutes From Nuclear Annihilation"

Podcast: Radio Atlantic
Episode Date: October 23, 2025
Host: Hanna Rosen
Guests: Noah Oppenheim (writer of A House of Dynamite), Tom Nichols (The Atlantic staff writer, national security expert)
Main Theme:
An urgent conversation inspired by Kathryn Bigelow's film A House of Dynamite, which dramatizes 18 minutes of nuclear crisis and probes how close this scenario may be to present-day reality. Through expert insights and research, the hosts discuss the evolution of nuclear threat, the fragility of deterrence, the human dimensions of decision-making in nuclear crises, and why this existential issue demands renewed public debate.

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1. Episode Overview

The episode uses A House of Dynamite, a new film depicting a breakneck nuclear crisis, as a springboard to revisit the reality of nuclear danger in the post-Cold War world. With guest experts who advised on the film, the show explores the systems, psychology, and politics surrounding nuclear weapons today—exploring both the systems' calculated logic and their terrifying collapse points.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Terror of the "Real-Time" Nuclear Clock

[03:03] Noah Oppenheim:

• The film's real-time, 18-minute narrative reflects the true speed of modern nuclear threats.
• "If someone were to ever lob one of these missiles our way, it would land very, very quickly... For instance, 10 to 12 minutes to impact on the East Coast from a Russian submarine."
• Decision-makers have mere minutes to comprehend and act—no time for deliberation or nuanced judgment.

Human Fallibility vs. Procedure

[05:26] Noah Oppenheim:

• Procedures and rehearsals exist, but ultimately "you're asking human beings to confront a reality that I don't believe any person is capable of dealing with, let alone with a clock ticking in the background."
• Even repeated drills (up to 400 times a year by military command) can't override human unpredictability in real crisis.

Presidential Sole Authority: The Weak Link

[07:04] Tom Nichols & [09:28] Noah Oppenheim:

• Every president, upon nuclear briefing, has reacted with appalled disbelief at the destructive power they control.
• Former presidents (JFK, Nixon, Reagan) expressed horror or avoided briefings altogether.
• The president rarely, if ever, rehearses real-time response after initial briefing—despite being the only person able to authorize a launch.
• The nuclear decision system relies almost entirely on one individual's judgment under unimaginable duress.

Avoiding "Easy Villains": The Problem Is Systemic

[12:36 & 13:18] Noah Oppenheim:

• The film intentionally portrays rational, reasonable leaders—no "bloodthirsty lunatics" or partisan scapegoats—because the problem is the system itself: "Even with the best person in the job, we still have a problem."

The System's Design: Speed, Not Safety

[14:56] Tom Nichols & [17:43] Noah Oppenheim:

• "The system is designed to work this way...to enable the President to go to war, to make things happen fast. It's not a bug, it's a feature."
• Built for the Cold War challenge of ensuring quick US retaliation, thereby deterring Soviet attack (the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction").
• Today, the system's momentum doesn't fit the new complexities of multi-power proliferation and sub-state actors.

Fragility of Deterrence and Impossibility of Defense

[18:31] Tom Nichols:

• A centralized "one man decides" system was about deterrence, signaling unambiguous danger of retaliation.
• Technically, missile defense (like the Iron Dome) cannot reliably protect against ICBMs; test conditions overstate effectiveness ([24:45] Noah Oppenheim, [25:54] Tom Nichols).

The Modern Proliferation Landscape

[27:50] Tom Nichols:

• US and Russia have reduced arsenals, but China, Pakistan, and India are expanding theirs.
• Technology for nuclear weapons is far less "exotic" now than in the past; proliferation is lopsided but increasingly accessible.

The Danger of Complacency

[29:24] Noah Oppenheim & [30:59] Tom Nichols:

• Nuclear threat has faded from public worry, but ignoring it is dangerous.
• "When you elect a president...you are still picking someone to hold a little card about the size of a playing card in his pocket that gives him the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons."
• Previous generations weighed this responsibility more keenly; we are less concerned today.

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

"If somebody launches from the Pacific theater, you're talking about a flight time of under 20 minutes... So we wanted to convey to the audience in a really visceral way by telling the story in real time just how short, for instance, 18 minutes is."
— Noah Oppenheim [03:03]

"Every president until now has had a nuclear briefing... and every one of them has walked out saying, 'My God, what? This is crazy.' JFK walked out and just thought this was absolutely appalling. Richard Nixon... sent Kissinger out in 1969 with a mandate to revamp the entire nuclear plan."
— Tom Nichols [07:04]

"They [the president] don't rehearse it at all thereafter. And so you have a situation in which the decision rests on one person's shoulders... That person has probably spent the least amount of time of anyone in the system thinking about this, practicing for it, and they're being asked to make the call with a clock ticking down minutes..."
— Noah Oppenheim [09:28]

"If you introduce a bloodthirsty lunatic or somebody who's clearly an idiot, then I think the audience is able to walk out and say, well, oh, that's the problem... But in fact, the problem... is the entire apparatus... It's even with the best person in the job, we still have a problem."
— Noah Oppenheim [13:18]

"It's not a bug, it's a feature. ... What happens if [leaders] are not reasonable people and they decide not just to be dragged along that road, but to jump in their car and floor the accelerator? ... It's not just this administration, it's an entire generation. ... People talk about things and think things are options that are not really options."
— Tom Nichols [14:56]

"The notion that you're going to put this bubble over the country, I don't think even back in the 80s anybody really believed that was possible. ... Very few decision makers are really, in the moment of crisis, going to rely on it..."
— Tom Nichols [25:54]

"You are still picking someone to hold a little card about the size of a playing card in his pocket all day that gives him the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. ... We can do this. We can back things up. ... But first the public has to take seriously that this is a real danger, it can really happen, and that real human beings have this responsibility."
— Tom Nichols [30:59]

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4. Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:23 – Introduction to A House of Dynamite & its chilling premise
• 03:03 – The narrative choice of the 18-minute clock; real-world flight times for ICBMs
• 05:26 – Human fallibility vs. institutional procedures
• 07:04 – Presidential nuclear briefings and the horror of sole authority
• 09:28 – Lack of presidential practice or rehearsal; the loneliness of the ultimate decision
• 12:36 – Why the film avoids assigning blame to bad actors; systemic critique
• 14:56 – System momentum: built for speed, not deliberation; dangers of impulsive leadership
• 18:31 – Origins of the “one-man” decision process; mutual deterrence logic explained
• 21:50 – Sudden, attribution-ambiguous launch scenarios; plausibility of “out-of-the-blue” events
• 24:45 – Limits and illusions of missile defense; “shooting a bullet with a bullet”
• 27:50 – Current state of proliferation: reductions, new arms races, and democratization of nuclear tech
• 29:24 – Why these dangers demand renewed public attention and debate
• 30:59 – What the public and leaders can actually do to reduce the nuclear threat

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5. Summary Tone & Takeaways

This episode is urgent, clear, and at times darkly humorous, mirroring the mix of realism and black comedy in A House of Dynamite. Both guests speak from experience and deep research, and the host creates a space for frank, unvarnished assessments. The consensus: the nuclear threat remains existential and uncomfortably reliant on mere minutes and deeply fallible humans. The systems invented to prevent disaster may themselves ensure its momentum. The speakers call for reviving serious, public discussion—and a reckoning with how much we trust individuals with the fate of nations.

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For listeners who missed the episode, this detailed summary captures its major arguments, urgent moments, and calls to action—offering clarity on just how little stands between us and nuclear catastrophe, and how imperative it is not to look away.

Transcript

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[Hanna Rosen]

The new movie, A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, begins with some banal chatting between two military personnel at a base office. Like it could be an SNL skit about your corny, annoying colleague. And then, all of a sudden, the movie takes a sharp turn. The office is Fort Greely, a US Missile defense site in Alaska. And the military personnel there notice that this ICBM they've been tracking on their screens, its arc is flattening. In fact, it's headed straight towards the US and they have no idea who launched it. The missile has about 20 minutes until it hits a major American city. And they have just one chance to shoot it down.

[Noah Oppenheim]

3, 2, 1.

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

Confirm impact. Confirm impact.

[Noah Oppenheim]

Standby. Standby Confirmed.

[Hanna Rosen]

The movie maintains this level of intensity the whole way through. It's definitely funny at moments, cleverly constructed, but it's so realistic, so obviously relevant to the world we live in, that it's very hard to relax while watching it. I'm Hanna Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. A House of Dynamite forces us to live inside a reality that's mostly too big and too awful to contemplate. But the thing is, the threat of nuclear war hasn't gone away in the decades since the Cold War. It's just evolved. Instead of a Soviet Union, there are now nine nuclear powers, which makes the situation more volatile, less predictable. The movie just reminds us of this reality, that we are all still living in a house of dynamite that could explode at any moment and easily get out of our control.

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

This is insanity. Okay. No, sir. This is reality. Six minutes to impact.

[Hanna Rosen]

Noah Oppenheim wrote A House of Dynamite, and staff writer Tom Nichols, who covers national security, consulted on the film. I'm talking to them about the making of the movie, the. And how close it is to reality. Noah, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tom, Welcome.

[Tom Nichols]

Thank you, Hannah.

[Hanna Rosen]

So, Noah, there is a clock running on this movie the whole time. Why did you choose that as a form of narrative propulsion?

[Noah Oppenheim]

For the very simple reason that it was among the most terrifying aspects of the nuclear problem. Which is to say, if someone were to ever lob one of these missiles our way, it would land very, very quickly. So, as we say in the movie, if somebody launches from the Pacific theater, you're talking about a flight time of under 20 minutes. If a submarine, a Russian submarine, for instance, off our Atlantic coast, were to launch, the estimate is 10 to 12 minutes to impact on the East Coast. So you're talking about something that would happen with extraordinary haste. And therefore the people who would be responsible for responding and figuring out how to defend against it, whether or not to retaliate, they would have an incredibly short window of time to make any kind of decision or to even make sense of what was happening. And so we wanted to convey to the audience in a really visceral way by telling the story in real time just how short, for instance, 18 minutes is.

[Hanna Rosen]

No, the whole time you've been talking, I can feel myself sweating. Like, all I want to do is say, tom, that isn't true, right? We don't just have 18 minutes. It's not that short a time.

[Tom Nichols]

I have bad news for you, Hannah. And one of the things that I found striking about A House of Dynamite in these other movies and in the Cold War environment where I grew up, you assume that you're going to have some long lead time up to the moment of nuclear peril. If you go back and watch the old BBC movie threads, the movie actually begins about three months before the war breaks out. And they walk you through kind of the superpowers getting themselves into this jam. But what's important about this movie and about these scenarios is that it doesn't matter how you got there. It's always going to come down to those 18 or 20 minutes.

[Hanna Rosen]

I mean, Noah, I guess this is another thing the movie's about is this tension between man and the machine, which is also true in Catherine Bigelow's other movie. Movies, like, you have a system, you have a rule, you have a clock ticking. But then you have human beings. And that's throughout the movie. Like the deputy national security advisor fumbling with his phone while going through security. There are all these moments that are supposed to remind us, I think, you tell me it's actually humans making this impossible decision.

[Noah Oppenheim]

No, I think that that's spot on. I mean, I think, you know, it's a very human impulse to try to impose order on chaos. We build processes and procedures and we put together big, thick binders of decision making protocols and decision trees. If A, then B, and you call this guy, if that person's not there, then you call this person. And we create this illusion that we have it all under control because these institutions exist, these processes exist. And not only that, but we rehearse them. The folks at StratCom told us they rehearsed this 400 times a year, more than twice a day on average. But at the end of the day, if it were to ever happen in real life, all of that rehearsal, all of those handbooks and processes and policies, they can never account for the human factor. The fact that on any given day, somebody might wake up and they could be having a terrible fight with their wife and horribly distracted. They could have a kid with a spiking fever who needs to see a doctor. And you're never going to be able to escape this sort of human infallibility. And the fact that you're asking human beings to confront a reality that I don't believe any person is capable of dealing with, let alone with a clock ticking in the background.

[Hanna Rosen]

You know, it's like we know this and yet we don't know this. Or maybe we just don't look at it. It's like I kind of know. Of course they practice it all the time, but. But what does that do for us in the end? Tom, how have presidents in the past absorbed the reality of what Noah's saying and what you guys have researched?

[Tom Nichols]

Well, here's a bright spot. The way they've absorbed it is not. Well, thanks, Tom. Well, no, but I mean, they've reacted the way. And this is across party and personality and generations. Every president with the. Except I don't know how Donald Trump reacted to his. But every president until now has had a nuclear briefing. They're shown all the targets and what they would have to do, and every one of them has walked out saying, my God, what? This is crazy. Kennedy walked out of his. And he turns to an aide and he says his one comment was, and we call ourselves the human race. JFK walked out and just thought this was absolutely appalling. Richard Nixon, who nobody is gonna accuse of being some sort of left wing panty waist about foreign, was so appalled at the, at the number of casualties that would be involved that he sent kissinger out in 1969 with a mandate to revamp the entire nuclear plan. Because he just, he said, this is just, you can't have this. I mean, we're talking about millions and millions of civilian casualties. Reagan, who people associate with, you know, this very muscular kind of nuclear posture, actually put off getting his nuclear briefing for almost two years because he just didn't, he didn't think it was relevant. He didn't want to do it. I'll just get off this soapbox and say that the plan that was shown to Kennedy, our plan, was to destroy the Soviet Union and China Just in case we were going to hit China and Eastern Europe, just like it's like that line in Aliens, right? We're going to nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. And we were going to hit them all. And David Shoup, the Common of the Marine Corps, stood up and said, this is not the American way. This is not a good plan. This is not who we are as Americans. And that was 65 years ago.

[Hanna Rosen]

Wow. So everyone in that moment, when they're faced with the reality of it, becomes a kind of pacifist. Noah, it's clear that a lot of research went into this movie. Was there ever a moment when you were talking to generals, people at StratCom, whoever you talked to, and you thought, what? This is what it is. Did you have that moment?

[Noah Oppenheim]

Absolutely. I mean, we had that moment, I think, several times over, beyond the short timeframe of the decision. I think the other piece of it that is striking is this notion of sole authority. The idea that in our system here in the United States, the President of the United States has the sole authority to determine whether these weapons are used or not. And not only that, but these initial briefings, notwithstanding that we've been talking about, they don't practice this. The President doesn't practice it very much thereafter. So while, yes, the professionals at StratCom do these rehearsals 400 times a year, the President of the United States, the person who actually ultimately has the authority once that initial briefing is over, especially when they have so often walked out, so appalled in the ways that Tom has described, they don't rehearse it at all thereafter. And so you have a situation in which the decision rests on one person's shoulders. That person has probably spent the least amount of time of anyone in the system thinking about this, practicing for it, and they're being asked to make the call with a clock ticking down minutes while they're simultaneously most likely running for their lives, being evacuated to some safe place. And so the idea that any person could function rationally in that scenario is just, you know, it's mind boggling.

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

Reed, are you still there?

[Noah Oppenheim]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm here.

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

What do you make of all this?

[Tom Nichols]

I really don't know.

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

You don't know you're running the fucking Pentagon. I had one briefing when I was sworn in.

[Hanna Rosen]

One.

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

And they told me that's the protocol.

[Noah Oppenheim]

They told me the same thing.

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

Shit, I got a whole fucking briefing on when a Supreme Court justice dies. Replacements, Replacement for what happens if the replacement drops out?

[Hanna Rosen]

Shit.

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

What to do if the original guy crawls out of his grave and wants his job back, we focused on more.

[Noah Oppenheim]

Likely scenarios, things we might actually have to deal with.

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

Yeah, we're dealing with this. Best I can remember, we follow the steps.

[Noah Oppenheim]

We were following procedure. Having spoken to folks who've worked at the highest level inside the White House for a couple different presidents, the sense that they had of their bosses was that once that initial briefing was over, these are not people who were laying up awake at night contemplating, hey, if I ever find myself in a situation where the Nuclear Decision Handbook is placed in my lap, here's how I would handle it. I think it is one of those crises that we have a tendency to just push out of our mind because it's so difficult to comprehend and it's so horrifying.

[Hanna Rosen]

In the movie, you can tell that the president is the one improvising compared to the people around him. You clearly made choices. You don't mention a political party. You make the president and everyone else a rational actor. There's a moment in the movie people say things like, we were prepared for this. We did everything right. Why those choices?

[Noah Oppenheim]

Very simple. Because we wanted in many ways to present the best case scenario. Right? The best case scenario is that that all the decision makers are rational actors. As you just said, they're all well intentioned, they're thoughtful. There's no bloodlust at work here. These are reasonable human beings who are well trained and trying their best to do the right thing. And even in that scenario, even when all those boxes are checked and you have the best of us sitting in those chairs, you still see how it might unfold in the movie and you still see how unlikely a positive outcome is.

[Hanna Rosen]

Why though? Like, why did you decide to go that route?

[Noah Oppenheim]

Because if once you introduce a bloodthirsty lunatic or somebody who's clearly an idiot, then I think the audience is able to walk out and say, well, oh, that's the problem. The problem is just we just have to elect the right person, or we just have to make sure our generals are more moderate in their disposition. But in fact, the problem is not that the problem, at least in our minds, is the entire apparatus. It's that we've built this world in which we live under existential threat from weapons of our own creation. And we have all of these systems. They're, I think, as well designed as they can be given the circumstances to a great extent. But whenever you have an apparatus like, there's always going to be, I think, a bias towards action. You know, once that first domino falls, I think the amount of restraint necessary to say, let's all step back and do nothing, I think that requires a lot of strength, character, courage that might not be possible to summon in a moment of crisis and panic, with a clock ticking, et cetera. And I think we just wanted the spotlight and the focus to be on those factors, the system, rather than giving the audience an easy villain to blame, like, oh, the problem was that president who was drunk when this happened. And that's why we have a problem. No, it's not that. It's even with the best person in the job, we still have a problem.

[Hanna Rosen]

Now, Tom, that's not our current reality. Exactly. The editor in chief of the Atlantic has written about our current president as being reactive, easily insulted, and having a lot of qualities that could cause problems in this specific scenario. How do you think about that?

[Tom Nichols]

Uneasily. You know, there's a really important point in all this, which is that the system is designed to work this way to enable the President to go to war, to make things happen fast. It's not a bug, it's a feature. And so that means that the people who have to be involved with this really need to be the most steady hands in the world. What Noah wrote and what's on the screen in House of Dynamite is here's this system with all of its gears in motion that will take even the most reasonable people and drag them along this road to disaster, right? What happens if they're not reasonable people and they decide to not just to be dragged along that road, but to jump in their car and floor the accelerator? And that really worries me a lot because I have a real concern that it's not just this administration, it's an entire generation. I just don't think people take this threat as seriously as they should. And as they once did, when that seeps into a culture and a political structure, you will have people talking about things and thinking things are options that are not really options.

[Hanna Rosen]

After the break, how the absurd situation that is the nuclear House of Dynamite came to be.

[ElevenLabs Representative]

Today's episode is brought to you by ElevenLabs, the company behind AI voices that don't sound like AI voices like this one. Eleven Labs powers companies and enterprises in building lifelike conversational AI voice agents. Their voice agents are used to handle everything from customer support, queries, appointment scheduling, and even offer personalized one on one tutoring. So join the thousands of leaders already using AI voice in their business. Visit ElevenLabs IO Atlantic to get started for free.

[Hanna Rosen]

In a house of dynamite. A nuclear missile is heading for an American city, and there is no way to stop that. No off ramp, no emergency brake. There's only the next action, the next decision, and on and on until the unimaginable becomes reality. Get in the car and just start driving.

[Tom Nichols]

Where?

[Reed (Pentagon Official)]

What are you talking about?

[Hanna Rosen]

West. Go west. Go west as fast as you can get away from any. Any urban centers you can get.

[Noah Oppenheim]

Liv.

[Tom Nichols]

What the fuck? What's going on there?

[Hanna Rosen]

I'll call you.

[Alicia Wainwright]

I love you.

[Tom Nichols]

I love you.

[Hanna Rosen]

Can you kiss Liam for me? Just kiss him.

[Noah Oppenheim]

Bye.

[ElevenLabs Representative]

Bye.

[Hanna Rosen]

Bye. This propulsion towards action is maybe the most intense aspect of the movie. The president could decide to do nothing, but the movie makes it feel as if the momentum is running in the other direction. I asked Noah about that.

[Noah Oppenheim]

When this system was being designed, one of the concerns was, you know, if the Soviets launched on us, could they destroy our arsenal while it was already on the ground or before we had an ability to initiate a counterattack? And so, you know, the. The idea was, in order to win a nuclear war, which we now, at least, I think, at least those of us talking right now believe is a preposterous notion, but if you were trying to win a nuclear war, you needed to make sure that you could initiate your counter strike very quickly before your command and control centers and your arsenal were destroyed by the enemy. So the system is designed for speed and to make it as easy as possible on some level, for retaliation to take place.

[Tom Nichols]

Can we add one thing to this, which is it's not. At least back in the day, the 60s and 70s and even the 80s, it wasn't entirely crazy to say, leave aside winning a nuclear war, if you were trying to avert a nuclear war, you want it to tell your opponent, look, there is no way that you can strike us first, decapitate us, or eliminate everything. We are going to respond. In the business, it's called a secure second strike capability. And part of that is to have a president who doesn't have to say, well, before I respond, I have to call a meeting with Congress. Before I respond, I have to get at least 3/5 of the cabinet. We did this in a different time and under a different circumstance to say to the old men in the Kremlin, listen, if we see this stuff coming at us, one guy is going to make the decision, and he's going to make it fast. And there is no way you are going to escape retaliation in a grisly deterrent sense that made sense 40 years ago. It doesn't make sense now because, because we're not facing the same threat of a massive, disarming, overwhelming first strike. And even if we were struck first, we have bomber submarines underwater that have enough firepower to destroy most of Russia or China with one submerged submarine. Remember back in these days, you're talking about two countries that were pointing a total of something like 30,000 nuclear weapons at each other by treaty. The United States and Russia now deploy 1500 strategic nuclear weapons which, listen, that's bad and it's the end of the world. But it's not the same thing where we were expecting an incoming armada of 3 or 4,000 warheads that were meant to just catch us on the ground with no time for decision. So we did this kind of centralized command thing for a lot of reasons. And one of them was to kind of spook the Soviets to say if you attack us, you are not going to trigger a committee meeting.

[Hanna Rosen]

Right? It's to make the threat real. But then isn't it the whole idea of mutually assured destruction, that doesn't make any sense. It's like a system that has a huge amount of drama and momentum but you depend on it being stalled. It's like if you had a shootout and then everybody was frozen in time forever and we depended on that. Like it's a strange idea.

[Noah Oppenheim]

It's precisely that. And that is what the movie is predicated on. It's the idea that we're all standing around with these weapons pointed at each other, frozen in time, and all it will take is one person in that circle pulling the trigger and firing one proverbial bullet and then all hell breaks loose.

[Hanna Rosen]

Okay, I'm getting sweaty again. So a couple of fact check questions and either of you can answer them. Here's two of them. The movie opens at Fort Greely. The ICBM is first identified, but they have no information about it. No lead up. Like no ratcheting up of tensions. No enemy owns up to launching it. For all they know, it could be an accident. How realistic is that scenario where you know nothing and you have no lead up?

[Noah Oppenheim]

Right. So I think several things. One is just philosophically one of the things that I have noticed, and I could be wrong over the last, you know, 25, 30 years of, of being an observer of world events from, from the perch of a journalist is, is that his. How often these kind of world altering events do come out of the blue, Right? I mean, you think about something like 9 11. Now, yes, you could say 911 was predictable to anyone who was following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. But during the summer of that year, it wasn't like the United States government, maybe we now know they should have been more aware of the signals. But it did feel like an out of the blue world event that was changing the course of human history. So that just philosophically I would say, you know, in terms of a launch from a submarine, in all the conversations I had with experts, I think, you know, everyone said to me that that's the tricky thing about a sub base launch is that it's harder to attribute responsibility. We do have a pretty effective system of sensors that would likely pinpoint the location of it. In our movie we play with the idea that one of these mechanisms failed. So it makes it even more ambiguous. But I would argue that, you know, it turns out our satellite infrastructure is perhaps the most susceptible part of our digital infrastructure to hacking and to cyber interference. So it felt like that was a reasonable liberty to take. But even if those satellites work and everything functions exactly right, if you're talking about a sea based launch, you still don't know whose sub it was.

[Tom Nichols]

You know, we don't have to hypothesize about this. In 1995, the Norwegians launched a weather satellite and they had told the Russians, we're firing a rocket into space, we're going to launch a weather satellite. And some, you know, as John F. Kennedy said during the Cuban missile crisis, there's always some son of a bitch who doesn't get the word. And in this case it was the Russian high command and they brought Boris Yeltsin, the Russian nuclear football. And they said, we have what looks like an incoming single missile launched from a NATO country and we don't know why. And Yeltsin basically said, ah, this doesn't look, you know, Bill Clinton and I are friends. There's been no tensions, nothing's going on. I don't think this is what it is. And thank goodness, you know, crisis was averted. But it was one missile being launched and the Russians got their hair on fire about it.

[Hanna Rosen]

Right, right. So reasonably realistic. Second fact check involves shooting the missile down. What I have in my head is Iron Dome. It always works. Yeah, but the deputy national security adviser in the movie says, no, it's not like that. The capability we have to shoot down an ICBM is not nearly that reliable. Like, he puts the chances of success at 61% and says it's like shooting a bullet with a bullet. And is that all true?

[Noah Oppenheim]

It is true. And I think Tom can probably speak to the technical Reasons even better than I can. But there's a big difference between the kinds of missiles that Iron Dome is shooting down in Israel versus shooting an ICBM down that's coming from the other side of the world. And we say in the movie 61% that's based on data from controlled tests. So you can imagine those are under the best of circumstances. A lot of the folks we talked to felt that 61% was being very generous when it comes to the system that we have. You know, as we mentioned in the movie, there are fewer than 50 of these ground based intercepts in our arsenal. So even if it were working perfectly, there are not a ton of them that we have available to use. I mean, I think, you know, it's always been this false comfort that we could build a impenetrable dome over ourselves that would somehow solve this problem. And it turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that knocking one of these ICBMs out of the sky is a really, really hard physics problem that nobody has quite cracked yet.

[Tom Nichols]

I was one of the people that said 61% is very generous. I mean, that's basically the Pentagon's number. And that's done under these super controlled. We know when the test missile is going to be fired, we know where it's going, we're going to shoot at it. Now imagine that. I mean, those are not battle conditions. And so this notion that somehow an enemy who is specifically trying to get past our defenses, that we'd have at least a 60% chance, I think is irresponsible. And to your point about Iron Dome, Hana, Iron Dome is meant to shoot down things that are low and slow rockets. They're relative. I mean, I know it seems crazy to say, well a slow rocket, but compared to an ICBM, when an ICBM's warhead reenters the atmosphere and it's coming down, it's coming down at like 25 times the speed of sound. And so this notion that we're going to shoot these things down, an enemy who is dedicated to doing this and launches two or three or five of these things is probably also going to launch dummy warheads, chaff, you know, other things that are meant to blind the sensors or confuse them. So the notion that you're going to put this bubble over the country, I don't think even back in the 80s anybody really believed that was possible. And it's certainly not possible now. And I think very few decision makers are really, in the moment of crisis going to rely on it, if they have an option not to.

[Hanna Rosen]

So you both mentioned this idea that this movie is reminding us of something that we've somewhat put in the background, but which is very real right now. Tom, what is the state of nuclear proliferation like? Are we in the middle of a new kind of nuclear arms race? What's happening in Asia? Can you just lay that out for us?

[Tom Nichols]

Yeah, it's a lopsided proliferation. The United States, even Russia, to some extent the uk, France, we've been reducing nuclear weapons. I mean, if you had said to me in, like, the mid-1980s, when I was studying this, I was a grad student, you know, I was writing about this stuff, saying, hey, you know, we're going to go from 20,000 weapons to 1,500, I would have said, you're completely high, that this is never going to happen this way. And it's really a miracle that we got there. The problem is that now the Chinese, the Pakistanis, the Indians, they are moving to catch up because they have their own concerns and they have their own enemies in the world. Now, these are smaller weapons. They're not ICBMs, they're not Intercontinental. Obviously, Pakistan and India and China keep arsenals for their own neighborhood. But it's a proliferation problem that isn't evenly spread out among all the nuclear powers. And I'll just remind people that there used to be 10 nuclear powers. And if you want to sleep well at night, remember that the white apartheid South African regime actually built six nuclear weapons and managed to hide them from the world in the 1980s. You know, this is not any longer an exotic technology. I mean, the first nuclear bombs were made when airplanes had propellers and TVs had, you know, tubes in them. So it's not that hard a technology to get.

[Hanna Rosen]

And, Noah, is this what you had in mind when you talked about the urgency of this movie? Like, what do you want people to be thinking about as they leave the theater? I mean, it's not a documentary, but what should we be thinking about?

[Noah Oppenheim]

I think we wanted to invite a conversation. You know, I recognize that there are so many dangers in the world right now. It's hard to keep them all in mind at any one time. But this is one that has drifted out of focus, I think, for far too long. And it is a problem of our own making. We created these weapons. So I think I'd like to believe that means we can also solve the problem if we've created it. As Tom mentions, there is historical precedence for making progress. It's not impossible. We've dramatically reduced the number of them in the world. So there are paths towards possible solutions. And it just feels like one of those subjects that is far too easy to ignore. But we ignore it at our own collective peril. And we shouldn't leave the conversation entirely to that tiny community of nuclear wonks who are incredibly thoughtful and have devoted their lives to thinking about this and probably understand the threat better than anyone. You know, I wouldn't want to suggest in any way that they're indifferent or callous. I think they're one of the things that we found in preparing and putting the movie together and doing the research was how eager the people in that world are to share their stories and their concerns with the broader public. I think they invite more people's voices in the conversation.

[Hanna Rosen]

Tom, do you have anything to say about the path back from this lopsided buildup that you talked about?

[Tom Nichols]

Well, I think one of the things that I hope gets us on that path is people taking this more seriously. When you're electing a president of the United States, I think people have kind of let it drift away that, yeah, you're voting because of the economy and the price of eggs and you're mad about political correctness or whatever it is, but in the end, you are still picking someone to hold a little card about the size of a playing card in his pocket all day that gives him the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. And people, I don't think, are voting thinking about that anymore. And we used to. I mean, during the Cold War, you know, there was always the question of whose finger do you want on the button? People worried about that, but I think that somehow they've lost that sense of seriousness about it because to them, it's kind of yesterday's problem. I also think we are not powerless here. We can do this. We can back things up. I mean, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev eliminated an entire class of weapons that right now the Trump administration is trying to put back in Europe. But they actually managed to make the world a lot safer by simply saying, we're going to take all these weapons and we're going to scrap them. We're going to literally crush them and throw them away. It's possible to do that, but first the public has to take seriously that this is a real danger, it can really happen, and that real human beings have this responsibility.

[Hanna Rosen]

Well, Tom, thank you for laying that out for us. And Noah, thank you so much for joining us today.

[Noah Oppenheim]

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

[Tom Nichols]

Thank you.

[Hanna Rosen]

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudina Baid and fact checked by Sarah Korlevsky. Rob Smirciak engineered this episode and provided original music. Claudina Baid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our Managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the [e-mail] listener I'm Hanna Rosen. Thank you for listening.

[Alicia Wainwright]

Go beyond the lab in the new season of When Science Finds a Way, a podcast from Wellcome, a global charitable foundation supporting science to solve urgent health challenges. You'll join me, Alicia Wainwright, your host, for bold conversations about the scientific breakthroughs changing lives around the globe in this season. Each episode explores how science is not just in the lab, but alive in homes, supermarkets, hospitals, schools and communities. We'll hear from a Nigerian artist who's channeling his lived experience into creative ways to support mental health. From Brazilian researchers who are using climate data to forecast and prevent disease outbreaks. From European scientists developing new imaging technology that reveals disease in the body in unprecedented detail. We'll even explore a groundbreaking new study that's reimagining reproductive healthcare. These are all stories about how communities and researchers are working together to meet urgent health challenges with empathy and impact. Listen to When Science Finds a Way, a science podcast that tells the human story. Wherever you get your podcasts.