A House of Dynamite movie accuracy disputed by Pentagon | Films | Entertainment
Kathryn Bigelow’s new nuclear war film A House of Dynamite is currently terrifying audiences on Netflix.
The new movie imagines a what-if scenario in which a WMD is headed for Chicago and the US government has just 18 minutes to respond.
A major plot point of the film involves a missile interceptor failing to engage the nuclear missile as it speeds towards the US mainland from an unknown origin.
The film claims that there’s a 50 per cent chance of it being successful, as it’s supposedly like a bullet hitting another bullet.
In response, Jared Harris’ Secretary of Defence is furious that a $50 billion interception system has a coin toss chance of working.
However, an internal memorandum from the Pentagon now disputes the accuracy of the new movie.
The Pentagon memo, which Bloomberg has seen, says previous prototypes and current interceptors “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.” However, experts dispute this, including Laura Grego, a missile defence critic at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
She has seen A House of Dynamite and believes the plot about a single nuclear missile headed for the US mainland on a known trajectory is “the least threatening [scenario] possible”.
Grego added: “A robust defence should anticipate facing multiple incoming ICBMs and credible decoys, and direct attacks on missile defence elements, but none of those were part of the story in this film. The fictional threat is arguably about as easy as they come.”
A House of Dynamite is streaming now on Netflix.
