In Kathryn Bigelow’s 2025 film, A House of Dynamite, viewers are dropped into an eighteen‑minute nuclear crisis as an unidentified nuclear‑armed missile hurtles toward Chicago. Told from multiple vantage points in Washington and Omaha, the film follows senior civilian and military officials as they struggle to work out where the missile is coming from and whether to launch a retaliatory strike.
The film powerfully dramatizes the dangers of the metaphorical “house of dynamite” we have built, but it largely takes that house for granted, skipping over the political, technological, and doctrinal decisions that make such a crisis possible in the first place.
To bring those choices to the fore, I spoke with Nancy Gallagher, director of the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland and the creator of the interactive role‑playing game Nuclear Decisions, about how the game reconstructs those upstream choices and what it suggests about agency and responsibility in nuclear decision making.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A House of Dynamite drops us into a crisis with almost no sense of how we got there. Nuclear Decisions seems designed to do the opposite. How does your game help us think about how nuclear crises like this are produced?
Gallagher: The key point of the game is that you never simply “find yourself” in a crisis scenario. You arrive there through a long sequence of decisions, reactions, and counter‑reactions that shape both the situation you face and the way you respond to it. I also want players to see that it is not only presidential choices that matter. Members of Congress, officials in the State Department, intelligence agencies and the military, and even private citizens in advocacy organizations all make decisions that cumulatively structure the nuclear environment.
One of the themes in A House of Dynamite is uncertainty. The U.S. early-warning system detects an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile mid-flight, but the origin of the missile is unknown and it is unclear if this was an accidental launch or a declaration of war. How does Nuclear Decisions help players think through where those informational and institutional linkages can fail or succeed, and how decision makers act under uncertainty?
Gallagher: Interestingly, the film has less technological uncertainty than my game or many other depictions. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear this is a real missile; the uncertainty is about who launched it and why, not whether the launch happened at all. Many treatments of nuclear crises rely on the “false alarm” as an easy way out. A House of Dynamite instead introduces missile defense as a potential escape and then underlines how unreliable its performance really is.
In my game, the deeper uncertainty is political rather than purely technical. Players draw on multiple sources of information to judge whether an apparent launch is real and, crucially, what the other side’s motives might be. One of the central questions concerns whether the United States maintains routine risk‑reduction and crisis‑management contacts with Russia despite serious disputes. When I wrote the game, it was Crimea; today the problem is even sharper.
You can easily imagine a very different version of A House of Dynamite if there were robust channels to Moscow, Beijing, or Pyongyang that characters could use to cross‑check what they were seeing on their screens. In Nuclear Decisions, earlier choices determine whether relations with Russia are improving or deteriorating, and that in turn shapes what information is available, how ambiguous information is interpreted, and what options exist.
Both the film and the game touch on fairly technical nuclear issues, and the movie uses lots of jargon. How did you balance technical accuracy with accessibility, and how important is it to you that people without a specialist background can engage with these questions?
Gallagher: I designed Nuclear Decisions to be accessible to a wide range of people, so I deliberately avoided technical jargon. I want ordinary Americans to see that once you strip away acronyms and insider language, the core issues are understandable, so they can form informed opinions. At the same time, I was careful not to include anything that was technically impossible or wildly implausible. Every option in the game is grounded in real policy debates, with real‑world examples of officials making the arguments that appear in the scenarios. At the end of each episode, we provide links for players who want to go deeper, but those resources are all written for a general audience rather than for specialists.
You also use the game to show who has their hands on different levers of power and what kinds of influence citizens can have. How did you design Nuclear Decisions so that players see both the limits and possibilities of their own agency?
Gallagher: Structurally, the game is a kind of choose‑your‑own‑adventure built around a sequence of issue scenarios, each of which presents a specific decision. The choice you make in one scenario alters the context for later ones. I track several key variables that get dialed up or down depending on what you do. When I designed it, I was thinking about the range of nuclear‑related decisions that are made on an ongoing basis about force posture, diplomacy and arms control that cumulatively affect the probability and character of any future crisis. The scenarios are not necessarily sequential, but the choices you made earlier in the game clearly influence your assets and vulnerabilities, and how other countries respond as the game unfolds. I wanted to build in that action–reaction dynamic, which is largely missing from A House of Dynamite, where the focus is on a single U.S. decision and there is very little explicit reasoning about how different choices would shape others’ responses or the longer‑term strategic situation.
Finally, what do you see as the main takeaways for people who play Nuclear Decisions, and how do they relate to what A House of Dynamite is trying to do?
Gallagher: My sense is that A House of Dynamite wants viewers to ask how we have created a nuclear order that is so unstable and so dangerous. Nuclear Decisions tries to give concrete examples of the kinds of choices about deterrence, arms control, diplomacy that have brought us to this point. I wrote the game in 2018–2019, and in many respects the situation it describes has deteriorated since then. This makes the underlying message even more urgent.
In my own teaching, I ask students to play Nuclear Decisions several times and adopt different personas—a hardline hawk in one run, a more peaceful, dove in another—and then compare the trajectories and outcomes. The point is not simply whether “the world blows up” or not, but how different sequences of incremental, often seemingly reasonable choices move them closer to or farther from the kind of nightmare endgame depicted in A House of Dynamite.
If the film immerses us in the last minutes of a crisis, the game forces us to inhabit the months and years beforehand, when policies, doctrines and force postures are still malleable. The real objective of nuclear policy is to avoid ever reaching a nuclear crisis where you must decide between bad options. It is the accumulation of many routine choices, long before any missile is in the air, that determines whether we do.
Learn More: Read about CISSM’s research on nuclear decision-making and try out the interactive role-playing game for yourself.
About the Author: Samuel M. Hickey is a PhD Student and Research Assistant at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy
