[CONTAINS SPOILERS!]
In the film A House of Dynamite, U.S. missile defense plays a key role. Here’s what it gets right and wrong.
RIGHT:
- A House of Dynamite correctly underlines that missile defense has been a costly project that has produced, at best, limited defensive capability. It is appropriate to refer to the chances of a successful intercept as a “coin toss” based on the system’s test record (roughly a 55% success rate). Of course, strategic missile defenses have never been used against an actual attack by an intercontinental ballistic missile, and the limited testing was not done in real-world conditions, having been scripted in advance and without expected countermeasures that would be anticipated done to date, and still, as mentioned, has a poor track record, so their effectiveness in a real crisis must be considered questionable at best.
- A House of Dynamite also correctly depicts that intercontinental ballistic missiles, due to their high speeds, are extremely difficult to hit. The relative success of theater missile defenses against shorter-range, slower moving ballistic missiles (estimated at about 80% in the recent Iran/Israel conflict) does not necessarily mean that strategic defense can be anywhere near as effective, even with monumental expenditures.
- A House of Dynamite also correctly illustrates the relationship between offensive and defensive systems. Even a missile defense system that works better than a coin toss can still be overwhelmed by more offensive weapons. The United States currently maintains just 44 interceptors at bases in Alaska and California, when Russia and China possess hundreds of ballistic missiles
WRONG:
- Unfortunately, A House of Dynamite underestimates how much the United States has spent on missile defense. Instead of the $50 billion mentioned in the film, the United States has spent more than $60 billion just on the ground-based interceptor system shown in the film and hundreds of billions more on missile defense across decades.
- In the exceedingly unlikely case that an actual adversary launched a single missile at the United States, it would be targeted by more than two interceptors as even optimistic estimates of the intercept rate would require far more. As the system has not been properly tested, there can be no certainty it would work at all.
Regardless of what A House of Dynamite gets right and wrong about missile defense, the movie raises important questions cost versus effectiveness.
With an unproven missile defense system in place in real-world 2025, the question for policymakers in Congress and in the administration is this: If you find there is any chance that a nuclear weapon may be directed at the United States, and acknowledging the poor record on testing to date despite the billions of dollars spent over decades, is spending billions more on such a speculative and unproven system our best use of national security dollars?
And if you don’t find the threat realistic, or the chances of development of a reliable and credible defense system likely anytime relatively soon, then why spend billions of dollars on such a system?
