Bigelow Netflix Thriller Sparks Missile-Defense Pushback

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Anthony Ramos, is a tense Netflix political thriller that compresses its plot into an 18–19‑minute window and had a limited theatrical run before becoming a streaming hit. The film dramatizes a nuclear ICBM headed for Chicago and portrays U.S. ground‑based missile defenses as succeeding roughly 50–61% of the time. The Missile Defense Agency circulated an internal memo pushing back, asserting that ground‑based interceptors have shown “100% accuracy” in testing for more than a decade. Independent analysts and journalists, including experts cited by the filmmakers, dispute the Pentagon’s blanket claim and point to mixed test results and past failures that make the film’s “coin‑toss” depiction a legitimate point of contention. Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim say the film is grounded in interviews with former officials and technical advisers and was intended to provoke public and policy debate, while critics remain split and the controversy has focused attention on missile‑defense effectiveness and nuclear‑proliferation policy.