U.S. President Donald Trump appears at an event on lowering drug prices in the Oval Office at the White House on November 6, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Andrew Harnik / Getty Images Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today! Kathryn Bigelow’s new nuclear thriller, A House of Dynamite, has been criticized by some experts for being unrealistic, most notably because it portrays an unlikely scenario in which an adversary chooses to attack the United States with just a single nuclear-armed missile. Such a move would, of course, leave the vast American nuclear arsenal largely intact and so invite a devastating response that would undoubtedly largely destroy the attacker’s nation. But the film is strikingly on target when it comes to one thing: its portrayal of the way one U.S. missile interceptor after another misses its target, despite the confidence of most American war planners that they would be able to destroy any incoming nuclear warhead and save the day. At one point in the film, a junior official points out that U.S. interceptors have failed almost half their tests, and the secretary of defense responds by bellowing: “That’s what $50 billion buys us?” In fact, the situation is far worse than that. We taxpayers, whether we know it or not, are betting on a house of dynamite, gambling on the idea that technology will save us in the event of a nuclear attack. The United States has, in fact, spent more than $350 billion on missile defenses since, more than four decades ago, President Ronald Reagan promised to create a leak-proof defense against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Believe it or not, the Pentagon has yet to even conduct a realistic test of the system, which would involve attempting to intercept hundreds of warheads traveling at 1,500 miles per hour, surrounded by realistic decoys that would make it hard to even know which objects to target.