Transcript
Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Jeffrey Lewis
0:06
You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a distinguished scholar of global security at Middlebury College.
Scott LaFoy
0:23
And I am Scott LaFoy, Vice President for Nuclear and Technology Security Programs at Exeger. Hey, Jeffrey, been a while.
Jeffrey
0:31
It has been way too long. We have basically become a front for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. We're mixing that up today. We're swapping Aaron out with you. And I am using my Middlebury affiliation because it's a pot of dynamite.
Scott
0:51
It is a pot of dynamite. Both of us have watched the House of Dynamite movie in very different scenarios. And we wanted to talk through kind of what we were seeing because there's a lot of think pieces now out there. And I think at the bare minimum, this movie is going to probably be the piece of media people go to for the next couple of years if they have any sort of intrinsic reference for missile defense.
So I think it's an important thing to cover.
Jeffrey
1:17
Yeah, so I want to ask you how you watched it. Before I do that, we should tell people, spoilers. We're going to talk about the movie.
Scott
1:25
Yeah, if you have not seen it yet and want to, go watch it. I recommend people do watch it. It is good. If they're just looking for a review, go watch it.
Jeffrey
1:33
Yeah, well, or, you know, if you don't care about spoilers, which I don't. Like, I get people, like... Then continue. Irritated with me all the time in the comments. But I just, intuitively, I don't care about spoilers. So it's like, I don't... I never think about it. So, yeah, spoilers. If that's the kind of thing that bothers you, you know, you can just stop listening.
How did you see the movie, Scott?
Scott
1:57
I had the luxurious experience of sitting up on my couch last night. With a cup of tea that turned into, I think, 12 cups of tea. So very, very focused. I was taking notes for part of it, which does disrupt some of the stress and some of the pressure that the movie wants you to feel. But mine was a very casual home Netflix experience for watching this.
Jeffrey
2:19
Did you Netflix and chill with House of Dynamite?
Scott
2:23
I am not even going to answer that because I don't know how to. No.
Jeffrey
2:30
I saw it in the theater in Palo Alto at a screening arranged by Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. And so, you know, we were in like the big movie theaters are different now than when I was a kid. So, you know, this this theater has these huge, you know, like lazy, lazy boys, like some of them are actually double like sofas, you know, and so you're just kind of like.
Laying back like your job at the hut or some with, you know some popcorn. And like that's a different, that's different than watching something on, on screen in the privacy of one's own home, because, you know, it was a, it was a screening organized by CSAC. And so most of the people there were topic adjacent.
Scott
3:31
Sure. At least like familiar with the subject to some degree, like at least casually familiar.
Jeffrey
3:38
Yeah, well, I mean, it ran the gamut. I mean, Scott Sagan and Rose Gottmuller were there. And so, you know, like there were people who like, you know, legit knew what was going on. And then, you know, I think there were just, You know, we had some students from the soon-to-be-defunct Middlebury Institute of International Studies drive up.
And then I think there were just some people, you know, who were Stanford-affiliated. So, yeah, a range of views, but definitely, I think, a pretty, you know, educated audience. So – What did you think? And let me make that to be an open-ended question, because I care both about what you think about it as a subject matter expert, but also as a piece of art.
Scott
4:38
I would subdivide it one level further, where there's sort of art, technical aspects, Decision-making slash, like, the... Decision may not even be the right word, but, like, the debate. Like, because a big portion of this movie that stood out to me was that several characters, their job was to be a stand-in for, like, borderline an academic or a member of Congress.
Like, there were some things where I feel like we could point to lines and be like, that's a Dean Wilkening quote. I liked it. I like this movie. I like it as a piece of art. ... I feel that there was a little less stress than I would have liked in it that would have made it a little more relevant in like a Dr. Strangelove sense, where Dr. Strangelove is like about a fait accompli.
I think this one at one point kind of has a forced resolution where like, frankly, I think two or three ICBMs should have been launched at different times. Well, we'll get there. Yeah, but I like it. There are some technical nitpicks that did not take anything away from it. I think the attention to detail on the technical stuff that they did get right was pretty nice, actually.
I felt pretty good that when I see two GBIs go up and there's, what were they, GBI front and GBI tail, I was like, There's something interesting. There's an FTX02 poster at Fort Greeley in the movie. There's some neat attention to detail that shows that they were really, they kind of put their heart into making this look right and feel like it was realistic that I really appreciated.
Jeffrey
6:11
I thought it sucked.
Scott
6:16
Okay. Very different experiences with it then.
Jeffrey
6:20
And let me preface this by saying, obviously, Kathryn Bigelow is a wonderful director.
Jeffrey
6:27
And so it was very professionally done. I mean, this is not like Last Best Chance, that terrible NTI movie with Fred Thompson. Do you remember that thing?
Scott
6:40
I do not. I'm going to have to add that to my watch list.
Jeffrey
6:43
Fred Thompson, the senator from Tennessee. Yeah. Who was a former actor. He was on Law & Order, and he was the commander in Hunt for Red October on the carrier.
Scott
6:56
I had absolutely no knowledge of this. I'm going to have to look this up.
Jeffrey
6:59
Okay, so Fred Thompson was an actor who became a Republican senator from Tennessee, mostly because he sounded like kind of a Southern president. And NTI recruited him to play the president in a nuclear terrorism movie.
Jeffrey
7:14
Okay, and that thing was... That thing was bad. OK, this this movie is not this movie is not incompetent. But yeah, I fundamentally did not like it. And and and and that is true that I did not like it as a piece of art. OK, holding aside any subject matter issues, nitpicks, what have you. And I think this point you make about the discourse is right and it is – I think this movie is likely to be misread fundamentally in a way that the director does not like.
Scott
8:00
100% agree with that.
Jeffrey
8:01
Because it is ideologically incoherent. In the same way that we make fun of Hollywood politics as being like shallow – And incoherent this, this has that vibe. And so how people react to it, I think is, is likely to be very different. And, and in this sense, it is fundamentally different than Dr. Strangelove, which was hostile to the field.
Yes. And yet funny and biting and at, at, at its base, correct. Yeah. In a way that the field is, Though it understands it's being made fun of, must reluctantly admit remains the best cinematic depiction of this stuff ever.
Scott
8:47
That I'd agree with, and I did take a little bit of note that this movie clearly wants to be thought of a little bit as Doctor Strangelove, or at least in the same category, like the Stratcom shots where they have the big board labeled as the big board very clearly made it feel like, oh, okay, I get what you're
Jeffrey
9:06
Yeah, it wants to be strange love, but it ends up being fail safe, which is another movie I don't like.
Scott
9:13
That's an interesting comparison for it, actually. Yeah.
Jeffrey
9:15
You know, it it wants to have and I have to let me also say I understand how vulnerable it is making a piece of art. I have written a novel. Nobody likes to be told your novel sucks. Nobody likes to be told your movie sucks. Yeah. I don't know where the suckitude comes from in the sense that, you know, I don't know what the original script looked like.
I don't know if Noah Oppenheim wrote the script, likes what the director did with it. I don't know if the director... If she's happy with the performances of different actors, I don't know if the actors are happy with with with the way, you know, it's it isn't it isn't as though, you know, everybody got together and said, let's just mail this one in.
Scott
10:02
Right. It's a high dollar performance. There's a lot of hardware moving and a lot of big names.
Jeffrey
10:08
I mean, we could talk about the completely pointless Kenya scenes involving the First Lady, which absolutely feels to me like they made a whole movie with no First Lady because the First Lady has functionally no role in this. And at some point, some studio exec gave them some note that said, you need the first lady. And they were like, oh, crap.
How do we do that? And they were like, film some cell phone calls and sent a freaking camera crew to Kenya. Like, what? Why? Like, that is a really expensive solution to an utterly pointless plot line that honestly could have been stripped out of the movie.
Scott
10:44
Yeah, it doesn't pay off at all. Like the closest thing on that one specifically is I turned to my wife and I was like, is the idea here that the first lady is trying to save the elephants and the president is arguably about to kill a hundred million people. And like priority, like I could kind of see something there, but like with a lot of it, there's these shoehorn stories that don't really pay off.
They're just kind of the other way I expressed it to my wife who had the joy of me pausing every 10 minutes to be like, did you know what that means? Which I'm sure is a really attractive quality of mine. It feels like sometimes the director is just going, we're just asking questions.
Jeffrey
11:18
Or the writer is going, we're just asking questions.
Scott
11:20
We just want you to be aware of this. Did you know that this is a hard thing? It's got that Donald Trump of just like, everyone's talking about how hard missile defense is. Did you know how hard a tail chase is? We're going to imply that here. Yeah. You know, so let me...
Jeffrey
11:37
Let me try to divide my complaints. Okay. So one set of complaints I have are craft of filmmaking.
Jeffrey
11:48
You know, they are storyline, structure, balance of emphasis. They are individual actor performances, which generally I thought were – Pretty mixed, although Rebecca Ferguson was absurdly incredible.
Scott
12:06
She's good at everything. I can't believe they let a Bennett Gesser into the Situation Room. No amateur mistake.
Jeffrey
12:11
Jeez. You know, I actually think she's so good, she ruins movies. Right. Because it's like it's like it's like you're, you know, like some community theater. There's a professional actor on stage doing a great job and there's everybody else just kind of bumbling around. And you're like, oh, one of these persons knows what they're doing. That's not her fault.
OK, so there's there are criticisms about it as a piece of art I want to talk about. And then I don't want to nitpick it to death, but there are fundamental problems with the scenario. Yes, absolutely. That I think lead to the ideological incoherence of the movie. And that's not, like, we can nitpick, and we're gonna nitpick a little, because it's the Arms Control Wonk podcast.
But fundamentally, these are not nitpicks. These are, I think, about conception. So, like, one question I had going in was, hey, look, a missile attack from the Northern Pacific to the United States Is going to go down in like 30 minutes.
Jeffrey
13:15
So how are you going to make an hour and a half, two hour movie out of that?
Scott
13:21
And then you hit 31 minutes and you're like, oh, we're going to do this four times, aren't we?
Jeffrey
13:25
Right, right, right. And I actually wondered if they were going to do that. But I don't feel like the separate plot lines ever merged. I felt like I watched three or four movies that...
Scott
13:42
Were of uneven quality. I super agree with that. I thought they were going to do a what is it, Threads, the British movie where they have like after the the existence of FEMA and whatnot. I thought was going to be the back half of the movie was going to be how do you do disaster response in an uncertain environment where you're not sure and then they did not. Yeah, I mean, I do separately want to talk about the decision to truncate before the bomb hits. Yeah.
Jeffrey
14:12
But just as a general observation, and maybe other people feel differently, but I felt the stories seemed incredibly disconnected. And that then led to a kind of... Point, I think, where the movie dragged, like I thought the you know, the first set with Rebecca Ferguson was really, really great.
Jeffrey
14:42
And and that that was that really had a lot of momentum and energy to it. And in part, I think because they had a one of the consultants had had been a White House Situation Room director.
Scott
14:56
That would that tracks. There are a lot of details that I've heard are exceedingly accurate in that that that are not in the other parts.
Jeffrey
15:04
Yeah, I went through the movie a second time. And one of the things I did was look at the credits and I looked up all the people who were consultants and like. One, too many military people. Like they just did that Hollywood thing where they were like, oh, you have stars. You must know all the secrets, right?
Yeah. And I think – which is weird because some of the military stuff is like not that well done.
Scott
15:30
Yeah. Right? Yeah. I'm not a fan of the Starcom stuff.
Jeffrey
15:34
Well, and like maybe not getting the right people. But I, you know, some of the consultants, I think, were, you know, worth whatever penny, whatever, however many pennies they paid them. So, yeah. But I felt like that that part ended up being very uneven. And in particular, Idris Elba is a wonderful actor.
Scott
15:57
Not in this movie. Yeah. He is a strong and elegant man.
Jeffrey
16:02
And he – and I think it's a choice. I don't – I think it is a dramatic choice he makes to play the president as this huffing, puffing, bumbling buffoon. Like why?
Scott
16:20
It's – I – To try to give them the benefit of the doubt, there's like a moment where I like this, but I generally am with you that I don't, where the SecDef and the president are on the phone together, and you can sum up the scene with it's basically them screeching into the phone going, we were not prepared for this.
Woe is me, I was not prepared for this by my giant institution around me. And I do, I think a slightly different performance or written thing would do this better. But I like the idea that they're expressing of the SecDef and the president don't actually have the experience necessary to make this decision in this time period. And he just doesn't pull it off.
But like you said, it's Idris Elba. He's really good at every single thing I've ever seen him in.
Jeffrey
17:06
Yeah, well, so this is why you know, like, I feel like the movie sucked, but I don't, I don't want to hurl any insults at anyone who's involved individually, because you know, when a movie sucks, it's, it's not, it's not that Idris Elba forgets how to act. Yeah, he's making a choice. It's that he's making a choice in in a context and just the pieces aren't working together, at least for me..
Yeah, and so I just don't think it has enormous drama.
Scott
17:41
Yeah, I think in the back half, particularly the drama deflates. Because one of the things that really stood out to me that really bothered me, and I want to get your opinion on this, because I feel like this is a thing we've talked about a lot for other pieces of media and for years is like a scenario, is they are trying to play up all this drama about do we do nuclear retaliation?
And at one point, someone makes the comment, this isn't going to unburn Chicago. They don't know if Chicago is going to be hit. We never know if Chicago is going to be hit. Yeah. And it just feels like the way to actually make that dramatic would be have three ICBMs or an unknown number of ICBMs or set it up where the radars are not reliable and it's not clear and retaliation would be more necessary because I feel like they're kind of taking for granted that retaliation is something that automatically would happen and is necessary where I don't
Jeffrey
18:34
Yeah, this will fall into the subject matter expert complaint category. 100%. There is no reason for the president to retaliate before that bomb goes off.
Scott
18:45
Right. There's nothing changes. Unless there's a preemption option, which we were presented almost nothing. There's a little bit about like, oh, what if there's another secret North Korean submarine or something, but it's never presented in a compelling way that's believable.
Jeffrey
18:59
One of my biggest complaints. All of that is just preposterous, because what's going to happen is they're going to let the thing land and explode, and they're going to attribute, and then they're going to make a decision.
Scott
19:11
Yeah. The timer stops mattering in this movie after... After they fail to launch a second salvo of GBIs. And at that point, we're all just going to wait. Except for the sec def who's going to have a bad time. And he has a reason to have a bad time, but it's a very different thing.
Jeffrey
19:25
Well, we can talk about whether he has a bad reason to have a bad time. And this gets to my... But, you know, I will say... I wish I had written a scene in my book as good as the secretary of defense walking off the roof of the Pentagon instead of getting into that helicopter.
Scott
19:45
It was really good. And like, did you see, especially on the second time you watched it, they were on the phone in one of the earlier scenes and you have a bunch of people going, no, no, no, like calling out. And then it goes quiet and it's not clear what's happening. And it's the, I believe what it is.
I've only seen it once is his guard and his detail cutting the, the live feed as he, he walks off the Pentagon. Which is, I did really like that scene.
Jeffrey
20:09
Oh, it's incredible. The problem with this is you don't know the yield that's going to go off in Chicago. Correct. His daughter's probably going to survive.
Scott
20:20
I think he's cracked. I think there are two people in this movie that crack, and that's how I read it. They're trying to do the personal story thing, the whole, like, you have personal stakes in this, he's going to represent that. And his whole thing is, to me, okay, he has clearly a bad relationship with his daughter, and the last thing he heard from his daughter was something positive.
And he cannot handle whether the next thing that happens is the worst thing ever or fine, and he just can't.
Jeffrey
20:47
I mean, OK. Yeah. But, you know. He is going to be surrounded by people. Who are going to be able to explain that depending on the yield of the device and we can talk about this, this is going to kill several hundred thousand people in Chicago. This is not going to kill everyone in Chicago.
Jeffrey
21:10
And, you know, like you don't know where it's going to land.
Scott
21:13
Yeah. It's a big part of the movie. The hilarious deputy national security advisor says the same.
Jeffrey
21:19
I mean, like, it's got to come through the atmosphere. And, you know, like, I don't know anything about this reentry vehicle.
Scott
21:25
Do you know anything about this reentry vehicle? Someone should. Another complaint I actually have on the technical side. But yeah. Yeah.
Jeffrey
21:33
Well, we can talk about that, too.
Scott
21:35
The DNAS says, like, sometimes they don't fire. Sometimes they don't go off. They do that sometimes. Yeah.
Jeffrey
21:40
Yeah, so we're starting into coming into sort of all the subject matter. No, it's fine. I mean, like, I just want to, you know, I want to be fair because I think all of these people are good. Yeah. Idris Elba is a great, great actor. Rebecca Ferguson is a great, great actor. Kathryn Bigelow is a great, great director.
And if I didn't think so, she can shove her Oscar up my butt. Like, you know, like she's got an Oscar. So what I think does not matter. And Noah Oppenheim is a good screenwriter. And so for me, the fact that the pieces don't work together – Is pretty interesting. Yeah. And I think the last thing I want to say about that, in addition to the three storylines sort of not properly converging with a bunch of just, I think, extraneous stuff.
Yeah. Like, I don't understand the basketball thing, except maybe it's an allusion to George Bush reading The Pet Goat.
Scott
22:42
That's kind of how I read it. It's a combination to heighten suspense, but also to reduce the amount of time for a decision to be made, which again would matter more if we had a second missile coming in. But they do all these things at the beginning to kind of screw up the timeline so that the people who are supposed to be ultimately making the decision are not available and need to be briefed in increasingly small times.
Yeah. I don't think that's the best I could give for that.
Jeffrey
23:09
Yeah. I mean, you know, one thing I would say is, and I, I, I, I am like, I feel like contractually obligated to say this now, George Bush gets a bad rap for finishing the pet goat.
Jeffrey
23:22
You know, famously, he is reading to kindergartners and Andy Card, who is the White House chief of staff, who is the designated crisis manager, which is a detail this movie does not exactly work out. But that's fine. That's nitpicky. Comes and tells Bush, Mr. President, America is under attack. He doesn't say nuclear conventional terrorism, you know, like he just says America is under attack.
And Bush... And by the way, if this were a nuclear attack, this is not what he is supposed to do. But I actually believe this is the correct thing. Bush is like, hey, we're a big, powerful, resilient country. The worst thing I can do is jump up like a lunatic with my hair on fire and go running out of this room.
Jeffrey
24:07
Which ultimately is what they do in this movie.
Jeffrey
24:11
You know, I actually think one of my complaints about launch under attack as a posture is I think most presidents are going to act like Bush. Right. They're going to take their time to figure out what's going on because they're used to other people trying to hurry them and force them. And I think Bush was right.
Jeffrey
24:32
And so, you know, the fact that the president gets, you know, like kind of bundled out, it's like, well, yeah, that could happen. But but, you know, the famous example is that's not what happens on 9-11. Right.
Scott
24:46
Yeah. Yeah. It would have certainly changed the stress level and certainly the read on the president, because the president just has so much bumbliness that it just also seems unlike him. But it goes back to your other thing, like why? Why do this with the president?
Jeffrey
25:02
Yeah, so all of those plot lines seem just disconnected to me, and they don't come together in a coherent way. Yeah. Like, with the exception that none of them can quite believe this is happening, I guess, is the closest thing I can...
Scott
25:19
It's an interesting thread that's not pulled enough, but just enough to kind of be frustrating. I think that that's an interesting thing for FEMA to be like, we don't believe this is a problem because this reaction time is not what we're expecting. But yeah. And I think the launch under attack is a really interesting one. Launch on warning versus launch under attack.
They keep poking at the discourse on it and then never really... I don't know. I don't think they focus enough on like, well, nothing's going to change in the next 30 seconds except we're going to have deterministic information. Well, OK, and that's not real.
Jeffrey
25:54
So, I mean, this is ultimately going to be the big the big. And I think this is the point at which we can definitely transition to getting away from artistic questions. The last artistic question, and I want to pull up a Kathryn Bigelow interview, which, you know, I think is, you know, good. A good example of the thing I don't like is why don't they show the bomb going off?
Jeffrey
26:25
Right? Yeah. And... They just... Don't. Yeah. And... I don't... I don't understand this decision.
Scott
26:43
Interesting. Okay. You and I may have very different opinions about this.
Jeffrey
26:47
Okay. Well, so... We don't know what is happening. Yes. We don't know who launched this missile. Right. We don't know whether it's armed. Right. We don't know whether it will survive re-entry. That's right. I mean, I think, you know, I'm not one of these cranks who believes North Korea won't survive re-entry, but like...
Scott
27:19
Hypothetically, it's on the list of fail states that this movie entertains, certainly.
Jeffrey
27:25
It's a solo. It might not be armed, right? It might be a test that's gone awry. It might be a demonstration to irritate us, which is the thing the North Koreans talked about doing once. You know, Guam, they're going to bracket Guam. Bracketing Guam. You know, it's a thing that the Chinese did to the Taiwanese. They, you know, were firing missiles.
It wasn't important for them to explode. It was merely important for them to fall. So you don't know if it's armed. You don't know if it's going to survive. If it goes off, you have no idea if it's going to have a disappointing yield and be a kiloton, which is bad, but, you know, not the end of the world.
You don't know if it's going to be 100 kilotons. You don't know if it's going to be 4 megatons. Right. Right. And ultimately, you don't know if it's a false alarm.
Jeffrey
28:23
And so while I understand that I think they didn't want to show the bomb going off. And. And. I get that as a as a kind of I'm actually looking for what what she said. Yeah. And of course, I can't find it. You know. It might be the case that this is nothing.
Scott
28:58
Yeah, absolutely could be.
Jeffrey
29:00
And so if you don't show the bomb going off, you know, I think they are imagining, oh, no, this is absolutely real. And we're just going to truncate it because we can't show you the horror in a fair way. Right? Okay. But I think you actually don't know it's real. Like you've been, first of all, Sibbers, I think we only have one DSP satellite left.
So really it's Sibbers. Sibbers. Okay, nitpick, but fine. Sibbers doesn't see the launch.
Jeffrey
29:31
Which is weird because Sibbers doesn't look just once, right? Sibbers looks and looks and looks and looks and revisits and revisits and revisits. And at a later point, they say, oh, well, we have dual phenomenology on it. Like, well, Sibbers is one of your two phenomenologies. So, like, either it saw it or it didn't. But, like, whatever.
Yeah. The reaction to that claim is that there is the possibility of some kind of cyber attack, that we have lost confidence in our information systems.
Jeffrey
30:06
Well, so maybe that's why the missile defense system missed. It was not there to shoot at.
Scott
30:14
I was so frustrated that this was something that they... They hand wave away, which is that the whole time, other than that cyber attack and other than the thread coming out that the DSP has been dazzled via cyber attack, the idea that everything else is trustworthy was not really attacked. And I think that should have been one of the things, especially because when you get the sec def doing his screed about like bullet with a bullet, 50%, we spent $50 billion on this.
That's the... I hit my microphone. That's the time to be like, are we sure? And the movie immediately goes, yeah, we're sure. This part of it is fine. C2BMC and everything that it connects to, that's working perfectly with no question. Everything else is. And so like, kind of from an artistic standpoint, I feel like They're trying not to ask that question, but that's one of the key questions to me that they are actually addressing is what's the point of all this investment?
And was this a good idea? And is it worth it with the kind of weaknesses that humans have for this? And that's a key part of it. It's trustworthiness of the hardware.
Jeffrey
31:24
Well, and I mean, to me, you know, that's really infuriating, right? Yeah.
Scott
31:29
It's a really important part of the discourse.
Jeffrey
31:31
You know, and in part because those of us who do not want The U.S. to place as much emphasis as it has. We do not rely on launch under attack, but, you know, whatever. It is an option. Those of us who are bothered by that posture are alarmed by false alarms and are alarmed by the possibility of leaders making poor decisions in a crisis.
And so the idea that the president and the secretary of defense crack and become bad decision makers, that's good. Yeah. But like that's worth exploring.
Scott
32:19
Yes. It's one of the, the key most interesting things is where the buck stops here and the buck stops on someone who can't handle it. That is a fascinating thing that they do. Investigate for the back third of the movie a little way that just a little bit like just it doesn't. I don't know, it's one of those where I almost want this to be a mini series, but I don't think a mini series would be the right way to do it..
Jeffrey
32:44
Yeah, so here are the two answers that Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim gave when asked, all right? So here's what Kathryn Bigelow says. But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons and in a perfect world, getting rid of them. That is incoherent.
I do not understand what any of these words mean.
Scott
33:21
As the children say, you had me in the first half, because the first 50% of that I actually generally agree with. I think that punctuating it with a nuclear explosion creates too much determinism, too much of a clean answer for the questions that the movie is trying to raise, which is how do you operate, to me, how do you operate in an unknown environment against a threat that you will never see with your two eyes?
These are, you know, every part of this is a decision made on sensors that are so far away that there might as well be stories you're telling each other.
Jeffrey
33:50
Okay, and here's what Noah Oppenheim says.
Scott
33:51
I have no idea what that back half means.
Jeffrey
33:52
Here's what Noah Oppenheim says. Yes. Audiences are numb to depictions of widespread destruction at this point. We've come off years of comic book movies in which major cities have been reduced to rubble as if it were nothing. I think we just chose to take a different approach to trying to capture what this danger is. And then Bigelow comes back and says, with an ambiguous ending, which is not what she said earlier.
Like, it's ambiguous? With an ambiguous ending, you walk out of the theater thinking, well, wait a minute. It sort of could be interpreted, the film, as a call to action. Yeah, you can be, look, these are talented, talented people, but this is ideologically incoherent.
Scott
34:41
I think I incoherence the right term because I think that there are two, two to three different messages in there, just like there are two to three different movies stuffed into this. And one of them is really salient to me, at least like the, the, the question of what, like, this is our fault. This is humanity's responsibility.
Okay. Interesting. Again, there's a through line with Dr. Strangelove to that. There's an important part, but I don't, the back half of that statement from her does not make as like, that's not a, how you'd follow that statement up.
Jeffrey
35:10
This is what you say after your second glass of wine at Spago. None of this makes any sense.
Scott
35:17
I love that this is an ambiguous ending. I think I am in the minority of that because I think most people don't like ambiguous endings like that. Because to me, I don't want the focus to be on if everyone was right or wrong. I like the forced discussion of, you know, in everyone's head when they watch this, they're going to read something different.
I know we want to talk about what people can read from it. And having the nuclear weapon go off reduces the number of positions and discussions you can have because it takes away a fail. It's just like taking away the radars could fail as a plot point is it takes away an important part of the discussion.
Jeffrey
35:53
So fair, but that requires a different movie that precedes the ambiguous ending. Because there have to be competing, irreconcilable views about what we should do. And there have to be competing and irreconcilable views about what is even happening.
Jeffrey
36:12
And you have to sort of either pick a side or feel like all the sides are pretty interesting and you really don't know what you'd pick and this is a really, really tough sitch. Right. And then it cuts and you are like, it actually doesn't matter who's right. Like this whole process is effed. Sure. Okay. That's fine.
That's a different movie.
Scott
36:38
I think there's a little... The only thing I'd push back on there is I think when we get the deputy national security advisor, who I think is an extremely funny... To me, he's the funny character. The closest thing to a funny character. He is like a parody of an academic leftist. When it's like, oh, we've got eight minutes till impact.
And he's like, let me call an expert. Like, okay, but this is...
Jeffrey
37:00
By the way, doesn't get asked the questions that they intend to ask her and doesn't say anything.
Scott
37:06
That section to me was very silly. That was one of the ones where I'm like, I have to kind of ignore that. And you saw Marcus was mentioning on Twitter where he's like, that's also not a position in the United States government.
Jeffrey
37:18
I didn't see what they called her. What did they call her?
Scott
37:20
They called her the National Intelligence Officer for the DPRK, which is just the U.S. does not do that. Right, right, right, right. It's for North Korea.
Jeffrey
37:28
I mean, the North Koreans would love to rate that.
Scott
37:30
Oh, yeah, absolute. Thumbs up for two thumbs way up.
Jeffrey
37:33
DNI has a mission manager, right, still?
Scott
37:36
Do they still have a mission manager? Man, that's a different place now than it used to be. But I think this is where, like... The deputy national security advisor and Stratcom and the president kind of represent that. But again, that's the weaker part of the movie. I think he starts to do this like, cause we get him, the Russian foreign minister and Stratcom all get this moment where the, the camera's going to focus on them and they get to talk about their opinions and feelings about missile defense and nuclear strategy for a few seconds.
Each of them is a different kind of academic slash operational position where But I don't think it holds is the problem. It's interesting and I was happy to hear it, but it's like you said, it's almost a different movie where it's kind of not built up for that correctly.
Jeffrey
38:26
Well, and it doesn't work with one missile. 1,000%. You can take your most, like, find the person in Washington who is the most anti-me. Find the person who is the most enthusiastic about nuclear war and what it might do, You know, for the global security environment, you know, encourage that person to take a break from eating babies and sit that person in the situation room and say, well, it's just one.
And we don't know where it came from.
Scott
38:57
That person is going to let it land. Yeah.
Jeffrey
39:00
Right. And so, you know, I just I think at some fundamental level that that just that that that that doesn't work.
Scott
39:07
The most incoherent part to me, because one of the things that Stratcom said, the most incoherent part of this is that it is one missile, but five. Also true. And I think when we're deciding who the anti-you is in Washington, I think we can't actually make that joke because I'd get in trouble and that'd be a bridge too far, perhaps.
But I do think that one of the things that is really incoherent about that is that the Stratcom, everyone's talking about retaliation, how the U.S. will seem weak and this will invite whatever. That's fine. That's a normal part of various theories of war and deterrence theories and all sorts of things. At no point is anyone like, hey, is anyone going to notice if the United States waited five minutes to start the apocalypse versus starting negative 30 seconds?
Waited like 28 days, I think, to do Enduring Freedom after 9-11? Yeah, like this is not something that has to be done now. Guess what? We didn't get over it. Exactly. And all it would take, to me at least, would be either you could do something like Top Gun where the country is ambiguous and it's totally not Iran that's firing something.
But if you say the silos are open in a foreign country, now we have a situation – and they kind of do this. They have – Some exercises kind of get hotter and whatnot, but like this is where you'd have to have the Dr. Strangelove thing of like real strategic forces are mobilizing. It can't just be.
Jeffrey
40:30
So one of the reasons that A, you know, one is not a very realistic scenario. Yeah. And B, why they would not dismiss the possibility that this was an accident. Yeah. Or a rogue event or a false alarm. Is no one starts a nuclear war without putting the rest of their forces on alert. Yeah. On on on launch ready alert.
I mean, this is one of the reasons and, you know, I will admit, you know, I'm in a minority about this. I'm very skeptical of the war scare involving Russian nuclear weapons that the Biden people had, in part because they didn't the Russians never alerted their force. Okay. You know, and I was in a meeting and someone was like, you know, like, what would you do if, you know, Russia used one nuclear weapon in Ukraine?
And I'm like, I would wipe them off the face of the earth for being idiots because they haven't alerted their damn force. Like, you're going to cream them. Like, you don't start a nuclear war with one weapon and then leave the rest of the force off alert. So if you're looking at the Russians and the Chinese and they're off alert, you're in no hurry.
Scott
41:40
Yeah. Well, and... This is where they kind of sprinkle in the details to try to talk about that, but they don't connect it well enough in my mind. They say, oh, Moscow's SIGINT indicates that they can see everything, they know about it, blah, blah, blah. And someone gives the alternative scenario that, well, what if this was the Russians trying to impersonate the North Koreans?
It just doesn't really land with exactly that. No one does this... Truly by accident, because this is also such a worldwide game changer that it's not like you can just like false flag this. And this is like not even getting into the tech. There's an extreme technical nitpick I have that is is way left field, which is I'm 99 sure they would be able to tell what type of missile it was. Oh yeah, or anyone had like, they have you know, you know, you know, when it burns out in its burnout philosophy.
Yeah, they have like at one point the person in the situation room says like, oh, look at the plume. It's not us, which I appreciated. Like, oh, cool. Hey.
Jeffrey
42:43
Yeah, but like, hey, guys, look at the plume.
Scott
42:45
Yeah, look at the rest of it, though. I know you can because I've seen the declassified stuff from the 70s where you're like, yeah, this is the thermal signature of a Soviet RV. We keep a library of those on record. Oh, do you? Like, OK, there's a. Yeah, sorry. No, no, no, no.
Jeffrey
43:01
I'm with you on the nitpick. But now I'm going to start complaining about the Indo PACOM thing anyway. But but but but to go back. Yeah, sorry. No. So two thoughts about this. Right. One is there is no discussion of a false alarm. And one missile. Yes. Looks a lot like a false alarm. And there is a history, which, by the way, I've discovered people don't know about online, which means this would have been a good question for the movie to raise.
Like, nobody knows about the training tape incident. Yeah. Okay, let's go for the listeners.
Scott
43:34
Our listeners should know about it.
Jeffrey
43:35
I was talking to somebody online, you know, and they're like, well, you know, false alarm, but like... How would it show up throughout the system? And it's like, I don't know, because the system starts playing a training tape for no particular reason. Which, by the way, it's wild if you go back and look at the after action reports.
We still don't know why it played. Nobody hit play. It played itself. They uploaded it. It played itself.
Scott
44:01
Jeffrey, automation is the future.
Jeffrey
44:03
Yeah, but the AI will never do that. The AI doesn't hallucinate. I mean, that's the thing we know about AI, right, is it 100% does not hallucinate. See, I think that would have been a really fun alternate, which is, first of all, it's a large attack, which does create the need to respond.
Scott
44:21
Sure. Even a medium-sized attack, anything more than one really creates a, especially if there's a wave.
Jeffrey
44:27
Yeah. And then moreover, the fact that maybe we've implemented a new command and control system or some significant change to the command and control system. And so now we have a debate of, you know, I think it's a deliberate attack. And somebody else is like, I don't think it's a deliberate attack. And somebody else is like, I think there's a false alarm.
You know, there are people saying like, well, look, we can ride this out and like take our time. And other people saying, no, no, the whole plan is based on going first. Like now is the time. Like that's, that's great. You know, one thing that I, in my book cared a lot about was not making any of the characters venal.
Scott
45:11
Okay. Like everybody on that. What? What do you mean venal? I don't think I know this word.
Jeffrey
45:17
Oh, just everybody in my book, everybody in my novel wants to avoid the nuclear war. Yes. Everybody in my novel is trying to do the right thing. Right. My job as an author was to consistently put good people, with the exception of Trump, who I didn't make a bad person. I just made him like a force of nature, like an unbound force of nature, right?
But all the people around him We're trying to do the right thing. And I just moved the pieces around so that they kind of got boxed in. Right. OK. That, I think, is a really important thing. And I'm not saying that they should have done it exactly the same way. But what I cared about was how is the structure we've built?
Less than ideal, right? Right. And I feel like that's a thing that doesn't happen. And you know what did a good job of this was the Madam President television show version of this. Oh, okay. Which, you know, is pretty good. Okay. And it ends with a, it's a false alarm. And they do that halfway through the episode, halfway, I don't know, a little bit, right?
Yeah. And then they spend the last half of the episode arguing about whether the system worked or not.
Scott
46:38
Oh, I love that. Right?
Jeffrey
46:40
Because they're like, look, it was a false alarm. We didn't react. And other people are like, no, no, that's a close call. This is bad. We should make changes. And other people are like, no, no, it went fine.
Scott
46:51
It's operating as expected. Interesting. I didn't know that.
Jeffrey
46:54
See, I feel like that was a – and I know it's TV. It's not going to be – Not going to get anybody, by definition, not going to get anyone an Oscar. Probably didn't get them a, what is it, an Emmy. But like I thought intellectually, they just did that better.
Scott
47:14
It's making me kind of realize I think the core thing that this movie missed is it did too much of what we talked about earlier, like we're just asking questions. It did a window tour of a lot of the interesting questions that come up in a nuclear exchange, ballistic missile defense scenarios, all of this theorizing. But because the scenario that it actually chooses and sits on is such a weird one, it doesn't have time or...
Opportunity, or whatever we want to call it, to actually explore some of the really core, harder questions. It's kind of asking almost like, it's almost asking the easier or hand-wavable questions for all crowds, and this is going back to what we talked about, there are people who are going to have an ideological role in this, and so we're certainly not what...
But it allows you to hand wave a lot of this and say like, oh, X, Y, and Z is clearly what happened. Instead of picking a scenario like a multi-wave ICBM attack where you're really stress testing the philosophy that underpins the technology as well as the technology itself. And of course, the human processes and whatnot. Too much of it is like, oh, by the way, it could have been a false flag.
I'm going to talk about that for 10 seconds and we're never going to revisit it because that's not what the movie is trying to address in it. Again, Window 2 are of a lot of interesting parts of the debate, but again, I kind of wish it was an HBO miniseries that went into different scenarios, but that's not what it is.
Ultimately, I think, incoherent. Yeah. It's asking too many questions without having a thing.
Jeffrey
48:47
It doesn't have a point of view. The director might have a point of view, and the screenwriter might have a point of view, and the actors might have a point of view, but they do not together add up in the movie to a point of view.
Scott
48:59
I think I'd agree with that. I think the closest thing to a point of view is it's really complicated and hard. And I don't... We've been in the field long enough where I just don't find that as salient of a question as opposed to answering these specific ones. Like, I do think for a person who has never interacted with the concepts of ballistic missile defense, this is an interesting primer in terms of things being hard and scary.
And that is... That, I think, has... You know, philosophical and artistic merit, but it doesn't stand up when you get deeper in.
Jeffrey
49:30
All right, let's talk about the missile defense system missing.
Scott
49:40
Sure. Which could just be fixed by more missile defenses, right? Like, a lot more.
Jeffrey
49:46
The nitpick is, I believe the firing doctrine is four.
Scott
49:49
I... Not to. I literally paused the movie to interrupt my wife for whatever she was doing to go. Jeffrey is going to be mad that they fired two. And I'm very glad that you're mad that they fired two.
Jeffrey
50:02
OK, look, I would not have made the investment in the ground based midcourse defense system in Alaska. I would not have made that investment. I believe that is a right or investment. Mm hmm. They're slightly off on the... They're very close, but not quite right on the number, the percentage chance.
Scott
50:27
61 after separation is what they say.
Jeffrey
50:29
Yeah, and I think it's... I'm going to have to go back. I don't think that's the right number, but it's close.
Scott
50:36
It works for the movie. It's basically right.
Jeffrey
50:38
Yeah. Okay, but... Holding aside, you know, then no movie should do this because this would hurt people's brains. But holding aside the fact that the failure modes probably aren't independent, holding that aside, two might miss.
Jeffrey
50:58
It's really unlikely four are going to miss unless there is a common mode failure across them. And honestly, if it's just one, they probably can fire more than four. Because I think it used to be five. I think it used to be five. I don't know what the limitations are in terms of getting stuff out of the silo and terminals.
But, like, really? Like, I think this is a waste of money, and I think this system can handle one launch.
Scott
51:35
Yeah, it's two. Two seems too small no matter how you cut it. That's that's what we test. We see tests of two. And so I think this maps clearly to the publicly demonstrated firing doctrine. But yeah, like a second.
Jeffrey
51:53
But it's not a classified fact. It's an unclassified fact. It's four.
Scott
51:58
Well, I just mean because like that's the thing you can point to and say there were two of these fired that went into space and we saw it.
Jeffrey
52:03
Yeah. I mean, in my book, I ended up having them. I mean, I hate to make it look like a novel, but like because I do this for a living, I, you know, you know, if it's a small attack mathematically, you know, a few might get through. Yeah. So you don't you don't have to make the system worse than it really is.
You just, you know, anyway.
Scott
52:24
Yeah. No, I'm 100% with you. It's the thing that took – it is the single thing in the movie that reduced the amount of pressure and kind of undercut all of the strategic decision-making to me was, one, they did not fire a sort of sufficient number of GBIs, but two, there was only one coming in. And those are very related facts, like why hold back if there's only one?
Yeah. Because even though they dazzled, whatever, even though someone cyber attacked DSP, everything else caught the launch, according to them. And so no one addresses the idea that there could be a second launch secretly happening. It's just that in case there is a massive attack next, and the system's never gonna protect against a massive attack.
Jeffrey
53:10
It's like- So this is why I think it's a bad investment. You know, if- Yeah. If you said to me, look, There is a realistic chance of a singlet attack like this, which to be clear, I just think is just very unrealistic. And that's one of the reasons I struggle with the movie. Then I think this system is capable of handling that.
Yeah. Right? I generally agree with that, yeah. And the real question is, can you add $100 million interceptors four at a time And keep up with the North Koreans, forgetting the Russians and the Chinese? And it's just, the answer is no, right? And so that's why I think this is a bad system. I don't hate missile defense because missile defense is evil.
It's just, it's a poor investment. And so Kathryn Bigelow gets asked this because I actually think a perfectly legible read of this film is that we should spend more on missile defense.
Scott
54:20
One hundred percent. I think that is an easy thing to take away is, well, if we just fired more GBI's, this movie would be an hour and a half shorter and everyone goes to have ice cream at the end, which they could still reasonably do because we don't know.
Jeffrey
54:36
But like, yeah, well, here's what she said. I think that's kind of a misnomer. I think, in fact, if anything, we realize we're not protected. We're not safe. There's no magic situation that's going to save the day. I'm sure you know a lot more about this and no one knows a lot more than I do. But from my cursory reading, you could spend 300 billion on a missile defense system and it's still not infallible.
That is not, in my opinion, a smart course of action. Well, so... Oh, so you find this persuasive. This makes no sense to me.
Scott
55:07
I don't find it persuasive. Again, it's one of these arguments. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. It's like if you wrote a paragraph half in Mandarin and half in English. Half of it makes a lot of sense to me, but it's like a chimera of philosophies where it's like, well, these are not two great tastes that go great together.
Because if you're like, okay, it's the same thing that the movie did. It's a whistle-stop tour of parts of the discourse, but not engaging with them in a way that creates a coherent narrative. It's saying two different things from the discourse. One, missile defenses are not a magic shield, and you can pour in as much money as you want, and they may not work.
Fact. That's correct. That is true. I don't know that the rest of her conclusion follows. Not if you think somebody's going to fire one. Yeah, like it would solve the exact situation that this movie set up.
Jeffrey
56:02
It solves the movie. Yeah, it solves the scenario you created. It does not solve realistic scenarios that I worry about. It does not solve them in a cost effective way.
Scott
56:11
Yeah, sure. You could restructure the movie to eat to be about that. Just fire three ICBMs at different times. And you now have a much more complicated discussion that's going on.
Jeffrey
56:23
Now, I will say this goes back to my like wanting to talk about this as a piece of art, because I am I will admit a weird audience. OK, not just because I'm a guest subject matter person, but also. Have you ever seen Dead Man Walking?
Scott
56:36
No, I have not.
Jeffrey
56:37
Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon. It's an anti-death penalty movie. It's about a terrible man who commits terrible crime and the state sentences him to die. And in facing his own mortality, he has a kind of internal awakening and self-actualization. And he becomes a good person just in time to be executed.
Jeffrey
57:04
I think this is intended to be read as an anti-death penalty movie. It is the most pro-death penalty movie I've ever seen. This man commits this terrible, terrible crime. He should absolutely be punished incredibly severely for this terrible, terrible crime. And he commits this crime because he is basically not living any kind of conscious or examined life.
And he's unwilling to confront his own mortality in the way that those of us who, you know, try to live a conscious and examined life must, right? And it's only because the state intends to execute him that he spends any portion of his life in a way that I would describe as meaningful and connected to other human beings.
The state's execution of him is the state's great gift to his otherwise miserable life. So, you know, I think when you have an incoherent philosophical or ideological worldview, you know, and I don't actually think this, like, I don't, I'm not saying that I believe that executing prisoners has this effect, but I am saying that the piece of art that was made because it is ideologically incoherent results in this, I think, misleading outcome.
I think that's exactly the same thing here. And, and... You know, the thing I love about Dr. Strangelove, which to be clear, I think is the only good, only, it's certainly the best and maybe the only good piece of work in this is Kubrick understood everything.
Jeffrey
58:37
Deeply, profoundly, in a way that even I, as a subject matter expert, am still in admiration of. And what he realized is that most of this stuff was just absurd. And if you took it seriously, you were a fool. And the only thing you can do is laugh at it because they tried to make Kubrick wanted initially to make a serious thriller.
And he was like, this is just too absurd. It is too absurd. And that to me is a person who didn't just, as you say, whistle stop tour these issues, who got them and got them at a deep level and was like, OK, it's nuts.
Jeffrey
59:18
Like there is no. And honestly, it's why I think strange love is better than fail safe.
Scott
59:24
Yeah. Well, I think that's a good way to summarize why Strangelove has its place in the canon that it does for most people in the community. It understands things, but it understands them at a level that not only belies expertise, but understands how to relate that to the human experience in a way that is just like, hey, this is it.
These are incoherent, but here's a movie about that incoherence and making fun of it, as opposed to joining in.
Jeffrey
59:49
Yeah. And again, let me say... They're on the side of the angels. Right? They want to raise awareness about an important issue. Honestly, one thing I find slightly, you know, me, I'm always the, like, jackass. You know, all my colleagues are like, oh, it's such a great movie. But they're saying that because it's like a little touch of Hollywood.
And we can, like, touch Hollywood. We can, like, be, like, adjacent to fame. So we, like, pretend it's a good movie.
Scott
1:00:26
I think that this is the way I would set it up for my conceptualization is if I was teaching a class about missile defenses and I did not think the class had ever interacted with missile defenses meaningfully, I think this would be a helpful thing to show in class three and really start fighting about stuff. Okay. Like, I think that there's an interesting onboarding experience here.
Okay. Directly into Northrop Grumman so that you can buy more missile defenses. Sorry, Boeing, so that you can buy more missile defenses.
Jeffrey
1:00:58
Like, I do think it's still onboarded into... Look, with Golden Dome, everybody's going to have a piece of the pie.
Jeffrey
1:01:04
I mean, Booz Allen Hamilton wants to build space-based interceptors, which I don't know how consultants do that, but hey.
Scott
1:01:10
I... No comment. Best of luck to them. I can't wait to see which of their associates they fire.
Jeffrey
1:01:17
Is there a nuclear weapon that will like crumple up like reports and like...
Scott
1:01:21
If you crumple the reports enough, they actually hit a critical mass. That's the trick. But I think there's a teaching tool here, but it's very different than Dr. Strangelove as a teaching tool. I think that you could throw this in front of smart students or engaged citizens and have a neat debate that comes out of it. But I do think, like you said, it onboards into a specific direction that I don't think it meant to onboard people anywhere.
And I think that it's lack of commitment to testing certain questions, not even answering certain questions. It's lack of commitment to testing certain questions undercuts its own ability to generate a truly terrifying phenomenon in the way that Strangelove does by committing to a very specific fringe case that was very realistic. A realistic fringe case that tested all of the doctrines at once and really put pressure on the system and people.
Jeffrey
1:02:17
Any nitpicks? I have a bitty one.
Scott
1:02:24
I think I did my big nitpicks. The Massant one is the nitpick, which is... They declassified that before MDA existed when they talked about Bimdo, specifically for when they were testing... Homing overlay experiment. There's a really good declassified document that in the back talks about how it was prepped to be a fake hit, and then Congress got involved, and Bimda was like, yeah, we actually didn't do this.
It was too complicated. But here are some of the readings from the National Labs of what The test object looks like versus the Soviet one. And it, it indicated the existence of you know, collections of, of signatures on those. That's my nitpick.
Jeffrey
1:03:06
Yeah. I mean, I actually, I think there are, I mean, I was really focused on my, my nitpicks different, but I think there are a lot of things that could happen along that trajectory that would allow you to have very rapidly high confidence about what you were looking at. You're right. Yeah. My nitpick is the undisclosed location in Indo-Paycom, which I believe is a beach in New Jersey.
I can't geolocate it, but there are palm trees at beaches in New Jersey, and most of this film was filmed in New Jersey.
Scott
1:03:39
Interesting. And you can sort of just... Smell it?
Jeffrey
1:03:44
Well, there's like a buoy, and I'm pretty sure they're not really in the Pacific, because there's some... Yes, there are palm trees, but there's some other trees that maybe don't look so palmy in the background. Where the F is that supposed to be?
Scott
1:04:00
I have no idea. I don't know what they were going for.
Jeffrey
1:04:03
We don't have nuclear weapons forward deployed in the Pacific. They would come from Whiteman Air Force Base. Also, one person wouldn't load it on a loader, but whatever, that's fine. I guess they spent all their money on sending a useless storyline to Kenya. They couldn't afford to hire two extras.
Scott
1:04:24
It's not supposed to be Diego Garcia, is it? I mean, A... It's kind of what it hints at.
Jeffrey
1:04:29
Okay, A, no nuclear weapons there.
Scott
1:04:32
Not the Pacific Ocean, also. It's Indo-Pacom. It's Indo-Pacom.
Jeffrey
1:04:38
Not closer to North Korea. True.
Scott
1:04:41
True. Yeah, exceedingly far.
Jeffrey
1:04:46
Or China. Well, you know, like, yeah, like you're going to come up over there. Like they're going to come out of Whiteman. They're going to refuel over Alaska and then they're either going to go to Russia, North Korea or China. That's what they're going to do. They're not going to fly past those countries, you know, like maybe it's because they're already there.
I know that just makes no sense. I think they just wanted to show, you know, pilot with shirt off.
Scott
1:05:07
Yeah, I don't know why they're saying... It seemed like an odd one.
Jeffrey
1:05:10
That's a nitpick. They're allowed. Opposite question.
Scott
1:05:12
Did you have, whatever the opposite of a nitpick is, any small detail that you were kind of like, kind of digged or dug that was interesting? Because there were two details that stood out to me where I was like, this was a neat thing to include that I was happy to see, but it was totally unnecessary, but was fun.
Jeffrey
1:05:28
You know, I thought Rebecca Ferguson was just so incredible. And I think the manner in which... She was like, go get your phone, you know? And like, we've all been in those rooms where you have to leave your phone outside and you know, you're not supposed to have your phone in, but she's like, no, no, this is, this is different.
And like that, for me, that like little detail of knowing, like just what, What would the day have to be like for you to walk out and grab your phone and walk it back into a skiff? Yeah. Like that just that is such a telling detail. And I think for most people, like, I don't think it would strike them.
But like the way she delivers that, it's like, oh, fuck.
Scott
1:06:22
Yeah, I think for security people, that's one of those, like, oh, okay, this scene has been designed by that consultant that you mentioned to specifically send a chilling message to everyone who knows what that would mean.
Jeffrey
1:06:33
Well, you know he, in his mind, must have had his own, like, this is the situation in which I am going to go grab my phone and make that call no matter what because I'm going to tell my kids to get out of town. Yeah, I thought that was good. What was yours?
Scott
1:06:45
And I do have a do would you like a little nitpick on that scene though? Yeah, even though I do think it was wonderful. I was talking to a friend about that scene and I I thought it was very like personally like Rebecca Ferguson obviously very good good at personalizing it, and they were like those are not, that's a reachable place, there are reachable things showing it as an unknown unknown number. It seems like it may have been unnecessary and that undercuts the drama, but I missed that.
Yeah. So she tried to call from her desk. That's right.
Jeffrey
1:07:12
It says unknown number.
Scott
1:07:14
And that apparently may not be the case.
Jeffrey
1:07:17
Sure. It probably would be a reachable place.
Scott
1:07:20
Yeah. But I don't know. I don't answer.
Jeffrey
1:07:21
I mean, it's not going to say what aspect of the reachable place. Correct. If you get a. Yeah.
Scott
1:07:28
Yeah. You may have. My assumption is you kind of have that number. You just wouldn't say like you. Anyway.
Jeffrey
1:07:34
Yeah, I think that's fair. Okay, what's your nitpick?
Scott
1:07:37
I still love that scene. So my counter nitpicks, my opposite ones were, I really liked at the very beginning.
Jeffrey
1:07:43
Oh, sorry, yeah, counter nitpick.
Scott
1:07:45
Yeah, counter nitpicks. I really liked it for Greeley that they had an FTXO2 poster. Why they have a 2007 flight test poster, I have no idea.
Jeffrey
1:07:53
Because that's what the set designers got on Etsy.
Scott
1:07:56
Apparently, but that was a cute little thing. Oh, that's kind of like, for me, that put me in the thing of like, okay, we're speaking a very different language. This is very much like turning on Strange Love and seeing the inside of the B-52 cockpit and being like... Okay, someone spent time on this.
Jeffrey
1:08:15
Why did they go all the way to Iceland to film the outside scenes? They filmed everything in New Jersey.
Scott
1:08:20
Did they seriously? Yeah. That's stupid. Because Iceland's cheap. There are financial incentives to go to Iceland. I see.
Jeffrey
1:08:27
Cheaper than doing it in Alaska.
Scott
1:08:29
Apparently. That sucks. I should have done it in Alaska and give the folks in Greeley, like, some fun.
Jeffrey
1:08:34
A little bit of shine. Yeah.
Jeffrey
1:08:36
The other nitpick I really... Look, I think your system's a waste of money, but I appreciate you freezing your ass off up there.
Scott
1:08:42
Because I do think you can shoot down one.
Scott
1:08:47
We have faith in the folks at Greeley. The other one that I liked was during the conversation with the Russians, the foreign minister was like, you know, he was saying like, are you going to, if you attack someone, are you going to keep our airspace empty? And he's like, yeah, our bombers won't go in. He goes, what about your ICBMs?
And the guy goes, tell them the truth. And they, again, whistle stop tour. They're not going to spend a lot of time on it. I do like that they kind of had this lip service of just like, hey, reminder, if you want to go to war with North Korea with real ICBMs involved, the Russians are going to see that as an attack.
Jeffrey
1:09:17
Again, could have been an interesting movie, and I feel like it's one of the scenes that I liked where I felt it did a little better job. So now now we are in the deep nitpick. They would have already had to call the Russians to tell them about the intercept attempt out of Greeley. Yeah, because when those two interceptors miss, they don't explode, that's correct. They keep flying and they're gonna fly into Russia and the Russians are gonna see those on the early warning radar and the Russians are gonna be like, did you just launch two missiles at us?
And they don't touch that. And that's nitpicky. And that's not, you know.
Scott
1:09:50
Still, if you're going to talk about overflights in Russian airspace, I feel like you should talk about debris coming down. Once again, whistle stop, but you're not stopping everywhere. The other nitpick I have is someone said, you know, everyone's forces around the world are mobilizing. And someone's like, everyone just saw us miss. I don't think that's true.
I think like three people saw you miss at most. They talk about it as if the EKV missed. That's interesting.
Jeffrey
1:10:10
I don't think anybody sees you miss. I don't have any faith in Russian. At best.
Scott
1:10:14
Well, and as we said earlier, there's a decent chance we would maybe not have a great idea. There's an interesting question.
Jeffrey
1:10:20
I mean, the Canadian officer at NORAD is like, oh, something bad just happened. Well, I'm real sorry there. Yeah, I don't think. Well, I'm going to go call my family.
Scott
1:10:35
Yeah, but they say like Tel Aviv and Iran are doing it. And unless the Russians and Chinese take people off, a couple of people will see it, but Anyway, overall, I still think teaching moment. Interesting movie. It's going to go in my nuclear collection of of talking points to be insufferable about at parties, but not quite hitting the strange love vibe.
Jeffrey
1:10:57
Yeah, I just I just it doesn't work for me as a piece of art, which is weird because everybody involved in it is real good.
Scott
1:11:06
Yeah. Well, sometimes something is not as good as the sum of its parts. I do not understand what Idris Elba was doing.
Jeffrey
1:11:13
The dramatic choice he made was – again, I mean this is a great actor, an elegant man, a man who I thought would have made a spectacular James Bond. Oh, yeah. He decided to play – I mean, I wonder if he was having a heart attack and they had to shoot around it. I don't know what the hell was going on there.
Scott
1:11:36
I love the other interpretation. Idris Elba just can't be non... He can't be not poised. He just can't play down. He's always got to be too cool. He just doesn't have that ability to be a doofus.
Jeffrey
1:11:47
I guess. I wanted to see Stringer Bell start a nuclear war. Anyway, I, I, I, I, I've been blunt. I feel bad. I feel bad. These are, these are, these are all, all, all wonderful, wonderful artists who, who make art that I love and admire and respect. And I swear I'm not nitpicking it. I just, I just think it's, it's incoherent in a way that prevents me from liking the movie.
Scott
1:12:15
I think that's a reasonable, reasonable interpretation of it. I don't think you'd be wrong for that. Especially the being able to onboard people into the wrong outcome. Not saying missile defense is the wrong outcome, but one that clearly is not what the director intended in such a way, I think also really undercuts like... That means you didn't really get the message straight, did you?
Are the peeps talking about it on the Slack channel? The peeps are talking about it on the Slack channel. And if you, listener, want to join those peeps on the Slack channel, you can go over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast and can support us. And the nitpicks that we have over various pieces of media and join a very robust, very vibrant Slack channel of interested wonks, hopefully like you.
Jeffrey
1:13:09
Scott, I am so glad you came out of hiding to join me today.
Scott
1:13:15
I am so glad to be here, and I think I'll be out of hiding a lot less in the near future, so...
Jeffrey
1:13:23
Well, thanks for joining me and thanks for listening.
