An essay by Noah Oppenheim on making 'A House of Dynamite' and the specter of a nuclear apocalypse

KATHRYN BIGELOW.

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THAT'S ALL IT TOOK to get me on board "A House of Dynamite.I would have leaped to collaborate with her on any project, but fortunately nuclear Armageddon is also a preoccupation of mine. (And no, not because my last name bears a similarity to the father of the bomb — there's no relation, not even distant.)

The sociobiologist E.O. Wilson famously remarked, “The real problem of humanity is ... we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” That's been our curse since the dawn of the Atomic Age, now compounded in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. And for that reason, I've always thought it nothing short of miraculous that any of us are still here.

In fact, early in my writing process, I interviewed an expert on nuclear war at a major think tank. At the end of our long, harrowing conversation, I asked how it was possible that the world hadn't already ended. He replied, in absolute earnest — “I'm sure it has, in most realities. We're just living in the one branch of the multiverse where it hasn't.”