By Patricia Jaworek and Isabelle Williams
Rebecca Ferguson as Captain Olivia Walker, in the White House Situation Room in “A House of Dynamite.” Photo credit: Eros Hoagland/Netflix © 2025.
Critics have hailed Kathryn Bigelow’s new thriller A House of Dynamite as “a movie that will ruin your day” and “the scariest thing you’ll watch all year.” The movie follows key figures within the US national security apparatus and their colleagues, friends, and families as an unidentified ballistic missile—launched from somewhere in the Pacific—races toward Chicago.
Replaying the 18 minutes it takes the missile to hit its target, the plot takes the audience through a frantic sequence of events: attempts at interception, deliberations of retaliation, and the realization that a major American city is about to be wiped off the map. Moments later, the missile is about to strike, the screen turns black, and the movie ends in silence.
If we pick up where A House of Dynamite ends, the story becomes one of devastation and cascading crises. Decades of modeling and simulations based on the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki help us understand the immediate and longer-term effects of a nuclear explosion. But in today’s deeply interconnected world, the effects of a nuclear attack would be far more complex and difficult to predict.
Let us assume that the missile carried a several-hundred-kiloton (kt) nuclear warhead—many times more powerful than the 15-kt bomb the United States used to destroy Hiroshima—and detonated directly above Chicago’s Loop, the dense commercial and financial core of the nation’s third-largest city.
What would ensue in the seconds, minutes, days, and months that follow, and how far would the effects ripple across the region, nation, and beyond?
The first seconds and minutes: detonation
At 9:51 a.m., without warning, the sky flashes white above Chicago. A fireball hotter than the surface of the sun engulfs the Loop, releasing a powerful pulse of heat, light, and x-rays. In less than a heartbeat, everyone within half a square mile—from commuters to children, doctors, and tourists—is vaporized instantly. Every building simply vanishes.
A shockwave expands outward faster than the speed of sound, flattening everything within roughly one mile of ground zero, including the Riverwalk, the Bean, Union Station, most of Chicago’s financial district, and the Jardine Water Purification Plant—which supplies drinking water to more than five million people. People are killed by debris and collapsing buildings. The city’s power, transport, communications, and water systems fail simultaneously. Major hospitals responsible for the city’s emergency and intensive care are destroyed.
Two miles from the epicenter, residential and commercial buildings in the West Loop, South Loop, and River North neighborhoods are heavily damaged or leveled. Debris blocks the streets and fires spread as gas lines rupture and wood and paper burn.
Anybody outside or near windows in at least a four-mile radius suffers third-degree burns from thermal radiation within milliseconds of the detonation. Those “lucky” enough to survive the initial blast absorb a dose of radiation about 800 times higher than the average annual exposure for Americans, causing severe radiation sickness that will likely be fatal within days or weeks.
The blast may have produced a localized electromagnetic pulse, frying electronics and communication technologies in the vicinity of the explosion. If not already physically destroyed, Chicago’s electric grid, telecom networks, and computer systems are knocked offline, complicating response efforts.
In less than 10 minutes, 350,000 people are dead and more than 200,000 are injured. Much of Chicago is destroyed and beyond recognition.
The first hours and days: fallout
Then, there is fallout. The intense heat vaporizes microscopic particles, including dust, soil, concrete, ash, debris, and radioactive materials, and lifts them into the atmosphere, forming the infamous mushroom cloud. As the wind carries these particles, they fall back to the earth, contaminating people, animals, water, and soil.
The direction and speed of the wind over Chicago can vary, making fallout inherently unpredictable. Assuming the region’s prevailing westerly winds push the cloud eastward, fallout descends on Lake Michigan—the largest public drinking water source in the state, serving approximately 6.6 million residents.
At average wind speeds, radiation that travels roughly 40 to 50 miles of the plume is immediately lethal to anyone outdoors. More than a hundred miles downwind, the intensity of exposure inflicts severe radiation sickness. Contamination from longer-lived isotopes would reach even further, poisoning Michigan’s robust agriculture and dairy industry and contaminating milk, meat, and grains.
A radical act of cinematic restraint: How to understand the ending of ‘A House of Dynamite’
Back in the city, the destruction of critical infrastructure triggers a chain of systemic failures, paralyzing emergency response. Tens of thousands of survivors suffer from deep burns, requiring urgent care. With only twenty Level I-burn centers in the state and scores of medical personnel among the injured or killed, this capacity amounts to a drop in an ocean of suffering. The city’s health system, among the most advanced in the world, has effectively collapsed. Suburban hospitals are quickly inundated, forced to focus on those most likely to live.
Despite “shelter-in-place” orders, a lack of clear guidance and widespread misinformation drives hundreds of thousands to panic and flee the area. Surrounding counties and states receive a sudden influx of displaced people (perhaps doubling or tripling their population), many of whom lack identification and require decontamination, medical care, and emergency shelter.
The first days and weeks: the impact spreads
While response efforts continue, the destruction of Chicago—known as America’s “railroad capital”—paralyzes rail traffic across North America. Serving as the primary link between the industrial Midwest, the East and West Coasts, and Canada and Mexico, Chicago’s collapse severs critical cargo routes for the transport of grain, goods, and industrial components.
Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport—one of the busiest passenger and cargo hubs in the world—is indefinitely closed. The loss of this critical artery, which moves hundreds of thousands of tons of freight every year—including electronics, pharmaceuticals, and food—destroys or delays supply chains and causes ripple effects across domestic and global markets.
The attack erased an urban area that is America’s third-largest metro economy, with a gross domestic product almost the size of Switzerland’s, wiping out hundreds of thousands of businesses and jobs across diverse sectors; direct financial losses amount to trillions of dollars.
The United States faces an economic crisis as Illinois demands enormous sums for disaster relief, decontamination, and, eventually, rebuilding. Global stock markets nosedive, pushing the country toward a recession. The loss of a single node in the modern economy’s interconnected system shakes the entire country.
The first weeks and months: Cascading effects
Given the unique nature of nuclear weapons, the medium- to long-term consequences of any nuclear use scenario remain uncertain, though they would certainly be dire. There is an urgent need to invest in new modeling that fills critical knowledge gaps on the systemic consequences of nuclear use.
However, for our scenario, informed assumptions are possible, based on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, along with more recent disasters such as the September 11 attacks, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fukushima nuclear accident, and extreme weather events like Hurricane Katrina. These events offer some lessons on how societies respond to crises and the cascading humanitarian, environmental, economic, financial, and societal effects in the medium to long term.
Given the radiological contamination of Lake Michigan and surrounding farmland, agricultural production could be suspended across the Midwest. This would lead to supply chain disruptions, shortages of essential goods, including food and medicine, and soaring prices in communities for hundreds of miles around Chicago. With US food exports likely to halt, countries dependent on corn and grain imports from the Chicago area would equally face food insecurity.
The greater Chicago area is also home to major oil refineries, including the BP Whiting Refinery and ExxonMobil Joliet Refinery. The bombing would likely stop operations for some period of time, putting the region’s fuel production at risk of disruption. Any resulting gasoline and diesel shortages could trigger a surge in nationwide prices, as occurred after Hurricane Katrina, though likely unfolding over a longer period.
As power grids collapse and data centers go dark, the communications, finance, and logistical systems that underpin everyday life for all Americans could fail, too. Even a temporary incapacitation of financial services infrastructure would shut down banking, trading, and payment systems—costing billions.
One of the defining questions in the months following the attack on Chicago would be society’s ability to recover. As weeks turn into months, we can expect the United States would face a regional disaster and also a web of multi-sectoral and non-linear crises. While the immediate blast may not kill millions as the movie predicts, numbers lose their meaning in the face of systemic collapse. Long-term outcomes of a nuclear catastrophe remain underexplored but would certainly have global reach.
Box office bombs: What I learned watching 20 nuclear films in a month
Unfolding in parallel: the risk of additional strikes and a geopolitical meltdown
While this scenario seems dire—bordering on unimaginable—it could well be worse. Even before the missile strikes Chicago, pressures that could easily lead to scenarios far more destructive than the one described here will have been set in motion.
As the movie chillingly depicts, the US president has the sole authority to decide whether and how to respond, with just minutes to consider the options and implications and before he knows the full impact of the incoming strike. The president must decide—amid competing advice and demands—whether to show restraint or demonstrate “resolve” by retaliating. Meanwhile, US adversaries (regardless of whether they were involved in the initial attack) would be closely monitoring their intelligence channels and facing similar pressures to preemptively respond as well, dramatically increasing the risk of a wider, more catastrophic conflict.
Even if Chicago remains the only nuclear strike that day, the world would be forever changed. The decades-old taboo against nuclear use would have been broken, shaking the foundations of the international order. Fear and uncertainty, strain on governance systems, societal trauma, and geopolitical tensions would only exacerbate the social, economic, and other cascading effects described above.
Conclusion: understand and prevent
A House of Dynamite may be fiction, but the scenario is plausible. As an advisor to the president says in the film, as long as these weapons exist, “this scenario isn’t insanity—it’s reality.”
Nuclear risks are rising and growing more complex; for the first time in 40 years, the number of nuclear weapons in the world is expected to increase, and the last remaining verifiable limits on nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are set to expire in February 2026. In the past, there have been dozens of close calls when nuclear command and control systems failed, initial reports were wrong, people made mistakes, or leaders felt pressured to act.
Despite the increasing risk of nuclear use, the full extent of the cascading impacts of nuclear weapons use is under-researched and little understood. Fortunately, there are efforts underway to fill this gap. A recent National Academies of Science study raises awareness of the systemic implications of a nuclear attack in an interconnected world.
In July 2025, the United Nations Secretary-General announced the formation of an independent, 21-member panel that will conduct a comprehensive, scientifically grounded examination of the “local, regional, and planetary scale” effects of nuclear war, delivering a final report in 2027. And the World Health Organization is conducting a study on the effects of nuclear war and nuclear weapons testing on public health and health services.
Decision makers and the public must be reminded of what is at stake should scenarios like A House of Dynamite ever occur. Developing a modern, evidence-based understanding of nuclear risks in today’s world can paint a nuanced picture of the negative cascading effects of nuclear use—an especially important development at a time when the world is again inching closer to the brink and younger leaders and citizens are further removed from the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Of course, this is only part of what is needed. Renewed public awareness should motivate governments to also renew nuclear dialogue—even and especially with adversaries—to help prevent misunderstandings and miscalculations, improve decision-making processes, and adopt concrete steps to prevent such a catastrophe from ever occurring.
Note: This article does not aim to provide an exhaustive account of all the potential effects of such an event. We acknowledge that numerous others would arise beyond those discussed here. Many of the details of the immediate blast effects were taken from NUKEMAP created by nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein.
Patricia Jaworek is a director for the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Global Nuclear Policy Program. She leads NTI’s activities to advance understanding of the global and long-term effects of nuclear weapons use and supports NTI’s efforts to reduce global nuclear risks.
Isabelle Williams is a senior director at NTI. She leads and supports projects across NTI, including efforts to reduce nuclear risks and advance understanding of the global and long-term effects of nuclear weapons use.
This article was published on Oct. 31, 2025 at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.