Films about nuclear war have often been dismissed by officials as inaccurate, alarmist or merely fictional, but their real power lies in forcing audiences to confront the madness of nuclear annihilation.

A feature film based on Annie Jacobson’s terrifying non-fiction book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, is now in preproduction with Dune director Denis Villeneuve at the helm. Looking back at how previous films about nuclear Armageddon have been received may give us a glimpse of how the Trump administration may respond to it.

In the recent Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite, an ICBM of unknown origin is detected streaking across the Pacific on a course that, in less than twenty minutes, will turn Chicago to ash. Efforts to shoot the missile down fail, as the ground-based interceptors (GBIs) miss their target and, as the seconds count down, the president, played by Idris Elba, has only seven minutes to decide how to respond. The consequences of his decision, which the film leaves open, could mean the end of human civilisation and even most life on Earth.

What was the official response to the film? A week before it streamed, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) produced a memo attacking the film’s credibility. America’s GBIs, they said, are much more accurate than portrayed in the movie, with a 100 per cent success rate. (The Center for Arms control puts that figure at 55 per cent in carefully controlled tests.) And an article published by the West Point-based Modern War Institute argues that the film’s premise is flawed since no adversary would launch just a single missile at the United States. It was also judged illogical that the president’s choices were limited to “surrender” or “suicide” – the latter meaning all-out nuclear war. The country could absorb the loss (meaning the 10 million inhabitants of Chicago) and respond only after the missile’s source had been determined. Finally, as the MDA memo helpfully pointed out, the plot of A House of Dynamite is “fictional” and........

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