By Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden | 14 October 2025 (IDN) — I’m just out of the cinema having seen Kathryn Bigelow’s masterful film, A House of Dynamite, about a nuclear missile found on radar to be heading towards America. The film ends with the destruction of Chicago, and the U.S. president is unsure what to do.
In the Cold War days, some of us used to say, “Better red than dead” — to rebuff those who believed in nuclear deterrence as a means of giving the West security. We had influential films about nuclear war exploding the myth of successful deterrence — Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1959), portraying the last people to die after a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in a submarine off the coast of Australia; and Peter Sellers’s Doctor Strangelove (1964), portraying an Air Force general going berserk and attempting to initiate a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia. (It was based loosely on true events.)
And we had the marchers from Aldermaston to London in the U.K., members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. None of the films nor the marchers managed to persuade Western leaders to disarm, but they made people in power — as well as electorates — wake up. This did constrain politicians from precipitate action, from doing the unthinkable without thinking it through. President Ronald Reagan became a nuclear pacifist after watching films of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Now, a generation later, those of us who are frightened that Trump could start a nuclear war over Iran or North Korea should see this film — to understand how ordinary human beings working on national security in the White House might react to a missile launch from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean when they have only 20 minutes to find out if the launch is hostile or accidental before giving the doubting U.S. president their final advice. It is either suicide or surrender, they conclude — the same idea as “Better red than dead.” The film, so brilliant in its storytelling and cinematography, has the ring of authenticity.
At the U.N., President Donald Trump (aka “Fire and Fury”) once threatened to “totally destroy North Korea” if the U.S. was forced to defend itself. But that is the suicide option, since North Korea would see the U.S. rockets coming and would fire more of its own.
Senator Bob Corker, the former chair of the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee and, at one time, an important backer of Trump the candidate, once said that Trump could set the nation “on the path to World War 3.”
The Erosion of the Nuclear Taboo
I would surmise, even though I have no polling evidence, that an overwhelming majority of the world would not accept the use by the U.S. of nuclear weapons in any circumstances — even if they believe in what I think is the false notion of “deterrence.” In Europe, I doubt if more than 5% do.
But in America, it is another matter. According to a survey carried out in the U.S. and analysed at length in Harvard University’s International Security, some 50% of American adults believe that their use would be justified — especially if it saved the lives of 20,000 American soldiers (which is less than the 38,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea today).
It’s the same conviction that led President Harry Truman to justify the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To protect the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who were fighting their way from the south of Japan to Tokyo, the bombs had to be used, he reasoned. In fact, we now know from well-regarded historians that this was not the most important argument that persuaded Truman to give the order to bomb. It was the fear that the U.S. ally, the Soviet Union — invading from the North — would reach Tokyo first if the U.S. didn’t immediately intimidate Japan into surrender. (If the U.S. forces had been given the option, they would have taken Tokyo by conventional means in a week or two.)
2023’s Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer, about the construction of the first bomb, failed to mention this, ruining the film’s otherwise authentic feel.
In August 1945, 85% of Americans told pollsters they approved of Truman’s decision. Support for that decision has declined over the years. A poll in 2015 said that only 46% thought it was justified, but even that is a lot. Hence, the false idea that Americans consider the further use of nuclear weapons a taboo. John Hersey’s popular book, Hiroshima, which sold millions of copies, did much to reinforce the sense of taboo, but over time, it proved insufficient. All Americans were not — and are not — inoculated against future use.
Leaders Who Nearly Crossed the Line
At the time of the last Korean War in 1953–55, Truman again nearly used nuclear weapons to halt the Chinese coming to the aid of the North, but was dissuaded by Winston Churchill. Advisors to President John F. Kennedy, including his (later pacifist-inclined) Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, considered their use against the Soviet Union during the Cuban crisis and were mentally prepared, in extremis, to use them. In the end, a deal trading the dismantling of U.S. missiles based in Turkey for the shipping home of Soviet nuclear rockets based in Cuba defused the crisis. A rarefied macho debate on the American side obfuscated this obvious trade.
During the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger thought seriously about using nuclear weapons against the North. During the Cold War, Georgi Arbatov, an advisor to Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, confided to me that there had been two or three occasions when the generals had argued to Brezhnev that they should be considered for use in a surprise strike against the U.S.
If Donald Trump feels unconstrained to use them, he won’t be the first president to think the unthinkable.
Public Opinion and the Peril Ahead
A sophisticated poll by YouGov in 2015 examined how America would react if Iran were caught violating the 2015 Agreement that sharply reduced world sanctions in return for Iran giving up its nuclear research program. YouGov asked its sample what they would think if Iran then attacked an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, killing over 2,000 military personnel. Then the U.S. retaliated with airstrikes and a ground invasion. A 56% majority of those polled agreed that if Iran did not then surrender, a nuclear strike was OK. Even women did not think differently. The taboo is no longer all-encompassing.
We don’t have such a detailed and careful poll of American attitudes to a possible nuclear strike on North Korea or Iran. But one can guess. If Trump decided to, he might have the support of a good half of the population. They should go and see Bigelow’s film.
*Jonathan Power has been an international foreign affairs columnist for over 40 years and a columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune (now the New York Times) for 17 years. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Copyright: Jonathan Power
Image: A silhouette of a political figure holding a glowing sphere symbolising nuclear power.