Private piece, no connection to my employer

French writer François Mauriac (1885-1970) is said to have once quipped about the division of Germany into East and West after World War II that he liked that country so much, he was delighted to have two of them: “J’aime tellement l’Allemagne que je suis ravi qu’il y en ait deux”. Three German invasions of France inside 70 years could have had that kind of effect on the man.

The US director Kathryn Bigelow is evidently so enamoured (not) of the likely real-time countdown to nuclear mass destruction that she repeats it three times in A House of Dynamite. It is 19 minutes if you must know, though other, shorter countdowns are available depending on where missiles are launched and where they are bound.

And maybe you really do need to repeat the countdown a few times or more to bring it home? Nineteen minutes tick by so fast whether you are a monitor, strategist or decision-maker, let alone a film-goer drinking wine and eating chocolates (not me, honest) or someone watching on a phone (unlikely to be me as watching it on the big screen once was quite enough).

Just to explain the premise of the film: the US detects the launch of an unidentified intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and then establishes from its trajectory that, 19 minutes later, it will hit an American city with the immediate loss of 10 million lives if not intercepted. Oh, in case you are wondering, ICBMs as a rule have nuclear warheads and, once launched, cannot be recalled.

The action of the film is how the American state responds when the choice is summed up as “surrender or suicide”, ie either you do not hit back with your own nuclear weapons because you cannot identify the country attacking you let alone the true scale of the attack, or you hit back and risk an all-out nuclear holocaust. It is a seemingly impossible choice in a quite possible scenario.

Bigelow’s cast convey shock and anxiety in a film stamped with the level of authenticity you come to expect from the director of K-19: The Widowmaker and The Hurt Locker. There are touches of symbolism too such as the toy dinosaur one official, the mother of a young child, finds in her pocket as she grapples with a potential extinction event; or the visit of the First Lady to Africa, the cradle of human civilisation, just as her husband is faced with possibly digging its grave.

Comparatively few films about nuclear war have been made, presumably for the excellent reason that the movie business does not want to terrify and depress the paying public. So why would Bigelow, 73, make this film now? Perhaps because she senses a pressing need to remind us all of the danger most of us try to ignore all our lives in order to stay sane?

Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe, a comparable film, came out in 1964 soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bigelow announced her film 60 years later as fighting raged in eastern Europe with a real danger of Russia and Nato, holders of the biggest nuclear arsenals, going to war with each other. It is bad enough that a nuclear war could start by accident let alone by design.

Cometh the hour, cometh the woman with the 19-minute message? Speaking to French public radio, she was quoted today as saying her film was meant as a “caution”. “There are now nine nuclear powers and only three are members of Nato, which is quite frightening,” she said.

“We are living in an age where we need to reassess nuclear weapons,” she told France Inter.

“We have gradually gotten used to being surrounded by nuclear weapons and there is perhaps a general desire not to think about them or rethink them. But me, I think we should reassess them. And I think that if we had fewer nuclear weapons, we would probably all be safer.”

Cannot argue with that and the main feelings I personally came away with after watching A House of Dynamite were disgust and outrage at the fact we have such weapons at all. However, the sombre truth is that we will probably never give them up because of mutual mistrust and there will always be the risk of an accidental launch.

That said, the risk of nuclear war can always be reduced just by doing more to avoid war full stop, whether by electing responsible politicians or appointing competent diplomats or holding officials to account. Having watched Bigelow’s film I do wonder if Donald Trump has ever been put through a 19-minute drill. And Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping for that matter.

I watched A House of Dynamite in comfort at the Curzon Bloomsbury cinema in London for £18.95 earlier this month. It is being released on something called Netflix on Friday. Trailer