A Nuclear Missile Is Headed to Your City: How Do You Respond?
What do you do when a missile has been launched at your city and you only have a few minutes to react?
Kathryn Bigelow’s new film A House of Dynamite invites just such a dilemma when US early warning systems detect a ballistic missile launched from an uncertain location on a heading for the American Midwest.
Divided into three segments covering the same eighteen minute period, the film attempts to chronicle the response of the US national security state to the most dreadful of eventualities.
One segment of the film culminates with the Secretary of Defense having a conversation with his daughter, who, by then, has been identified as the missile’s target and lives in Chicago.
With time running out and despair high, the SecDef chats with his daughter and wishes her well as she walks to work with her new boyfriend.
Of the many action items facing a person when they learn of an incoming missile, one thing you absolutely do not do is take a walk outside, or advise a loved one to do so. Another thing you do not do is assume that the city targeted by the warhead will be destroyed by it.
While the panic triggered by the incident is likely authentic, the reality of nuclear weapons demands a more practical set of responses.
The Missile
Circular Error Probability (CEP) is defined as a circular range in which half of all missiles launched at a specific target will land. This is to say that a one kilometer CEP means that half the missiles launched at a target will land within a one kilometer circle.
The other half… won’t. CEP for missiles can vary wildly. The reputed CEP for a Chinese DF-4 ICBM is between 1km and 1.5km. The Russian Bulava submarine launched ballistic missile has an estimated CEP of 300 meters. Of North Korea’s family of ballistic missiles we have little good data.
Most nuclear warheads are powerful enough that they will cause significant damage to the target if they land anywhere in their CEP or even without. But cities are big places, and it matters a great deal where the warhead detonates (assuming an airburst) when evaluating likely damage to different neighborhoods.
With respect to Chicago, according to Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP a 150 kt warhead detonated over Wrigley Field would kill some 170 thousand people and injure another 530 thousand.
A warhead detonated over Guaranteed Rate Field (home of the White Sox) would kill 120 thousand and injure 520 thousand. Crucially, there is very little overlap between those two groups.
The two stadiums are nine miles apart, well outside of the CEP of most modern missiles, but without information on the motives of the attacker there is no reason to prefer one target over the other. Crucially, only a few neighborhoods near downtown Chicago would suffer damage from both.
The Warhead
First things first, the missile may not even have a nuclear warhead. A single missile appearing out of nowhere may or may not carry political intent. If the launch was accidental, there’s no certainty that it’s carrying a nuclear warhead or indeed any warhead at all.
Second, as the film allows, not all nuclear warheads detonate as expected. A nuclear weapon is not a package of explosive; it is a complex device that can badly malfunction in service, especially at the end of a trans-continental missile ride which was subjected to an interceptor attack.
The warhead could explode with much less force than expected, detonate in an incomplete fashion (possibly distributing radioactive material, as a dirty bomb), or not detonate at all.
Third, size matters. The largest warhead currently carried on an ICBM appears to be the four megaton devices equipped on Chinese DF-4 missiles. Four megatons is very bad news for any city, but under no set of targeting assumptions would it kill 10 million people.
A more reasonably sized warhead (the 150kt device tested by North Korea) would inflict far less damage and consequently be far more dependent on location, as detailed above.
Just Don’t Panic, OK?
In the nightmare scenario that you receive news that an unidentified missile is headed for your location or that of a loved one, the very first thing to do is try to avoid panic.
It is, of course, tough to avoid panic in the face of a nuclear device, but nevertheless. The second thing to do is to seek shelter, or advise others to do so, because even relatively thin walls provide substantial protection against fire and radiation.
The more robust the building, the greater the chance of avoiding death or injury. Nuclear weapons are man-made disasters, and the same steps that mitigate a natural disaster can mitigate damage from a nuke.
The construction of vast numbers of thermonuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to render the civil defense efforts of the 1950s pointless; enough big missiles would hit that efforts to protect cities weren’t worth the expense.
That may be true in context of a full-on thermonuclear exchange. If only one missile is on the way, the architecture of cities makes a great deal of difference in who lives and who dies.
About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley
Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.
More Military
Canada’s F-35 Fighter Debate Summed Up in 3 Words
The U.S. Air Force’s B-52J Bomber Crisis
Mach 5.1 X-51 Waverider ‘Hypersonic Scramjet’ Has a Message for the Air Force
Beast Mode: How the F-35 Stealth Fighter Bolts on 22,000 Pounds of Bombs
bis-biss
October 31, 2025 at 7:07 pm
An ICBM like RS-24 might take 18 minutes to hit a large city.
A sea-launched version could take maybe 12 minutes, but…..
a space-based nuke would only need 5 to 6 minutes to sanitize its target.
….just sayin’ !
Swamplaw Yankee
November 1, 2025 at 5:42 am
Chicago: Just take the Amtrak out to California.
Ukraine: Pick a city: any Ukrainian city. Thanks to POTUS Obama any US citizen can get bombed in the Ukraine. And, quite regularly. And, with a wide variety of Missiles.
In 2014 d POTUS Obama Democrat Cabal unilaterally covertly green lit the geopolitical loss to NATO of Ukraine’s Crimean ancient soil, Families and Black/Azov Sea jurisdictional zones to the prime vile Cold War enemy of the WEST, Kremlin ruuzzkie Putin.
Once Obama got in 2008, the NATO focus on the vital Black Sea zone received less funding. POTUS Obama betrayed the WEST by unilaterally green lighting in 2014 the loss of freedom of movement of NATO between Ukraine and Turkey, splitting the NATO zone.
Today, missiles travel over these former NATO zones to bomb Ukrainian cities. Why not take a charter over to say Kherson City and delight in daily human safari hunting by ruuzzkie Muscovy of anyone walking in the CBD. Maybe you can get killed or maimed by a PRC CCP Xi regime supplied drone.
One can be sure, one speculates, that the missile so ready to strike the Chicago CBD only had a defective part made in CCP Xi regime controlled China. And, that would never be at all construed by 2025 MAGA elite as a WW3 attack on the USA. Ukraine, also, is not in WW3, as the MAGA elite bunkered down in the inner aquarium deny any such reality in Ukraine. Ukraine is just undergoing a MAGA POTUS Trump land swap. a genuine free unilateral POTUS Trump FREE gift to his ole cuddle buddy, ruuzzkie Putin. Got it all straight, Bud? -30-
Jim
November 3, 2025 at 9:15 am
While the movie dramatizes the situation of “an incoming missile,” we have a real life experience with such an event.
A false missile alert was sent to Hawaii on January 13, 2018, causing panic across the state. The alert was the result of human error during a shift change at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, when an employee mistakenly selected “missile alert” instead of “test missile alert”. The presumed “missile” was thought to come from North Korea for unknown reasons (take a look at the videos and interviews from residents of Oʻahu, where the “incoming missile” was thought to be heading).
Now, there was no missile, but for a time, there was genuine panic at the prospect of an incoming missile.
But perhaps, this is where people from all points of the political spectrum can agree on:
Let’s avoid nuclear war.
There is no winner… no matter what some Dr. Strangelove might claim while sitting in the relative safety of a nuclear bunker.
And, let’s not head down a pathway which brings nuclear war any closer than we already are. (The elite might be safe in their expensive bunkers, rather, it’s the everyday Americans who would pay the biggest price.)
To be clear, there are “theorists” who think nuclear war can be “won,” particularly with tactical nukes, especially, after a conventional war starts and unexpectedly one side or the other finds itself in the dire position of losing a conventional war they thought would be an “easy” victory.
Miscalculation is the biggest threat to human civilization.
Look at recent events, each side has made miscalculations about the ability of the other side which has already led to escalation of aggressive action and threatens a wider war (which could go nuclear, although, largely dismissed by those analysts most invested in winning at any cost).
This same pattern of miscalculation is even more likely when on the edge of open nuclear war.
Again, there is a wide spectrum of political opinion in America, but let’s all have a common goal of avoiding the extinction of human civilization as we know it at our own hands.
That would be a terrible epitaph for the human species.
(If there is anybody left to read it.)