Kathryn Bigelow’s new Netflix thriller, A House of Dynamite, starts off with a bang. Well, almost a bang. The movie, which was written by TV producer and former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim, begins with the U.S. government grappling with a nuclear missile that’s 18 minutes out from hitting Chicago. What follows is a race against the clock to figure out the attack’s origin and whether or not to respond with a massive nuclear counterstrike.

As told by the politicians, generals and bureaucrats leading the U.S.’s nuclear war efforts, A House of Dynamite terrifyingly unfolds in real time, exploring the protocol and decisions that would need to be made if a nuclear strike was made against America.

“For me, film is an opportunity to explore worlds few people know anything about,” Bigelow told Netflix’s Tudum. “It’s a journalistic approach to filmmaking, where the distinction between entertainment and information is fused and fluid.”

Oppenheim told the outlet that they conducted an “extraordinary amount of research when we were preparing this film” and that he “spoke to as many people as [he] could who’ve worked in these rooms, who’ve had these jobs.”

But how real is the film? Here’s everything A House of Dynamite got right about how the U.S. would respond to a nuclear attack.

It would take less than a half-hour for a nuclear strike from the U.S. or Russia to hit the other country

According to Digital Spy, one of the most accurate aspects of the film is its timeline. When determining the nuclear strike capabilities of the U.S. and Russia, a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that it would take around 25 minutes for a missile from either country to reach the other. If it was launched from a submarine, that time would be even shorter.

“After receiving warning of an attack, political and military leaders in either nation would have very little time to assess the credibility of the warning and decide whether to launch in response,” the report detailed.

Intercepting a missile from either country would be just as difficult do to. It’s been described as “hitting a bullet with a bullet,” per Tudum, which is largely due to the U.S.’s flawed missile defense system.

“From all of my conversations with people who work in missile defense — and again, I think we all are aligned and hoping that those systems could be improved — but I think that those folks are the first to acknowledge that it is a really hard physics problem at the end of the day that we may never be able to solve perfectly,” Oppenheim told the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, per Tudum.

When it comes to nuclear attacks, the U.S.’s first line of defense is a ground-based interceptor (GBI), which features a three-stage rocket employed to launch an exoatmospheric kill vehicle (EKV) to eliminate intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), USA Today reported. If successful, the EKV will collide with and destroy an ICBM outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The problem is that the U.S. has less than 50 GBIs in its “entire arsenal, and the success rate is 61%, but that’s obviously based on tests,” Oppenheim said, according to USA Today. “When you’re testing a system, you’re able to control a lot. So it’s likely that in a real-world scenario, the success rate would be even lower.”

Like in A House of Dynamite, the U.S. has a missile defense system in Fort Greely, Alaska. While the military can intercept nuclear warheads, it could not block multiple missiles in a large-scale attack.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get to a point where we could knock every one of those missiles out of the sky,” Oppenheim said. “All it takes is one to get through to wreak enormous destruction.”

The president would be at the helm of the decision-making

In A House of Dynamite, the U.S. president, played by Idris Elba, is shown spearheading the decision-making as the country faces the nuclear threat. According to Digital Spy, this is aligned with real life. Should a missile be launched at the U.S., the president would be presented options by the Pentagon, and it would be up to them to decide what to do, the Union of Concerned Scientists report noted.

Oppenheim found in his research that while it all falls on the president, there isn’t much preparation for the situation should it arise.

“We asked him, ‘How often does the president practice for a moment like this, given that it all comes down to his decision, and that he might have only a few minutes to decide?’ And the answer was hardly ever at all,” Oppenheim said.

After assuming office, the president is briefed on “certain technical details of how something like that might happen, but it takes less than an hour. Then it never comes up or is practiced for again,” he continued.

While the president doesn’t have to consult with any advisers on what to do, they would consult military officials on the matter, which is shown in A House of Dynamite, NPR reported. A large chunk of the movie sees the president on a video conference with officials; according to Stephen Schwartz, an independent scholar well-versed in America’s nuclear command systems, it’s an accurate portrayal of what would happen in real life.

If a missile was identified, then “the National Military Command Center (NMCC) convenes a Threat Assessment Conference Call with multiple lower-level duty officers,” he said. “If the threat is validated, it becomes a Missile Attack Conference Call joined by more senior officials (and the president, if a senior conferee requests it),” Schwartz said, according to NPR.

The movie shows difficult calls being made in different rooms, which Rose Gottemoeller, a professor at Stanford University who served as the deputy secretary general of NATO from 2016 to 2019 and previously oversaw arms control at the State Department, found “scarily authentic.”

“The situation room at the White House, for example, was absolutely pitch perfect,” she told NPR.

The nuclear football shown in the film is real

During the movie’s terrifying final moments, a young military aide, played by Jonah Hauer-King, is tasked with carrying the “nuclear football,” which is a briefcase that contains the nuclear codes, emergency procedures and other information needed to respond to a nuclear attack, including estimated casualties. Oppenheim told USA Today the briefcase is real and resembles a “menu.”

“The notion of the football has been in the public consciousness for a while, but the idea that inside that briefcase is a manual that has pages of options is stunning,” he told the outlet.

Schwartz said that, as depicted in the film, the football follows the president wherever they go, offering the commander-in-chief the chance to launch a nuclear strike at any time, NPR reported.

“The ‘Football’ looked exactly as it should and that the Presidential Decision Handbook [which lists the pre-set options for a nuclear strike] was a reasonable-looking facsimile,” he told the outlet.

A House of Dynamite is now streaming on Netflix.