And how are Americans choosing to relax on the weekend when a nuclear attack has seemed more plausible than at any time over the past 40 years? They are flocking to a supposedly escapist film - about a nuclear attack.
The cinema version of the Tom Clancy thriller The Sum of All Fears, starring Ben Affleck, features terrorists nuking the crowd at the football Super Bowl in Baltimore - precisely the kind of nightmare that currently preoccupies the Bush administration.
The film opened on Friday, and immediately smashed its way to No 1 in the US's movie ranking lists by grossing more than $9.5m (£6.5m) on its opening day. The films at two and three in the box office chart - Spider-Man and the new Star Wars - could not manage that much between them.
It was expected to have reached $40m by this morning, which would mean that in three days the film had recouped more than half the costs of making it.
The success is a stunning rebuke to Hollywood analysts who thought the movie's chances of success would be wrecked after September 11. It is a riposte to the critics too: "Collapses into a swamp of sentimental mush" (New York Times); "Mighty offensive and beside the point" (People magazine); and "Flaccid" (Baltimore Sun).
But the scenario is not especially well designed to make anxious cinema-goers put their cares aside: in defiance of most traditions of this genre, the hero, CIA agent Jack Ryan, fails to stop the device being detonated. The number of dead seems unclear.
The theme of the original book has been given a retro-fitting to avoid it being too close to home. In Clancy's 1991 novel, the villains were Muslim terrorists. After protests by the American Islamic Council, the producer, Mace Neufeld, changed the plot before filming began - almost a year before September 11.
In this version, neo-Nazis dig up a lost Israeli bomb, get it overhauled by renegade Russian scientists and smuggle it to Baltimore. However, the CIA - Ryan aside - turns out to be run, in the words of critic Scott Holleran, "like a dotcom start-up", which does come close to recent revelations.
"Sum" is expected to surpass by some way the takings of the three previous Hollywood versions of books about Jack Ryan, subject to the proviso of its plot not actually coming true in the next few weeks.
