“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness," US president John F. Kennedy told the United Nations in 1961. "The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”
Producer Lawrence Bender and Alliance Films' Countdown to Zero argues the case that this nuclear sword still hangs over our heads by the thinnest of threads; the Cold War of the 20th Century replaced by the threat of worldwide terrorism.
Gary Oldman Narrates Alliance Films' Countdown to Zero, Directed by Lucy Walker
Producer Lawrence Bender (An Inconvenient Truth, Inglourious Basterds) focuses on the 'accident, miscalculation or madness' portion of Kennedy's speech in showing the three ways that someone could trigger a nuclear war, and how close they came to success.
Narrated by Gary Oldman and featuring interviews with figures like Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, Pervez Musharraf, Jimmy Carter and former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, Countdown to Zero presents the argument that nuclear weapons "must be abolished before they abolish us."
Obviously international terrorism is a major focus of the film: Al Qaeda has been trying to get its hands on Highly Enriched Uranium – the secret ingredient in nuclear bombs – for over a decade to further Osama Bin Laden's crazed plan to slaughter 4 million Americans in one go. The former Soviet Union is a prime place for international terrorists to get a hold of HEU, with lax security, plenty of enriched uranium and a desperate population willing to do anything to get a few dollars.
There are also rogue states like Libya, North Korea, Pakistan and Iran who are working towards joining the Nuclear Club.
But the chilling part of this documentary is how human error or one-in-a-million chance have very nearly unleashed nuclear devastation on the planet. Whether it was a pair of US Air Force bombs accidentally dropped in North Carolina in 1961 (thankfully they didn't explode), or a lack of international communication over a scientific rocket launch that led Russian generals to believe that the US was unleashing a nuclear strike in 1995 (“Fortunately Yeltsin wasn’t drunk,” commented one interviewee), the film shows how closely the US and USSR have come to unleashing nuclear devastation.
Countdown to Zero: 'No Nukes' Film's Argument Is Impossible to Ignore
How do we eliminate the threat of a nuclear explosion? According to the filmmakers, and their interview subjects, it's simple: ban nuclear weapons the same way we banned land mines and poison gas. It's a compelling argument and, from this perspective, impossible to refute.
While many observers will chide this film for being more of a 'no nukes' plea rather than an actual documentary, detractors will nonetheless have a hard time disagreeing with its central message: only a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons could stave off inevitable disaster. Countdown to Zero gets a 4/5.
Dominic von Riedemann - Dominic is the Animated Film Feature Writer, and winner of 11 Suite 101 Editors' Choice Awards.
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