It’s the end of the world as we know it. And it won’t be fine — at least according to the cautionary documentary “Countdown to Zero.” There may be no more important public concern or one less welcome subject for a late-summer movie jaunt: Warning! At any minute, an errant nuclear bomb could “incinerate the heart of a major city.”
With relatively accessible technologies, slipshod international controls and highly motivated terrorists, it has only been through dumb luck that millions of people haven’t been vaporized before now, apparently. Director-writer Lucy Walker (The Devil’s Playground”) and producer Lawrence Bender (“An Inconvenient Truth”) present a straightforward and frighteningly convincing alert about how close we’ve been in the past, how simply it could happen today, and the horrific physical and societal fallout of a detonation.
If you go
‘Countdown to Zero’
3 out of 5 Stars
Director: Lucy Walker
Rated PG for thematic material, images of destruction and incidental smoking.
Running Time: 90 minutes
“Countdown” is so authoritatively reported — too much so, perhaps — that would-be evildoers will find it a veritable how-to manual: What’s the easiest way to source the scarce enriched uranium or plutonium that is required? Go to the barely protected facilities of the former Soviet Union and bribe an underpaid worker. How to make your bomb? Hire any average graduate student in the field and throw about $7 million at the problem (a surprisingly economical sum for a rogue nation or terrorist faction). Where best to buy or steal a bomb? Pakistan. How to smuggle it into the United States without detection? Surround it in lead or kitty litter then conceal it in one of the 100,000 poorly screened shipping containers that arrive at U.S. ports each day.
There’s nothing fresh about the documentary’s structure or style. But the filmmakers do snag an impressive collection of respected scientific, intelligence and especially political experts. With narration by actor Gary Oldman, archival footage runs alongside heavyweight testimony by Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair and Valerie Plame Wilson, among others.
They bear witness to a terrifying reality, and many of the professionals involved seem terrified, personally, at the prospects. They also support the idea of a 100 percent reduction in nuclear weapons as the only way to prevent civilization’s destruction by “accident, miscalculation or madness.” The film asserts that the United States and Russia, the entities with the most weapons by far, should lead the other nuclear countries toward a total disarmament initiative. “Countdown to Zero” obviously exists to make that particular policy point — however impossible it might be to implement.
