If any of the horrific scenarios sketched by Countdown to Zero comes true, this nuclear-threat documentary will look timid in retrospect. But in a world where such weapons haven’t been used since the year they were first available, the movie appears at times to be overselling its prophecy of probable obliteration.
Riffing on a John F. Kennedy Jr. speech about the dangers of nuclear explosives, director Lucy Walker explores the late president’s three possible paths to radioactive cataclysm: “accident, miscalculation, madness.”
The first two words are nearly synonymous, and cover a range of historical incidents in which someone — most often a Russian or an American — almost authorized a nuclear attack. The third is taken to refer to terrorism, and prompts the film’s most alarming section: a discussion of the ease of building bombs and smuggling highly enriched uranium. (One way to fool the sensors: Hide the bootleg uranium in a shipment of kitty litter.)
The movie opens with a pocket history of the A-bomb, featuring cameos by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi. Then it spins though Mumbai, Madrid, Oklahoma City and other metropolises hit by devastating (but non-nuclear) attacks. New York is featured, as it will be again and again as the movie progresses — although it’s unclear if Walker considers the city the most likely target or simply the most recognizable one.
Such WMD veterans as Jimmy Carter, Tony Blair, Robert McNamara, Mikhail Gorbachev and Valerie Plame Wilson recount unnerving anecdotes: Aum Shinrikyo, the murderous Japanese cult, tried to buy a nuke. In 1961, mutinous French officers in Algeria actually nabbed one. In 1995, only Boris Yeltsin’s common sense prevented a nuclear exchange after an American test missile was mistaken for an assault. And the U.S. has lost several nukes, most of which are still submerged in various large bodies of water.