Countdown to Zero (2010)

Directed by: Lucy Walker | 89 minutes | documentary | Starring: Graham Allison, James Baker III, Bruce Blair

The music video for the 1986 Genesis song “Land of Confusion” features a Spitting Image doll of then-President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who wants a sister by his bedside after a night of bad dreams. Only he confuses the buttons: instead of the one for the sister (‘nurse’), he presses the button that launches a nuclear weapon (‘nuke’). It is a striking picture of how the Cold War feared nuclear war and how a random incident could have unleashed a worldwide devastating conflict. The images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both hit by a nuclear weapon in 1945, were still on my mind.

After the fall of the Wall, however, this diminished. To be sure, war and terrorism still existed on a horrific scale in large parts of the world – Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Islamic terrorism – but those threats were more local in nature than nuclear world war. You would almost think that nuclear weapons no longer pose such a great threat.

‘Countdown to Zero’ is a 2010 Lucy Walker documentary that takes the opposite point of view and seeks to call for vigilance. Although there have been no attacks with nuclear weapons since the invention of the nuclear weapon and its first use in 1945 after the two above examples from Japan, the number of countries owning them has risen to 40. After a peak during the Cold War, the total number of nuclear weapons is still over 22,000.

And that is not without danger. Most of the ways this leads to risk are not revolutionary new insights; one can think of Iran’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, which increase the chances of terrorist groups acquiring them. Also the lousy security of storage points for enriched uranium in the former Soviet Union, where you can sometimes just walk in and take the base of a nuclear weapon, will not surprise those interested in this matter.

What does blow your mind are the trivialities that can make dealing with nuclear weapons go wrong, even within an advanced military force like the US. Examples are given of fighter jets that accidentally fly around with nuclear warheads and may or may not crash, where only a few safety mechanisms stood in the way of a nuclear disaster on American soil. The most shocking example comes from January 1995, when a US jet fighter armed to the teeth flew into Russian territory, all Russian military protocols dictate a response to this act of aggression, and only President Yeltsin’s improvisation and audacity prevented a nuclear conflict.

As in many political documentaries, there is no shortage of talking heads. Fortunately, these are the greats who are coming to have their say: Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, Jimmy Carter, Pervez Musharraf and numerous experts and scientists in this field. Their presence gives ‘Countdown to Zero’ the necessary cachet; from a former president or CIA expert you take something just that little bit easier. J. Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb, can also be seen in archival material, and it is fascinating to see how quickly he sees all the implications of his magnum opus – which leads to little optimism.

In the hour and a half that the documentary lasts, ‘Countdown to Zero’ shows us that the only way to completely eliminate the threat of these potentially devastating weapons is to eliminate nuclear weapons completely from the world. One should expect little else from such a committed documentary: the aim is to convince the viewer of this and to encourage the promotion of this goal. Of course, all the aforementioned celebrities agree with this – no Western politician will ever say otherwise – but the film lingers on this wish, without being able to say how this noble aspiration should be fulfilled. How can you convince countries that have been peddling a nuclear weapon for decades? And is it really useful, as a neat, democratic constitutional state, to put out all atomic bombs if shady regimes don’t care and keep their weapons safe? None of these questions are answered, which is a shame. ‘Countdown to Zero’ does encourage you to ask, and that is something.