Jimmy Carter, Tony Blair, Valerie Plame Wilson, Mikhail Gorbachev, director Lucy Walker and a United Colours Of Benetton-worthy selection of vox pop contributors think nuclear weapons are bad. Not because nukes are bad in general, you understand, but because some eight other countries apart from the United States have nukes – and that’s bad.
Combining compelling footage with lots of interesting talking heads (and, let’s be fair, lots of uninteresting talking heads), Walker’s doomsday documentary presents chilling evidence that a nuclear disaster could easily occur – and very nearly has, numerous times – due to simple miscalculation, tiny technical errors and shockingly lenient security measures. The current state of the nuclear arsenal is discussed; the ownership of the 23,000 extant weapons is revealed; and the ease with which weapons could be smuggled, bought or assembled is clearly outlined. It’s terrifying stuff.
Unfortunately Walker’s arguments come wrapped in layers of stars and stripes, with America’s ‘Us .v. Them’ mentality seeping from every shot. “If Iran acquires weapons, pieces of that become available to terrorist organisations!” warns Plame Wilson. Which would be dangerous. Unlike, say, making weapons available to George Bush or Harry Truman. In a particularly enraging sequence, footage of Hiroshima is used not to illustrate the devastation of Americans’ use of nuclear weapons, but the potential effects of a terrorist attack.
It’s almost impossible to fault Walker’s overall message that the threat of nuclear weapons is all too real. And her final call to arms, asking viewers to text their support to an anti-nuke petition is well-intentioned, if somewhat naïve – do we really think Kim Jung-il will be deeply affected by an SMS poll? It’s great, if somewhat obvious subject matter. It’s just a pity the film is so infuriatingly biased, unintentionally patronising and selectively edited.
Walker repeatedly refers to John F. Kennedy’s assertion that, “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.” By the end of Countdown To Zero, I felt two important words were missing from both JKF’s quote and Walker’s film: “Or Americans.”
Like the many near accidents it recounts, Countdown To Zero is a near-miss.