Countdown To Zero ****

Good documentary film-making informs and provokes debate, and hopefully, addresses all sides of the argument. So in recent times, we’ve had some highly emotive big-screen subject matter (Inside Job’s banking crisis, for example) that’s naturally one-sided to stir up a hornet’s nest of public outrage. It seems film-makers need to find a common concern to guarantee their mainstream audience, and Lucy Walker addresses one of the biggest here in her new film Countdown To Zero about nuclear power falling in the wrong hands – or ‘proliferation’. Oh, and if an act of terrorism wasn’t enough of a worry, the world could go up in a cloud of radioactive smoke through an act of failed diplomacy (like in the Cold War years) or a simple accident (a rising moon that was thought to be an in-coming bomb). Nothing to fear, then…

Walker’s film features chilling commentary from international statesmen and former leaders Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pervez Musharraf, F.W. de Klerk and Tony Blair and traces the history of the atomic bomb, from one of its bright-eyed and later remorseful inventors, J. Robert Oppenheimer (who makes a weepy confessional in the film), to the present state of global affairs and the nine nations with nuclear arsenal, USA, Russia, UK, France, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Iran and Israel. But more disturbingly, the film highlights how unprotected we are against the threat of the material (highly enriched uranium or HEU) and the know-how falling into the wrong hands, such as Al Qaeda. After all, according to Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former CIA Operations Officer for 22 years (1928-2005), to acquire HEU you can simply steal it, buy it or build it – and the film makes all three seem so feasible, like going food shopping in your local supermarket.

With such volatile material in itself, Walker doesn’t have to try too hard to make an unnerving and highly persuasive ticking time-bomb for going ‘zero’ tolerance on nukes, supported by real-life interviews with ‘those in the know’ and news footage. Taken quite literally: “We’re doomed”, seems to be the sensational standpoint, especially if, as the film states, Iran and North Korea are ready to begin trading their technology, and a tiny amount of HEU (25kg) needed to make a bomb can easily be smuggled through ports in kitty litter, without a whiff of detection.

Looking at Walker’s film objectively, it suggests how damn lucky we’ve been so far, and attempts to finish on an ‘upbeat’ note – after scaring the bejesus out of us – with a last push of hope: There’s been a 50 per cent reduction in US and Russian nukes – but there are still around 23,000 bombs and 1,700 tonnes of HEU worldwide. Barack Obama and the Russians have agreed to reduce their stockpiles by another 50 per cent. That’s good to hear, but it’s not the big super powers that are the biggest ‘villains’ of the piece, rather the other, more unsettled players – according to Blair and others: Pakistan and Iran. In this sense, Countdown seems to serve as a propaganda tool for the West’s latest political concerns. In fact, this film is dated already as it’s pre-Osama Bin Laden demise, clearly pointing to Pakistan’s political instability and untrustworthiness with it’s harbouring of the world’s most wanted man. To balance matters a little, it does offer the highly rational argument of ‘defence’ used by the West from Iran’s Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, leading you to think for a moment, who are the real scaremongers here?

In terms of its general picture, Countdown doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, but the well-presented details enforce what we already fear, bringing it back to public attention. Perhaps the most alarming memory of Countdown are the famous words from John F. Kennedy: “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. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us….” (Address before the General Assembly of the United Nations, NYC, 1961). Food for thought, which is precisely what Walker has achieved above all else.

‘Demand Zero Day’ on June 21 sees over 72 participating venues across the UK, where you can watch a screening of the film, followed by a live stream of the panel from BAFTA, including Queen Noor, Lawrence Bender, Valerie Plame and Margaret Beckett. http://countdowntozerofilm.com/screenings.

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