The horrors of a nuclear Holocaust, a ticking warning in the back of almost everyone's mind, are ever-present, perhaps ever-closer whenever a terrorist, or a rogue state, or someone less fair and balanced than even Fox news, discusses the possibility of an atomioc bomb getting loose. Lucy Walker's excellent documentary, "Countdown to Zero," is just the latest.
Circling around President John F. Kennedy's 1961 speech in which he spoke of the nuclear sword of Damocles that hangs over everyone, and pointed out how the horror could be unleashed by "accident, miscalculation or madness," Walker lets many people speak, from New Year's Eve celebrants in Times Square to tourists in Trafalgar Square. We also hear from Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA agent outed in a piece of petty revenge by Dick Cheney. Robert Oppenheimer, the key developer of the weapon, remembers the early days, and politicians, scientists and others ranging from Blair (Tony) to Brzezinski (Zbigniew) chime in with their warnings.
We are reminded of how close Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came to total disarmament, blocked at the last minute by "Star Wars," and how close we came to World War III when a flock of geese set off alarms in Russia and Yeltsin ("Thankfully, he was sober," says a commentator) refused to act until he had more information.
The story is lightened a bit with clips from "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb," but views of Hiroshima, and of non-nuclear terrorist attacks in various spots throughout the world, are enough to create a climate of fear. There are some 23,000 nuclear bombs in existence, easily sufficient to create almost enough damage, and fissionable material like plutonium or uranium is extremely easy to smuggle.
"Just put it in a truck full of kitty litter," says one expert. "No one will find it."
Until it's too late.
Opens today at the Tivoli
–Joe