Countdown to Zero

The Cold War ended but nuclear weapons did not go away. Lucy Walker's documentary gathers the danger under three headings: madness, accident and miscalculation. That is, a state using them deliberately, a fault or a human error starting the chain, and two sides misreading each other into a decision that cannot be undone. The film goes one by one through the moments when each of the three nearly happened. Among those who speak are Tony Blair, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mikhail Gorbachev and Pervez Musharraf; Gary Oldman narrates. The film also includes an invented sequence of a bomb going off in Times Square in New York at the same moment as the New Year countdown. The documentary is openly a campaign film arguing for disarmament and gives no room to the opposing view. Its force is not in that partisanship but in the fact that most of the people speaking ran these weapons themselves.