Countdown to Zero hits nukes on the button

A British director hopes to do for nuclear disarmament what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change with a documentary that has wowed audiences from the United Nations to Cannes.

Lucy Walker's film, Countdown to Zero, starts with John F Kennedy's 1961 speech in which he contemplated an uninhabitable earth: "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, miscalculation or madness."

Walker's film isn't about ‘dirty bombs’; the threat from these unsophisticated weapons has been blown out of all proportion by some in the media. This film is about the real thing – and as one of Walker's interviewees makes clear, you don't need a Manhattan Project to build a nuclear bomb. Any country with a university can produce enriched Uranium – the active ingredient in a nuclear weapon.

A nuclear bomb could be set off by accident, by a rogue state, or by terrorists. Walker's film makes the case, championed in the past by both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, that we will not be safe until there are zero nuclear weapons: total nuclear disarmament.

During the film, Tony Blair warns Walker that Iran and North Korea are prepared to trade nuclear weapons technology. But for those who are reluctant to once again trust the opinions of the former British prime minister regarding weapons of mass destruction, there are plenty of more plausible figures. Besides some eminent scientists, Mikhail Gorbachev, the CIA spy Valerie Plame and former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf all make an appearance.

One of the film's most impressive scoops is an interview with a Russian smuggler being held in a Georgian prison. Walker spent night after night drinking in Tbilisi with top Georgian officials to secure an interview with Oleg Khintsagov, who was arrested in 2006 for trying to sell 100g of enriched Uranium to someone he thought was an al-Qaeda operative.

"It was like interviewing Mohamed Atta before the September 11 attacks," Walker told the Sunday Times. "Khintsagov believed he was selling HEU, bomb-grade uranium, the real deal, the stuff you make a nuclear device with, to someone he thought was Al-Qaeda. So, in his mind, he was playing his part in an attack that would have been infinitely more devastating than 9/11."

Khintsagov had nowhere near enough enriched Uranium to make a bomb, but he claimed he could get more. Scarily, nobody yet knows from where he sourced the 100g he was carrying.

Walker, who is based in Los Angeles, certainly has some starry champions. One of her producers is Lawrence Bender – who is responsible for most of Quentin Tarantino’s films and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

Her film was even screened at the nuclear non-proliferation talks at the United Nations earlier this month, where it was introduced by Hollywood actor Michael Douglas (a UN 'Messenger for Peace', no less). Although it was generally well received there, the Iraqi ambassador reportedly questioned the film’s treatment of Israel, a state which everyone knows has nuclear weapons but won’t admit it.

After her Cannes screening yesterday, attended by Queen Noor of Jordan, Walker said: "This is the most urgent threat we face as human beings. [It] did not go away with the Cold War as we would love to think."

Her film illustrates this point horribly: in 1995, a US missile launched from Norway to study the aurora borealis was mistaken for a nuclear attack by the Russian military – even though they had been told about its purpose. It is pure luck that President Boris Yeltsin happened to be sober when he was presented with the nuclear button and he did not believe his advisors.

Until now, the general public has been totally oblivious to the danger that nuclear weapons still present: membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has fallen to 30,000 from a Cold War peak of over 100,000.

Jeff Skoll, Bender's co-producer on Countdown to Zero, said after the Cannes screening that he hoped it would mobilise support for nuclear disarmament, just as An Inconvenient Truth gave impetus to the campaign to tackle climate change.

Of course, although An Inconvenient Truth did wonders for the climate change campaign, it also encouraged sceptics, who thought it over-egged the consequences of global warming, to fight back. CND had plenty of enemies in its Cold War heyday: let’s hope there is no backlash against nuclear disarmament as effective as, say, the Climategate affair. ·