From almost the very start of Countdown to Zero (2010) you have a keen awareness that you are witnessing something truly awesome and awful. In fact, you probably already expected it before you even stepped into the theater or bought the ticket. Only a fool walks into a documentary about nuclear bombs thinking that they are going to take the children out for ice cream afterwards, have a few laughs, and then score with the wife later. Most likely you underplayed the situation, and now you will never be able to eat a meal again without some form of stomach pain or nauseousness, not from the food, mind you, but from the ever present and under the surface tension in your gut that comes from the constant oh-my-god-I-am-going-to-die anxiety which makes digestion nigh impossible, yet which is unshakable from knowing that at any second, without prior warning or choice in the matter, yourself, your family, your dog, and the 500 million people around you could instantly disintegrate into dust. Ignorance is bliss, so they say, and madness is pushing the red button.
In the realm of nuclear annihilation prevention, you have absolutely no power. Well, actually that is only 99% true. There is a URL that you can go to in order to let your inept state representative know your stance on nuclear arms reduction, but I don’t want to spoil the film’s ending…
Countdown to Zero, a slickly produced, well structured, intensely gripping, and beautifully filmed documentary directed by Lucy Walker (Devil’s Playground), pivots its central argument for nuclear arms reduction around a quote by President Kennedy taken during a 1961 United Nations speech, “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”. For one hundred and thirty-one minutes the film explores the continuing nuclear threat almost 50 years after Kennedy’s speech.
As Kennedy alludes to so eloquently, a devastating nuclear event is not a hypothetical “what-if’” of the asteroid-striking-the-earth-kind. As the film painstakingly details, as long as the world holds any nuclear weapons, certainly the staggering 20,000+ that it holds today, then a nuclear event is an almost certainty. What is uncertain is whether the event will be caused by madness, accident or miscalculation. Regardless of how it occurs, you can expect that the world of human interaction and government will, from that point onward, forever change and, to paraphrase one of the movie’s speakers, “you can take the Bill of Rights and put it on the shelf”.
I don’t think many people will argue that a world gone “balls-out” nuclear will be a much less desirable world to live in. As a result, the main point that the film spends time drilling into the audience’s head is that the one thing preventing nuclear attack up until this point has been a very thin patchwork of laws, individual choices, serendipity, happenstance, near misses, and luck. This is what makes up the string holding the metaphorical sword of Damocles over the earth, and all that prevents that sword from dropping from the ceiling and entirely skullf!cking all of us that happen to be sitting beneath it.
Let’s start with madness, which in today’s world is monopolized by only a small group of individuals – terrorists (Osama Bin Laden), religious fundamentalists (Muslims and Christians and Jews, oh my!), cults (Aum Shinrikyo), insane political leaders (Kim Jong-il), and United States War Hawks (Robert Gates, George W Bush). That may seem like a lot of people, but measured by the destruction capacity of a nuclear weapon, one bomb could wipe out all of this group 10-fold. The documentary lists the three ways that a person teetering on the brink of madness, but still functioning as an adult, could acquire a nuclear weapon: steal a bomb, build a bomb, or buy a bomb. It then goes on to show, through historical events, how easy it truly is to do any one of these three things. Indeed, it would seem as if any person with half a brain could perform any one of these three actions. One gets this impression because most people showcased in the documentary – the ones that we know about because they were caught in the act – clearly already had at least 50% of the bulbs blown out in their heads when they committed the deed.
Mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore? Go to Russia and steal a bomb, apparently they have better security guarding their potatoes. Can’t gain access to Russia because you are on the terrorist watch list? Easy. Buy a bomb. There are dozens of men in Georgia, a province bordering Russia, that will sell you some highly enriched uranium. Not because they are as mad as you are, mind you, but because they want to “drive Lamborghini sports car”. Having trouble locating a seller? Hell, just build the bomb yourself. For this final approach you will need a team with some diverse knowledge, kind of like your own personal “Ocean’s Eleven”, and some highly enriched uranium, which can be purchased for the nominal fee of $1/2 million.
You’ll want to build the bomb in the city of detonation to cut down on risk of discovery during transportation, and most likely this will require you to ship the uranium in from overseas. Not to worry. Even the impressive technology in US ports cannot identify uranium that is sealed in a lead container. If you want to play it conservative then simply ship the uranium in one of the many containers of marijuana that make it into this country undetected every day. And that is how a person that has succumbed to madness builds an A-bomb.
So if you aren’t sufficiently paranoid and feeling hopeless by this point in the film, remember that the documentary also touches on the threats of “accident” and “miscalculation”, which I will not do you the favor of rehashing here. Do not fear, you will not be let down by the amount of historical anecdotes and fiery film footage that the director pulls out in order to clearly display that we are very very lucky to, at this point in time, not yet have suffered a significant and catastrophic nuclear event. By all accounts we should have.
Though, in fact, we already did, in the form of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Time magazine in late July released 14 stunning never before seen photos featuring the devastation in Nagasaki and Hiroshima immediately following the United States nuclear attack on those two cities. Though the documentary doesn’t debate the merits of these attacks, or Disease X – the resulting radiation sickness that plagued and killed those unlucky civilians that actually survived the bomb blast – it is clear from those interviewed in the documentary that a nuclear bomb detonated on a city is an act that they would prefer never happen again. Here the name of the film takes on a dual meaning – the countdown to zero signifies the rocket launch sequence of descending numbers familiar to any of us that have watched a movie about space travel or armageddon, but it also signifies the intent to reduce all nuclear warheads in the world down to the number 0. At the end of the day, this is the only way to remove the escalating risk of a devastating nuclear event occurring in our lifetime.
If we can remove all nuclear weapons from the earth, then we might have a chance to live another 50 years or 100 years. Beyond that the blood thirsty ice islands and other results of global warming may, or some say with 100% certainty will, have wiped out all human life from the face of the earth. Hell, that may not be a bad thing from a nuclear event perspective. In a fingerless world, all red buttons are rendered harmless.
Countdown to Zero
(5 puppets)
No surprise the new ‘Countdown to Zero’ disarmament documentary omits life-saving strategies from their agenda of banning nukes, like advocating public Civil Defense, to try and better survive nukes in the meantime.
The disarmament movement for decades has hyped that with nukes; all will die or it will be so bad you’ll wish you had. Most have bought into it, now thinking it futile, bordering on lunacy, to try to learn how to survive a nuclear blast and radioactive fallout.
In a tragic irony, the disarmament movement has rendered millions of American families even more vulnerable to perishing from nukes in the future.
For instance, most now ridicule ‘duck & cover’, but for the vast majority, not right at ‘ground zero’ and already gone, the blast wave will be delayed in arriving after the flash, like lightening & thunder, anywhere from a fraction of a second up to 20 seconds, or more.
Today, without ‘duck & cover’ training, everyone at work, home, and your children at school, will impulsively rush to the nearest windows to see what that ‘bright flash’ was, just-in-time to be shredded by the glass imploding inward from that delayed blast wave. They’d never been taught that even in the open, just laying flat, reduces by eight-fold the chances of being hit by debris from that brief, 3-second, tornado strength blast.
Then, later, before the radioactive fallout can hurt them, most downwind won’t know to move perpendicular away from the drift of the fallout to get out from under it before it even arrives. And, for those who can’t evacuate in time, few know how quick & easy it is to throw together an expedient fallout shelter, to safely wait out the radioactive fallout as it loses 99% of its lethal intensity in the first 48 hours.
The greatest tragedy of that horrific loss of life, when nukes come to America, will be that most families had needlessly perished, out of ignorance of how easily they might have avoided becoming additional casualties, all because they were duped that it was futile to ever try to learn how to beforehand.
The disarmament movement’s sincere supporters, just wanting a world safe from nukes, will discover those unintended consequences to be an inconvenient truth of the worst kind.
The Good News About Nuclear Destruction! at http://www.ki4u.com/goodnews.htm dispels those deadly myths of nuclear un-survivability, empowering American families to then better survive nukes. For as long as nukes exist, these life-saving insights are essential to every families survival!