Movie review: ‘Countdown to Zero’ recounts nuclear arms race

Did you know nuclear weapons are a legitimate threat to our well-being? Shocking, isn’t it? Or, at least it is to Lucy Walker, who breathlessly spells out the obvious in her remedial but well-meaning documentary, “Countdown to Zero.”

For 90 snooze-inducing minutes, Walker tries to do for nuclear proliferation what Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” did for global warming: laying out her argument, backing it up with facts and concluding with a call for action.

The difference, though, is that Gore was telling us something most of us didn’t know, whereas Walker is covering ground most people traversed when they were in grade school.

There’s nary a fact or scenario that you haven’t heard at least a dozen times before: that nukes can kill millions; that they’re easy to build; that terrorist organizations like al-Qaida are fixing to detonate them in major cities; and that they are often accidents waiting to happen.

That’s all fine and good, and I’ll admit that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we all could use the occasional reminder that more than 2,300 nuke warheads still remain in existence. But what Walker is offering could be covered in a fraction of the time on the nightly news.

And what, exactly, does she want us to do about it? Write letters to our neighborhood terrorist cell begging them not to vaporize us? Go around the world gobbling up all the plutonium so as to keep it out of the destructive hands of Kim Jong Il? Do away with organized religion, and thus eliminate the root cause of 90 percent of the world’s conflicts? More to the point, what can we do to protect ourselves, particularly in the case of so-called dirty bombs, crudely assembled devices that fit in a backpack but are capable of killing tens of thousands?

Alas, Walker has not a single answer beyond the rote plea to write your congressman. But by the time she gets around to that, you’ll probably have been lulled into a state of indifference by her heavy dependence on generic archival shots and an abundance of talking heads (including outted CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson) standing in agreement that all nuclear weapons should be abolished. Gee, I wonder how long it took them to come to that conclusion?

Walker bombards you with these hackneyed “insights.” She even dusts off the sainted John F. Kennedy and his 1961 U.N. address in which he compared the growing nuclear threat to the sword of Damocles, hanging by a thread, and easily severed by accident, miscalculation or madness.

True, Kennedy should be commended for his foresightedness, but it’s a tad disingenuous given that he was the president who one year later would bring us to the brink of nuclear annihilation. That doesn’t stop Walker from using Kennedy’s three scenarios – accident, miscalculation and madness – as an outline for her argument.

Of the three, it’s the possibility of human and/or computer error that instills the most fear, as Walker revisits the near misses that have occurred in the 65 years since Robert Oppenheimer created a weapon capable of killing more people in a split second than Hitler murdered in a lifetime.

What she fails to point out, though, is that you’re more likely to be killed by heart disease, cancer or even a car accident than a nuke. But those issues aren’t quite as sexy, nor do they lend themselves to the phallic nature of seeing repeated images of big, powerful warheads delivering their payload.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Bob Dylan meant when he predicted “a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO A documentary by Lucy Walker. 2 stars out of 4.

The Patriot Ledger