Countdown to zero

Directed by Lucy Walker 91mins, club, IFI members

IT’S A LITTLE late in the day to be manufacturing a defence of Bush and Blair’s WMD thesis but that hasn’t prevented former Oscar-nominee Lucy Walker from having a bash.

Countdown to Zero, an outrageous first-world-centric bit of nuclear scaremongering, unfolds as a series of increasingly preposterous what-ifs and maybes. Back in the day, the film tells us, only sensible tried-and-trusted nations such as the US, UK, France and Israel had access to nuclear technologies. But nowadays all these crazy poor countries such as Pakistan and North Korea have their fingers on the button. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Suppose a drunk Russian peasant stumbles across some uranium? Suppose they make it through checkpoints into Chechnya? Suppose they transport from there to one of those rogue Middle Eastern countries we keep hearing so much about? From one of these benighted kips, reckons former CIA op Valerie Plame Wilson, it’s easy peasy to detonate on US soil.

Factor in all the mathematical possibilities and we’re drawn inexorably to a big fat nothing, but that, judging by the repeated shots of happy city dwellers going about their business, is not the “Zero” to which the film-makers allude.

Mind you, there’s such a general cluelessness about the entire project we’re not entirely sure what the point of the title or the project actually is. As history, it’s a few random Wikipedia entries and factoids with no sense of scale or propriety; important issues are glossed over; Pakistan’s nuclear programme comes under unnecessarily detailed scrutiny.

But to what end? Beyond a fuzzy message that "Atomic Bombs are bad, m'kay?" Countdown to Zerohas nowhere to countdown to. There's no sense of debate or engagement here; no one from the deterrent side of the argument is put forward, no one ventures a solution, no one interrupts Tony Blair when he's speaking to camera.

Ultimately the film seems rather more concerned with the proliferation of newer nuclear states than with global disarmament. “If they’re so bad why do you have them?” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reasonably asks a western interviewer in an old archive clip. He’s not interviewed here; only tried-and-trusted premieres such as Blair make the cut.