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The upside of Countdown to Zero -- Lucy Walker's straightforward and scrupulously researched documentary about the less-than-secure state of nuclear weaponry -- is that global warming may not even be close to our No. 1 problem.
Well, except for isolated spots where the temperature may reach 8,000 degrees, not accounting for the Humidex.
A chronological diary of danger, the movie begins with Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer and Hiroshima and takes us through the Cold War, and a plethora of near-Armageddons (as recently as the '90s, when a thankfully sober Boris Yeltsin was given the "suitcase" and advised to engage launch codes after a U.S. research rocket in the Arctic was mistaken for a first-strike).
Interestingly, there's a remarkable look back at how Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev finally got down to the horror of what they were sitting on and began the world's first total disarmament talks (characteristically, it took a movie -- The Day After -- to make the Gipper see the blinding light).
But the days of having a single, identifiable enemy who could vaporize us (and vice versa) seem like good times when Walker chalks up the various ways an atomic disaster could go down today. (She underscores her point showing five-mile devastation zones in the world's major cities, inside which you are certainly, immediately dead.)
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Potentially-failed states like North Korea and Pakistan have the bomb. Iran is on the verge of same. Osama bin Laden has a stated goal of killing 40 million infidels to offset the number of Muslim casualties he claims have been inflicted over the years. And one convicted smuggler from the former Soviet Union, among the many interviewees in Countdown to Zero, thought he was selling his stash of fissionable material to Al Qaeda when he was arrested in a sting.
The shipping industry, involving hundreds of thousands of boats per day mooring in the U.S., is shown to be particularly vulnerable as an entry-point for weapons-grade uranium and plutonium (at times, the movie veers close to how-to territory for terrorists).
And these days, any half-decently trained physics grad is apparently capable of jury-rigging a crude fission bomb (one plan is shown involving an atomic conversion of conventional field artillery).
All of this makes Countdown to Zero's closing invocation -- that the 20,000-plus nukes in the world be dismantled -- seem like an incomplete thought. You can't remove the knowledge of how to make a bomb, so any serious disarmament movement would have to concentrate on removing fissionable material from the planet.
And since much of this is refined in the process of fueling nuclear reactors (India, North Korea and others became bombmakers under the cover of their reactor program), then you'd have to be talking about nixing the nuclear power industry too.
And that would be a whole other movie.
(This film is rated G)
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca