“A nonfiction horror movie”
Countdown to Zero is a documentary detailing the dangers of nuclear weapons. In the process of making it, Lucy Walker discovered that “zero”—all-out nuclear war—is a lot closer than most people like to think. She calls the film “a nonfiction horror movie.”
Walker recalls that her scariest interview was with Oleg Khintsagov, a Russian smuggler imprisoned for trying to sell 100 grams of enriched uranium to what he thought was al Qaeda. “An elephant is a huge animal, but 9 grams [i.e. a bullet] can kill it,” he said. “You see, America is a huge country, but that doesn’t mean everybody has to be afraid of America.” Khintsagov thought he was doing his part to bring down America—using only a few grams of powder. The Sunday Times writes,
Yet, as Countdown to Zero makes clear, even more terrifying is that Khintsagov was a bungling amateur, a two-bit fence who usually made a living selling black-market sausage, dried fish and Turkish chandeliers. To this day nobody knows how he got hold of 100 grams of weapons-grade nuclear material—a grayish-green powder that he hid in a plastic bag in a pocket of his coat—or where it came from. Before his arrest, Khintsagov bragged that the 100 grams, which was found to be 89 percent pure, was just a sample and that he could easily get as much as 2 kilograms more.
Highly enriched uranium is a dangerous substance to have floating around the black market. But even America’s weapons are not all that well secure. The Sunday Times continues,
The documentary describes how, in 2007, six live nuclear warheads were accidentally loaded onto a B-52 bomber, which then flew over mainland usa. The warheads were not missed for 36 hours, in a country supposed to have the most secure nuclear arsenal in the world.
If America can lose track of its nukes, what about nations like Pakistan?
Another risk is that America’s enemies could make their own enriched uranium, without stealing it from anyone else.
Walker’s original title for the movie was How to Blow Up New York. “Then I realized that all the steps it would take to blow up New York not only could happen, but actually had happened,” she said. “They just hadn’t all lined up successfully in sequence yet.”
“Until now, the big choke hold has been getting fissile materials. But the enrichment-of-uranium technology is becoming better and better understood, and the parts are becoming more and more common,” she warned.
Walker’s warning is perhaps even more urgent then she realizes. Nuclear war is a very real and frightening possibility. For more information on what’s ahead, see our article “The Unthinkable Will Happen!”
