Countdown To Zero (2010)

Editor's Note Conventional wisdom has it that the prospect of nuclear war subsided with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, but filmmaker Lucy Walker illustrates how the nuclear threat has only grown in unexpected ways and moved in new directions in this documentary. There are 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, a number of which are unaccounted for (when the USSR split into a handful of separate states, some of their bombs went missing), and as the technology becomes simpler, several major radical terrorist groups and politically unstable nations are trying to obtain nuclear weapons, a prospect that isn't as unlikely as one would hope. And what would happen if the wrong people got their hands on the bomb -- or if some of the "good" people were to detonate one through error or mistaken judgment? In COUNTDOWN TO ZERO, a number of leading politicians and political analysts -- including Jimmy Carter, Tony Blair, Valerie Plame Wilson, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Zbigniew Brzezinski -- discuss the question of nuclear war in the 21st century and what can be done to eliminate the weapons once and for all. Featuring narration by Gary Oldman and music by Pearl Jam, COUNTDOWN TO ZERO received its world premiere at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

	Lucy Walker - Screenwriter
	Peter Golub - Composer
	Nick Higgins - Director of Photography
	Gary Clarke - Director of Photography
	Bryan Donnell - Director of Photography
	Mikhail Gorbachev - Host
	James Baker III - Host
	Jimmy Carter - Host
	Tony Blair - Host
	Robert S. McNamara - Host
	Zia Mian - Host
	F.W. deKlerk - Host
	Bruce Blair - Host
	Joe Cirincione - Host
	Rolf Mowatt-Larssen - Host
	Pervez Musharraf - Host
	Valerie Plame Wilson - Host
	Lawrence Scott Sheets - Host
	Mike Chinoy - Host
	Alexander Glaser - Host
	Matthew Bunn - Host
	Graham Allison - Host
	Pervez Hoodbhoy - Host
	Andrew Koch - Host
	Ahmed Rashid - Host
	Jeffrey Lewis - Host
	Roger Molander - Host
	Zbigniew Brzezinski - Host
	Ira Helfand - Host
	Frank Vonhippel - Host
	R. Scott Kemp - Host
	Richard Cizik - Host
	Thomas d'Agostino - Host
	Richard Burt - Host
	Robert Chappell - Director of Photography
	Lucy Walker - Director

Entertainment Weekly
"COUNTDOWN TO ZERO makes old terrors radioactively new again....[Lucy Walker] has her finger on the ultimate hot-button topic, and she doesn't let go." -- Grade: A- 07/30/2010

Box Office
4 stars out of 5 -- "COUNTDOWN TO ZERO is effective and frightening. It is not a film without hope, as this is very much an advocacy film that suggests how the nuclear threat could be eliminated..." 07/23/2010

New York Times
"Cleverly structured around John F. Kennedy's 1961 address to the United Nations about disarmament, Lucy Walker's documentary assembles a nuclear Who's Who of concerned scientists, writers and politicians." 07/22/2010

Washington Post
3 stars out of 4 -- "Walker makes a clear, cogent and irrefutable case for the total elimination of nuclear weapons." 07/23/2010

Los Angeles Times
"COUNTDOWN TO ZERO is both a comprehensive look at the many ways we are all in terrible danger from the world's 23,000 nuclear weapons and and an understandably desperate plea to cut that total to zero." 07/30/2010

Wall Street Journal
"[I]t has a sense of rhythm, color and humanity that evokes melancholy rather than dread. The nighttime photography, of the world's most luminous cities, awakens our sense of grief -- not for what's gone, but for what could be, in the blink of an eye." 07/23/2010

Total Film
3 stars out of 5 -- "Revealing our frighteningly ongoing near-misses with atomic Armageddon, it's a call for disarmament..." 06/01/2011