Countdown to Zero

Lucy Walker’s ambitious and unabashedly alarmist nuclear-disarmament doc may not save the world, but it might scare you into visiting a recommended website. That’s where we’re at now, half a century after President John F. Kennedy told the United Nations that “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.” And boy, have there been a few close calls since then. Talking heads tell some grave, gripping stories, driving home the excessiveness of 23,000 nukes still out there. It can’t hurt to reduce that number; after all, it’s so easy now for the layperson to just make more. Bottom line: Yikes! Thanks to this film, every time I clean my cat’s litter box, I worry about an impending apocalypse. Long story, but now you want to see it, right?