Countdown to Zero (2010)

This is an ugly little film, I watched it because I wanted to see a balanced account of the state of world power and the insanity of the mutual destruction doctrine, what I got was a piece of propaganda that Goebbels himself would have been proud of. I watched open mouthed as the political bias of the makers was laid bare for all to see, they must really think we are moronic. If as I suspect this is just a 'psy-op' to make the world believe that is 'woz the Arabs, wot dun it' when a nuclear device is exploded on US soil, then you will see the truth in what I'm saying soon, I hope to the pit of my soul that I am wrong.

Writer/director Lucy Walker's "Countdown To Zero" is a "wake up call" in the second nuclear age. An urgent call, crafted in the film genre, for reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons around the globe. The threat has fragmented slightly to also encompass global nuclear terrorism, another risk dealt with at length in the film. It takes surprising twists, following closely upon the history and facts of the issues that have brought us the nuclear age we live in today. The film is neutral, candid, cold, "unblinking", fair and true to the intensity of the obvious threats, it builds continuously from their facts and anecdotes of the past and present, conception in Oppenheimers brain, the horrendous use of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a trail of broken treaties, missed opportunities, diffused and decentralized agendas, near misses, persistent threats of terrorism, and failed visions of the nuclear age. President's John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have both left legacies in this territory, based in their historic action taken toward reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan personally believed that we could reduce nukes during his presidency, eliminate them completely, and Russian Pres. Mikhail Gorbachev and Pres. Reagan came very close to realizing the dream. JFK also believed strongly in the need to eliminate nukes, "before they eliminate us". What struck me in the film was how JFK, early on in his campaign recounted the time when he first began talking to people about nuclear disarmament, he was surprised by how many people cared deeply about the issue and if he'd known earlier (about the deep public interest), he would have made it a priority much sooner than he did. I thought it was surprising incite from the film (an aside), because it showed how public opinion more than anything, had influenced JFK's opinion on the problem and his policy. The same is true today. It's a deep, perhaps, covert lesson of the film. Which perhaps goes beyond it. And its important to keep public interest focused on this issue. Its not about scare tactics or party lines, but about keeping this issue at the top, because that's what gets work done on the problem, not only providing the incentive to our politicians to action, but the public support they need to make change. That is why I think it is so important for people to see this film, because its gotten a lot of attention in the press and the popularity of the film will, no doubt, unofficially be looked at by our political leaders as possibly one indicator, a gage, of how important this issue is to us, and not only to the people in the U.S., but also worldwide.

No surprise the new 'Countdown to Zero' disarmament documentary omits life-saving strategies from their agenda of banning nukes, like advocating public Civil Defense, to try and better survive nukes in the meantime.The disarmament movement for decades has hyped that with nukes; all will die or it will be so bad you'll wish you had. Most have bought into it, now thinking it futile, bordering on lunacy, to ever try to learn how to survive a nuclear blast and radioactive fallout.In a tragic irony, these disarmament activists have rendered millions of American families even more vulnerable to perishing from nukes in the future.For instance, most now ridicule 'duck & cover', but for the vast majority, not right at 'ground zero' and already gone, the blast wave will be delayed in arriving after the flash, like lightening & thunder, anywhere from a fraction of a second up to 20 seconds, or more.Today, without 'duck & cover' training, everyone at work, home, and your children at school, will impulsively rush to the nearest windows to see what that 'bright flash' was, just-in-time to be shredded by the glass imploding inward from that delayed blast wave. They'd never been taught that even in the open, just laying flat, reduces by eight-fold the chances of being hit by debris from that brief, 3-second, tornado strength blast.Then, later, before the radioactive fallout can hurt them, most won't know to move perpendicular away from the downwind drift of the fallout to get out from under it before it even arrives. And, for those who can't evacuate in time, few know how quick & easy it is to throw together an expedient fallout shelter, to safely wait out the radioactive fallout as it loses 99% of its lethal intensity in the first 48 hours.The greatest tragedy of that horrific loss of life, when nukes come to America, will be that most families had needlessly perished, out of ignorance of how easily they might have avoided becoming additional casualties, all because they were duped that it was futile to ever try to learn how to beforehand.The disarmament movement will be culpable for those grave unintended consequences, and the sincere activists, who strove to save all from nukes, will discover it worse than an inconvenient truth.The Good News About Nuclear Destruction! at ki4u.com/goodnews.htm dispels those deadly myths of nuclear un-survivability, empowering American families to then better survive nukes. For as long as nukes exist, these life-saving insights are essential to every families survival!

It's a subject we don't like to think about. We'd all prefer to stick our heads in the sand and pretend it isn't there. And when we do think about it we feel so incompetent of doing anything about it that we quickly push it away. But we do need to think about it and do something. Let's all become more actively involved in the subject matter. This film details so well what we're up against but also gives us hope that if we all work together we can turn this around. Many younger people aren't even aware of the dangerous trend and when we mention nuclear weapons, many of them believe it's either under control - which it isn't - or that it's already too late and nothing can be done about it anyway. But we need to educate everybody, in every country, in every religion, of the importance of disarmament and non-proliferation.