Countdown to Zero

There's a key scene in Countdown to Zero that shows members of the public being asked how many nuclear weapons currently exist in the world. A few make wild guesses but none of them really have a clue. It's this ignorance of an ever-present threat that Lucy Walker tackles with her new documentary. Coming from the production team behind An Inconvenient Truth, this slick, tightly paced film packs a lot of information into its ninety minutes, successfully getting its message across in a manner that's accessible and engaging rather than didactic. Walker incorporates interviews with a impressive variety of contributors – from former heads of state to plutonium smugglers – and makes effective use of archive footage, but the most alarming sequence is one that reveals just how close we have unwittingly come to disaster in the past. The film's tales of accidents, miscommunications and near-misses are deeply unsettling, and proof, if it were needed, that the threat of nuclear destruction is one we can no longer ignore.