- Countdown to Zero
- OPENING: 06/23/2010
- STUDIO: Magnolia Pictures
- RUN TIME:91 min
- ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site
The Charge
No nukes is good nukes
Opening Statement
Atomic apocalypse may still be upon us. That is what the filmmakers behind Countdown to Zero want us to remember. As President Kennedy said, “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.” This quote is used as the thesis behind this film. They used this idea to scare the guano out of me. Seeing images of nuclear bombs going off while being told how your internal organs may explode if you’re close enough to the epicenter, really makes one ponder how to not have that happen. And that is exactly what they are going for. Getting that response is their way to get the audience to act and do what they want them to; whether that be writing their government, texting to a specific number, donating to a charity or reducing carbon emissions. It is emotional manipulation, and it works. However, the direction they are trying to get us to move in is not only naïve, it is futile.
Facts of the Case
In 1942, the Manhattan Project, led by the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, came together to beat Germany in creating a fission-based weapon. Many of the world’s leading physicists were brought into this incredibly top-secret project. They decided to make two bombs and use uranium in one (Little Boy) and plutonium in the other (Fat Man). Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 while the Manhattan Project had yet to finish a working weapon. After a test in New Mexico that showed that the plutonium Fat Man released around 19 kilotons of TNT upon detonation, President Truman decided to use them against Japan. Little Boy was released above Hiroshima; Fat Man, above Nagasaki. At least one hundred thousand people died, most of them civilians. Tens of thousands would later die from radiation sicknesses and cancers.
The Evidence
Since 1945, the world has gone from two nuclear weapons to over 23,000 nuclear warheads. We’ve come a long way, baby. It would take just one-megaton bomb exploding in the air to throw the earth into a nuclear winter. So we have enough going here on this little planet to really mess things up. To have any bombs active really feels, on all sides, irresponsible. Like children picking up loaded guns, I wonder if our world leaders really comprehend what they have in their hands? The film’s solution to all this madness is to disarm all the bombs. It’s great to aim high, but what are we truly trying to accomplish? In a way, the ancient demon we’re trying to destroy is the threat of great weapons in the wrong hands. It’s stopping outwardly antagonistic countries like North Korea and Iran from getting their hands on something that will kill us all. But then, is it right that we should have the bombs and they shouldn’t? As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is quoted in the film as saying, “If they are good, then why should we be deprived? If they are bad, then why do you have them?” Are we really more reliable, more responsible then they? We, America, are the only country who has ever used one. So really that ancient demon is us – all of us. Every single human on the planet is the reason why the dream of disarming all the nuclear weapons is never going to happen. We are not trusting, nor trustworthy enough to bring the count back down to zero.
Closing Statement
There are currently nine countries in the world with confirmed nuclear weapons. Even if by sheer will and luck we are able to get 7 of those countries to completely disarm, the two that are left will fall into a “No, you first” face off. There is just too much power in having something your enemy doesn’t, which won’t allow us to just let it go. We, as a people, do not trust enough to do that. We think, “If I disarm my bombs, and they SAY they’ve disarmed all their bombs, but they really have a secret stash, that will leave me open to attack. I need to have my own secret stash.” And we also think it’s safer for us to have an ace up our sleeve just in case something happens – and in that way we are not trustworthy either. This film is great in that it got me to ponder and talk about all these situations and scenarios. However, call me cynical, but the solution they offer is, I believe, a big pipe dream that will never be realized.
The Verdict
6/10
2 comments ↓
The film’s director, Lucy Walker, received financing to produce a countdown to zero from Zionist Jeffrey Skoll. Like most wealthy Zionists, he wants the United States to crush Israel’s enemies. Sadly, most of America enjoys serving the billionaire banker class rather than questioning their motives. The movie is pro-war on Iran.
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 try to learn how to survive a nuclear blast and radioactive fallout. In a tragic irony, the disarmament movement has 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 downwind won’t know to move perpendicular away from the 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’s sincere supporters, just wanting a world safe from nukes, will discover those unintended consequences to be inconvenient truths of the worst kind.
The Good News About Nuclear Destruction! at http://www.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!
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