Countdown to Zero

"It's the feel good movie this summer!!"

"You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll come back for more!!"

Speaking as someone whose very first nightmare involved the cast of Family Ties dying in a nuclear explosion

Nightmare? That would be awesome.

What's this SIFF republican bashing crap anyway?

Despite the alarmist tone you describe, building a fissionable device is actually not very easy at all, although designing one is something a high school physics whiz could easily do (and have done).

For one thing, a true fission-bomb requires a sufficient amount of refined U-235 (or better still U-238) or Plutonium to create an explosive fission chain-reaction, and that generally requires a "shaped" charge of conventional explosives surrounding the core to compress it to the point of initiating the chain-reaction; pretty tricky to get right, especially when you have only a limited quantity of core material with which to experiment.

What is much more likely is that someone would create a so-called "dirty bomb", basically a comparatively low-yield conventional explosive device with radioactive materials mixed in, so that the explosive force disburses the radioactive particles over a wide area.

Not as efficient from a destructive point-of-view as a true fission-bomb, but a quite nasty beast nonetheless.

Puts me in mind of "If You Love This Planet" :

www.imdb.com/title/tt0084118/

The most terrifying movie I've ever seen about nukes was "Threads" filmed in 1984. It's in BBC public domain so you can actually watch the whole thing online:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=…

I wrote something about this a couple of years ago, in response to another documentary on the subject. Basically, like Chris said, it's a lot harder than they make it sound.

I go into more detail here:

http://www.suoxi.net/pettyblog/2010/06/t…

While I seriously doubt that any terrorist group is ever going to manufacture a nuclear weapon, I totally believe that it would be easy for a series of accidents to lead to a nuclear holocaust. It's already almost happened more than once. Sometimes it's a matter of minutes before launch when cooler heads prevail.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlHEJtflc…

LOL.

When I was in the Army, we knew exactly how many nuclear missiles were targeted for Vancouver BC and Seattle WA and Everett etc.

You've always been one minute away from a firestorm of nuclear destruction, noobz.

@10:

I don't think it was THAT big of a secret.

Otherwise, why would the kids at Bainbridge High School have painted a giant red-and-white bulls-eye on the top of the water tower that used to sit next to the school more than 30 years ago?

I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that, when you live in a major metropolitan area surrounded by military installations (NAS Whidbey, Bremerton Naval Shipyards, Bangor Sub Base, Ft. Lewis & McChord AFB), plus major civilian transportation infrastructure (Sea-Tac Airport, Boeing, Everett & Renton Fields, Harbor Island/Port of Seattle, et al) you're going to be very much on the Russkie's target list.

And of course, we still are, so far as that goes.

Plus, bonus points, we're now on North Korea's target list, as well as Red China and Russia.

I second third and fourth the Threads recommendation. What a movie.

It's surprising how much you can do to survive a nuclear blast. First of all, because targeting is so advanced now, the typical warhead or bomb is "small" - maybe twice the yield of Hiroshima. There were people in bomb shelters a block from ground zero who would've survived Hirishima had there been blast doors on the shelter.

Please read about what you can do:
http://www.ki4u.com/survive/index.htm

Seriously, read it (scroll down past the initial links). It's a freaky good time.

My favorite tips: if some country like North Korea is evacuating it's cities, start digging. Also: if not killed by the blast, just running towards safety for 20 minutes will move you a mile - and that can make the difference between life and death from fallout from a nuke or a dirty bomb.

I was at the same screening.

Regarding this comment in the review: "at one point, we see a series of dots on a map and the film doesn't bother to explain exactly what we're looking at."

Actually, the film does explain itself, quite clearly. The map graphics appear during the sequence about various authorities investigating and interrupting the black-market transfer of highly enriched uranium and other fissionable material. In context, it is unambiguous that each dot represents a location where such material was seized. Based on the geographic pattern, the film makes the point that these seizures are clustered around Russian cities, with a significant number of events in close proximity to Moscow itself.

I'm not sure why the Stranger reviewer didn't glean this; it was hardly an abstruse element of the film. Perhaps this was the moment he chose to scrutinize his bong.

Keep in mind that the fact that you usually never think about this is a testament to diplomacy and work of people in charge of these weapons.

The film makes the assertion that we're only one sneeze away from nuclear annihilation at any given moment, and it addresses the many different ways that worldwide destruction could happen.

It's been that way for a long time. It's actually quite remarkable that we've never had a nuclear war. Will our luck hold out forever? I doubt it.

At least the Cold War players were rational. The doctrine of M.A.D. -- as crazy as it seemed -- worked because neither the Soviets nor Americans were going to start something knowing what the horrific response would be. But crazed terrorists, most likely (athough not limited to) Islamic extremists, don't care about that. If they can set a nuke off in an American, or some other Western, city they will.