The purpose of this slick and engaging (and often terrifying) documentary is to remind us of the fact that the worst danger of the cold war did not die with the death of that long ideological battle, capitalism vs. communism. Even today, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, humanity is still caught in the teeth of nuclear weapons. At any moment, the human world could go up in smoke. At any moment, millions of lives could be dispatched to the other world by an atomic weapon whose uranium was purchased on the black market and whose parts were assembled by a God-intoxicated scientist.
The documentary is not about the destruction of nations but the destruction of cities, and specifically the king of all cities, New York, New York. The director, Lucy Walker, sees the very city that played a major role in translating the secrets of atomic energy into atomic weapons (The Manhattan Project) as the one that’s currently in the most danger of being annihilated by that terrible power—the power of nuclear fission, the power of a sun. One scene demonstrates how uranium can arrive at a port, pass detection, be transported to the center of Manhattan, be placed into a bomb that’s been assembled in a basement, and be detonated. In a blinding flash, millions of American lives are dispatched to the other world (if there is another world—most likely there is nothing but nothingness).
The nuclear threat is, first and foremost, a threat against dense urban centers—Rome, San Francisco, Shanghai, London, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, São Paulo. Every city remembers Hiroshima—the first city of the 20th century. (It’s important to note that Walker has also recently completed a documentary, Waste Land, about the creative side of another form of urban destruction—humans’ garbage.) You do not drop a nuclear bomb on the countryside; you drop it on a place that has lots and lots of human lives. The arrival of the most powerful weapon on earth corresponds with the accelerated urbanization of humanity. The worst of all worlds came with the best of all worlds. Indeed, the director’s emphasis on the terrifying vulnerability of cities recalls something that the Dutch urban theorist Saskia Sassen recently pointed out: “Something about destroying a city has a much deeper meaning than just death.” 
Do we have a complete accounting of where all the nuclear weapons are in the world? Are we still reducing nuclear stockpiles?
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!