LONG Beach, California -- In 2006, Oleg Khinsagov was caught trying to smuggle 100 grams of refined uranium into Georgia with the aim of selling it to a Muslim man whom he believed was connected to "a serious organization."
Khinsagov, a whippet-thin, 50-year-old Russian trader who generally transported fish and sausages, was carrying the uranium in two small bags in his jacket pockets when he was caught in a sting operation. The amount was small, but enriched enough to make a bomb, and Khinsagov said he had another 2 to 3 kilograms stored in his apartment that he was willing to sell.
That should be the opening scene of a new documentary on nuclear proliferation, but instead it's tucked into the middle of Countdown to Zero, which aims to do for anti-nuclear proliferation what An Inconvenient Truth did for the environmental movement. The film takes a while to work up to its most important point — that anyone with a relatively small amount of money has the ability to obtain enough nuclear weapons material to incinerate everything in a five-mile radius of a large city. And they wouldn't have to missile it into the U.S., they could simply detonate it in a container ship at a port.
The film was shown Thursday evening to attendees of the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference by producer Lawrence Bender, who debuted his previous documentary An Inconvenient Truth at TED in 2006 and also produced Inglourious Basterds and other Quentin Tarantino films. The TED screening is only the second showing of the film in the U.S., which had its world premier last month at the Sundance Film Festival. The film has just found a distributor, which is in the process of choosing a release date.
Countdown to Zero picks up where Jonathan Schell's brilliant 1982 three-part New Yorker series "The Fate of the Earth" left off. That series shocked the public into understanding the full reality of what a nuclear winter would entail should a full-scale nuclear exchange occur between countries.
But the landscape in 2010 is drastically changed from 1982 when Russia and the United States were the only players likely to launch such a catastrophe.
Today there are an estimated 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world, spread among nine nations:
- Russia (13,000)
- United States (9,400)
- France (300)
- China (240)
- the United Kingdom (185)
- Israel (80)
- Pakistan (60)
- India (60)
- North Korea (10)
On top of these, there are numerous terrorist groups seeking to join this fraternity of nuclear possessors.
The story of Khinsagov highlights just how easy it could be for any of them to obtain materials for a nuclear bomb.
Earlier in the day, former CIA covert operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who is featured in the film and was at the screening, told the TED audience that during her time in the CIA her main focus was on preventing terrorist groups from obtaining nuclear materials and weapons. But now she believes the greatest threat comes from Pakistan, which is politically precarious and believed to be the current home of Osama bin Laden.
The film's main message, as the title suggests, is that zero nuclear weapons in the world is the only acceptable number, because even if nations were committed to not using their weapons, they can't be trusted to care for them. In the last two decades, there have been 25 known cases of nuclear weapons material being lost or stolen and several situations in which all-out nuclear war was narrowly averted between nations due to miscommunication or faulty equipment.
A near-miss occurred in 1997 when the U.S. launched a scientific rocket from off the coast of Norway to research the Northern Lights phenomenon. U.S. authorities had alerted Russian officials in advance of the launch, but the message failed to move up the correct chain of command, and the Russian military concluded the missile was a U.S. nuclear attack. Then Russian President Boris Yeltsin had 10 minutes to decide if he should launch Russian missiles. It took him 8 minutes to make the decision not to do so.
In 1979, during President Jimmy Carter's term, an exercise tape used for simulating nuclear attack was mistakenly loaded into the wrong computer at the North American Aerospace Defense command (NORAD), sending the Air Force scrambling into full alert. It took eight minutes to conclude that it was a false alarm. A year later, a fault in a 46 cent computer chip caused the military to once again believe it was under attack from Russian nuclear missiles.
If the U.S. military detected what it believed was an incoming nuclear missile attack, the president would have between 10 seconds and 12 minutes to decide whether to launch the United State's own nuclear missiles.
The documentary, which includes interviews with former leaders Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, F.W. de Klerk and Pervez Musharraf, as well as Robert McNamara, Valerie Plame and numerous others, makes a strong case for zero weapons.
But the TED audience was skeptical that it could be achieved.
Following the film, an audience member asked Bender and Plame what it would matter if the U.S. and European nations reduced their nuclear weapons to zero when hostile governments in Pakistan, North Korea and China likely wouldn't do the same.
Plame said that western countries had to initiate the move, which would lead to tremendous pressure on other nations to follow.
Another audience member asked Bender if he thought the time was right for such a documentary. An Inconvenient Truth was released when the public mindset was already primed to receive the message of climate change and spread it. Was there a similar movement ready to carry this film?
Bender replied that when An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, "We had a president who didn't give a shit [about climate change.]"
Now we have a president who is leading the way in anti-nuclear proliferation, he said.
Last year President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev committed to reducing nuclear arsenals in the U.S. and Russia and are believed to be finalizing an agreement to that effect, with the ultimate goal being to eliminate all nuclear weapons. This week, as military and political leaders met in Paris for the Global Zero conference to discuss nuclear proliferation, Obama and Medvedev issued separate statements supporting work toward complete elimination of nuclear weapons.
Photo courtesy Department of Energy
