Another startling setback in obtaining zero is the ease at which highly enriched uranium can be smuggled virtually undetected into U.S. inside lead pipes

Countdown to Zero: Is it Possible?

Watch the film. Watch it again. - Academy Award winning producer Lawrence Bender and director Lucy Walker's documentary Countdown to Zero is an extraordinarily powerful and disturbing film that lays out the case for global nuclear disarmament. I had the privilege of interviewing Lawrence Bender on this issue. This movie is like a wake up call and it's an edge of your seat, urgent kind of scary movie about this issue. So people watch it and go 'holy shit'.
But the question of how we get to zero is not one easily answered. It's not easy and it's going to take some time to do. And it's an idea that was started by the great liberal president Ronald Reagan. Obviously in the movie we have some of his speeches He had many speeches where he believed that the best thing for the world was abolition of nuclear weapons.. And this is an idea that's been around for a while. It's not a liberal idea or a conservative idea. But I do believe it's an idea whose time has come. So from Reagan and even with Nixon, when he talked about reduction, this is an idea that's been around for some time and again, it's weird, because in the 1980's the nuclear freeze movement was primarily a liberal movement but it was effective. There were 70,000 nuclear weapons and now we're down to 23,000 - so it did have an effect. But today most people just don't think about this and as President Kennedy says in the movie, you have this Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. The problem is no one is looking up. President Reagan was. A staunch nuclear abolitionist, he made global disarmament a focal point of his post Cold War Strategy.

Bender adds, "The use of nuclear weapons used to be, you know, mad, they were used to destroy. One can say that it worked. Not everyone was always for nuclear weapons but certainly we didn't blow each other up, In the case of Russia and the United States, sane minds prevailed. We had some very tough close calls and it was a very scary time in history, but it didn't happen. Today, the same issue of retaliation exists - we strike them, they strike us. But in the case of terrorists, they don't care about retaliation so the rules have changed completely and rules for nuclear weapons have changed completely and this is really scary."

President Kennedy, in his 1961 address to the United Nations General Assembly warned of a three tiered nuclear threat to humanity, "... 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." And whether by accident, brinksmanship gone awry or insanity, zero nukes could very well be an impossible goal.

"I think one of the most poignant moments in the movie is the moment where we talk about the fact that in physics, there's a law that if the probability is not zero, it ultimately will happen and there's so many low probability events that shouldn't happen because they're very low probability but ultimately do. The Gulf of Mexico is a great example of the low probability of that happening, extremely low and it happened. Things like this happen all the time."

While progress has been made in decreasing global arsenals of nuclear weapons, the world is reaching a potential proliferation tipping point toward nuclear terrorism. Al-Qaeda has been seeking nuclear weapons for over a decade. Iran is hell bent on developing a nuclear weapon. North Korea has confirmed Pyongyang has an active nuclear weapons program. Pakistan has had the atomic bomb since 1972 and its trying to build more.

"Making a bomb is relatively easy but you've got to get the highly enriched uranium. You've gotta [sic] get the physical materials to make the bomb. Iran doesn't have the material yet. Iran is trying to. They have these enrichment centers, obviously, these centrifuges and they're trying to do that. If Iran gets the bomb, it's game over. There's no question."

But the game could be easily over as more unsecured material reaches the black market.

The film's narrator, former covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson was believed to be looking for missing nukes at the time her identity was leaked by the Bush Administration. The majority of missing nukes belong to the United States and Russia and there's no way of telling just how many are out there.

"One reason it's so important to ratify the New START Treaty is because it provides enormous transparency between Russia and the United States. But the first step is to lock up and secure everything that we know about that. That's really important because we don't want anything else to be stolen. I know it sounds obvious but that really needs to happen."

There's also the issue of stolen Russian uranium making its way across the Russian-Georgian border and eventually into Iran. Stealing and selling highly enriched uranium is big business and an attractive option for countries incapable of building a bomb.

"In terms of stuff that's on the black market, my understanding is there's about two thirds of a Hiroshima size bombs that's been interdicted over the last 17 years, two thirds of a bomb that size, so if you figure that's the tip of the iceberg, not the iceberg, there's a lot more on the market, maybe a dozen, ten or something of that magnitude. So obviously, interdiction and policing, is extremely important."

Still, Bender stresses, getting to zero starts with Russia and the United States taking the lead in reducing nuclear weapons.

"Russia and the United States as you know, has 95-percent of the world's arsenal. Nobody's going to do anything until we reduce. And we don't need all these weapons, we could blow the world up a million times over. So the idea is that the United States and Russia reduce until they get about 1,000 each and speaking to Chinese, [sic] we believe that somewhere around that point the Chinese will agree to start reducing. And if the Chinese reduce, then you have the three major powers in the world taking the lead. Then India and Pakistan will reduce their arsenal and then other countries will start to fall in line."

Bender notes, just as there was upward pressure to proliferate, there will be downward pressure to eliminate nuclear weapons.

"Every country is going to have a reluctance [sic] for a variety of reasons. Any country you can name is going to have a reluctance [sic]. But ultimately there will need to be a multi-lateral conversation about how to reduce and every country has a lot of reasons why they should reduce as well. But there will be this downward pressure if this happens and there will be less and less tolerance for countries who either try to acquire or countries who are not going to reduce. But it has to be proportionate. It has to be robust and there needs to be intrusive verification systems. There are monitoring systems that have to be robust and much bigger than they are today. Transparency has to become bigger and bigger. We have to trust but verify obviously.

Bender says there also needs to be a greater trust between all nations as this happens. But it's not a process that is not going to happen overnight.

"There's securing the materials, There's stopping Iran from getting a weapon. There's stopping Pakistan, they're as important as Iran is. Pakistan is, I think, the most important because Pakistan has many nuclear weapons and is actually out there trying to build more nuclear weapons as an unstable government has command and control.. We'd like to think that America has the best command and control With Pakistan, you've got to worry about the command and control You've got to think about a commander on the ground maybe not getting the right information, maybe making a mistake, maybe the Pakistan-Taliban infiltrating, taking over potentially, the government falling, etc. Pakistan is a very important and scary part of the world right now because they have nuclear weapons and they have a lot of terrorists in the country [sic] which is why President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others are focusing on it."

Yet even with the main powers on board, getting countries like Pakistan and India to sign on may prove difficult.

"India and Pakistan, their relationship is extremely important because if we can help them come to an understanding between the two and more trust [sic] at their border, if we can help them... then Pakistan, which has directed an enormous amount of energy towards India in protecting themselves against India and has 100-thousand plus troops on their border, can move all that energy and time and effort and military into helping keep their country safe and stopping the Pakistan-Taliban from infiltrating. And that's one of the biggest threats facing us."

Another startling setback in obtaining zero is the ease at which highly enriched uranium can be smuggled virtually undetected into U.S. inside lead pipes.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the technical director of the Manhattan Project and "father" of the atomic bomb, when asked in a closed Senate hearing room how he would protect against a nuclear weapon entering the United States quipped, "with a screwdriver, to open each and every crate and suitcase."

During the film, one can't help but detect Oppenheimer's tortured gaze, almost offering a foreshadowed nod confirming that the monster unleashed can never be stopped.

"That's right. In a sense, the genie is out of the bottle and Oppenheimer was part of bringing the genie out of the bottle of course and there was a lot of pain for him for doing that. That's why we made the movie in the first place. Of course we can't put the genie back in the bottle but we have to look at how do we take this and make this a liveable situation, control the genie."

Eerily, Former Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev's threat in 1956 to western diplomats "we will bury you" seems more a reality than ever - only this time via proxy war by terrorists armed with Russian highly enriched uranium.

Countdown to Zero premieres today in New York and Washington.