When Potatoes are Guarded More Than Nuclear Weapons

There's a reason President John F. Kennedy said that we would have to abolish nuclear weapons before nuclear weapons abolish us. After all, upon detonation of a nuclear weapon, the immediate area impacted will see temperatures of several tens of million degrees centigrade. And nothing says automatic vaporization of life like a thermometer set to 10,000,000 degrees.

Nearly five decades after Kennedy's comments, we're still failing in accomplishing a world with zero nuclear weapons. Worse, though many of us are highly attuned to security threats surrounding terrorism, airplanes, Times Square car bombs, and underwear bombers, the threat of nuclear annihilation seems like something passé. How 1960s, 70s, or 80s.

But the truth is that with the push of a few buttons today, nuclear weapons could instantly kill hundreds of millions of people around the world. There's a reason for that old saying about how the next world war will be fought with nuclear weapons, and the one after that will be fought with sticks and stones.

Such is the core argument of a new film from Participant Media. You might know them as the groovy folks who brought the world An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's vehicle to shine the spotlight on climate change and wake people up to the very real threats of environmental degradation. Now they're turning their focus toward the threat of nuclear weapons, with a new film coming out this summer, Countdown to Zero.

The trailer for the film came out yesterday, on Apple.com. If you've got 60 seconds, watch it now. And find out just how very clear and present the danger is for a nuclear holocaust.

The film is set to include a number of voices and interviews with folks who have shaped nuclear weapons policy around the world. Mikhail Gorbachev? Check. Tony Blair? Check. Jimmy Carter? Check. Pervez Musharraf? Check.

What do these dignitaries have to say? That as a global community, we've got to get down to zero nuclear weapons, lest the push of one button, or the theft of one nuclear missile, or the rogue country that figures out how to make a nuclear bomb threaten the survival of humanity.

The trailer's release is particularly apt this week, as the Obama administration (which has shown renewed vigor over the subject of nuclear weapons, recently signing the first disarmament treaty since Knotts Landing was still on television) released the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. It's a number that has remained secret since World War II, but one that shed light on how vast our weapons arsenal really is. Any guesses?

About 5,100 (5,113 active and inactive warheads, to be exact). Sure, that's a mere fraction of the over 31,000 nuclear weapons that we had in the late 1960s, at the height of a Cold War stand-off between the U.S. and Russia. But it's still enough to render the planet practically uninhabitable, and when you add up the total number of nuclear weapons that other countries around the world possess (including Russia, Pakistan, India, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, and maybe North Korea) you get a grand total of over 23,000 nuclear weapons.

Yowsa. That's an awful lot to keep track off. And as Countdown to Zero demonstrates, this volatile collection of weapons has come dangerously close to getting in the wrong hands. One interviewee notes that in the 1990s, potatoes were more guarded than nuclear weapons in Russia. And in another harrowing sequence, you learn that because of an employee error, Russian President Boris Yeltsin nearly launched a nuclear attack on a U.S. survey of Aurora Borealis.

Check out the film trailer here, and check out the film once it gets released this summer. Because what An Inconvenient Truth did for environmental activism, Countdown to Zero might just do for disarmament.

Photo credit: jmuhles