Film preview: Countdown to Zero

Public fears of nuclear war have receded since the 1980s, but there are still tens of thousands of warheads around the world, a fact a new film seeks to highlight and address, its producer Lawrence Bender tells our film critic

• Countdown to Zero director Lucy Walker and producer Lawrence Bender. Picture: Getty Images

BACK in 1961, John F Kennedy cut to the heart of the biggest threat facing humanity. Likening life in the atomic age to living under a "nuclear sword of Damocles", he urged the General Assembly of the United Nations to abolish the weapons of war "before they abolish us". Fifty years on, according to the new documentary Countdown to Zero, that threat hasn't diminished – even if our fear of it has.

"I think that's a generational thing," says the film's producer Lawrence Bender. "I came just after the Baby Boomers, but I remember very well the duck-and-cover drills and the mutually assured destruction argument, but for most people that's ancient history. People who are in college today were born after the Berlin Wall came down so there's nothing in their psyche that relates them to the issue of nuclear weapons."

The irony, says Bender, is that most people involved in the issue will say we live in scarier times now than we did in the Cold War. "At least during the Cold War every one was aware of the issue. And not just the politicians: the people too. Without public demand on something, it won't be at the top of an agenda."

Countdown to Zero, then, seeks to re-engage the public with the threat posed by thermonuclear destruction to help facilitate a change in attitude, much like An Inconvenient Truth, which Bender also produced, did with the climate crisis. Its timing couldn't be better, either. The old arguments for having a nuclear arsenal, while always specious, are becoming ever more irrelevant in a world that is not only more fractured politically, but far less stable. Indeed, as Bender points out, you just have to look at the footage in the film of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad mocking Western objections to Iran's nuclear aspirations to see how problematic having them is. "He's there saying, 'If they're not so bad why can't we have them? And if they are bad, why do you get to have them?' I'm obviously not taking this guy's side, but it's a logic that's hard to argue against."

Countdown to Zero should certainly make people feel uneasy in this respect. Not only does it illustrate the ease with which smugglers have managed to get their hands on fissile material, but it also reminds us how close we've come to major accidents despite – and in some cases because of – the complex systems in place to prevent nuclear weapons being deployed. Backing all this up is an impressive line-up of experts and political heavyweights. Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev and Pervez Musharraf all provide fascinating insights, though the presence of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and Tony Blair in the same film isn't quite as explosive as it could have been, given Blair's infamous dossier on Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction used dubious intelligence that Plame was instrumental in dismissing. Did Bender think about getting them in a room together?

"Of course it occurred to me, but I was very focused on the issue, not on trying to create other things or scandals." He laughs. "Those two have the ability to contact each other if they want to."

Though Bender is perhaps still better known as Quentin Tarantino's long-serving producer (he's produced all his films bar Death Proof), it was his producing credit on Good Will Hunting that unexpectedly awakened his activist side when a screening of that film at Camp David put him in a room with the likes of president Clinton. "It was just really inspiring to meet these people who were making a difference. So I made a personal commitment to find a way to make a difference however I could."

When he subsequently saw Al Gore deliver his slide show on the climate crisis, he found a way to do just that. "Everybody who saw it asked, 'What can I do to help?' And I thought, 'I'm going to try and make a movie out of this.'" The resulting film was the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, and Bender reckons the issues at the heart of both that film and Countdown to Zero are similar: "Neither issue is going away and the scary thing about both these issues is that they can affect life on a planetary basis forever."

Still, there's reason for hope. A series of nationwide premieres tonight have been timed to coincide with tomorrow's Global Zero Summit in London, at which more than 100 international political, military and civic leaders will meet to map out an agenda for bringing all the nuclear countries together for the first time in history to talk about total nuclear disarmament.

"It can only go in one of two ways," says Bender. "The status quo is never going to be maintained so we're either going to go back to proliferation or we're going to head towards zero, reduction, which, God willing, is the direction I hope we'll go."

• Countdown To Zero is screening tonight at the Belmont, Aberdeen, the Cameo, Edinburgh and Stereo, Glasgow, among other locations across the UK, as part of Demand Zero Day. For a full list of screenings, visit countdowntozerofilm.com/screenings. The film is then on general release from 24 June.