Countdown to Zero - the film

I saw Countdown to Zero opening night at Kendall Square Cinema, Cambridge, MA. A great opportunity for the already-convinced to get on the same page, and for doubters who still think of nuclear weapons as a useful part of the defensive arsenal to rethink.

Interesting emphasis on the centrality of nuclear material as opposed to hardware and technology. 90% of the Manhattan Project, it seems, was getting and preparing the material, not the bombs themselves. And this has not changed.

Nice to give leaders of the arms control movement a platform, but they offer no political strategy, i.e., strategy to get the power to change things.  Their imaginations falter when it comes to political action other than persuading other leaders, their counterparts in national government.  Leaders love talking to Presidents and Congress Members.  But lobbying doesn’t do it, whether in the form of learned discussions or writing letters and marching. Sixty-five years and counting. Lobbying doesn’t do it. 

For all the film’s rich content on the creation and the numbers and peril of the weapons, its scope is narrow, both as to history and solutions. Like most of the anti-nuke effort, it is clueless about solutions other than saying no to nukes. This makes sense if the film is understood simply as a collaboration with the President’s announced goal of Zero. Ultimately, though, a secure world requires an alternative way of doing things. Zero Weapons is like Peace.  It is the absence of something rather than an alternative.

This weakness was most evident in the movie’s powerful review of the Iranian menace.  I thought the only conclusion to be drawn was to attack Iran, not something I favor. Ditto re the huge dangers posed by Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. 

Granted there is only so much one motion picture can try to do. Still, the makers should have tried harder for some of the important background that one needs to be effective, including background on the history. The references to Hiroshima should have noted the doubts about our true motivations in dropping the first two bombs. The references to Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik should have noted that they failed because Reagan insisted that Star Wars was solely a peace effort rather than another chapter in the arms race (like missile defense today!)

Nuclear weapons are not going to be eradicated until the nations decide to prevent war. The question is whether the nations make that decision before or after nuclear weapons are used again. The passage of 65 years, not to mention the current missile defense race, prove that the nations will not substitute enforced law for war absent a political revolt by the targeted populations. The only imaginable staging area for a political revolt is the targeted cities and towns of the world, cooperating across national borders through a directly elected Security Congress of Municipalities. That would give the targeted populations the power to force nations to substitute enforced law for war.

David Hoffman's The Dead Hand

The most chilling thread of David Hoffman’s book The Dead Hand is the plea of Soviet WMD inventors that they were sucked into their careers unwittingly and kept there with lies about American counterpart efforts. Talented humans becoming agents of their own destruction, in many variations, is where we all still are today.


The book is powerful also as to the forward inertia of doomsday arming in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R., perpetuated by self interested beneficiaries of the military/industrial complex.

There ought to be a law, though, that makes authors give equal time to solutions and remedies when they describe dangers. For example, unless they are told, readers will not deduce that they have a duty to champion verification when their country takes an important step like Nixon’s renunciation of biological weapons in 1969, and joining the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972. In the absence of verification, these steps provided little assurance, and the Soviets proceeded full blast to violate the Convention and make the weapons.

A subsequent chapter, or a footnote or citation to another work, for example, should tell the reader, that without verification, the Soviets could not depend on such announcements, that verification has to be backed by international enforcement, and that without democratic accountability the power to enforce cannot be delegated.

Americans are told endlessly what is wrong in the world and what the President should do. It seldom occurs to complacent citizens that anything drastic that the President has to do, citizens must do first, failing which it will be politically infeasible for the President. Verification is an example of a security prerequisite that necessitates a public demand for a different way of conducting international relations.

Americans are afflicted by the absence of action ideas. Even the very best current affairs publications, of which The Dead Hand is an example, serve more as entertainment than inspiration, because they do not link facts with the requisites of democratic action.

Hoffman’s exciting account of the Reagan/Gorbachev dance during 1985-6, culminating with their meeting at Reykjavik when drastic disarmament steps were defeated by Reagan’s starry eyed Star Wars plans, fails to tell the reader that targeted cities in both countries were exchanging delegations during those very months to encourage their national leaders to stop the arms race. City, Save Thyself! describes these efforts, and I have it from good source that they were instrumental in persuading Gorbachev to take unilateral steps like banning nuclear tests. Even the Reagan Administration encouraged the city initiatives.