(2010) For most or all of our lives, those of us on the Earth have been living with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, though most of us rarely think much about the unthinkable. Writer/director Lucy Walker's documentary makes the point that the possibility is only increasingly likely, not less so.

A nuclear sword of Damocles is hanging over us by a thin thread, needing only an accident, a miscalculation, or madness to sever it. Madness in Madrid or Bali or Tokyo or London or New York City … Had terrorists had an atomic weapon they would have used it.

Former CIA agent Valerie Wilson Plame and author Graham Allison describe how highly-enriched uranium (HEU) could be and already has been purloined from former states of the USSR without security aware of the missing material. Harvard Prof Matthew Bunn says that a Russian guard at a facility housing bomb material admitted that "potatoes are guarded better." An incident involving the serendipitous capture of small-time Russian hustler Oleg Khintsagov attempting to smuggle weapons-grade uranium out of Russia is just one of many examples of how easily HEU might get into the hands of terrorists.

Shipping it into a US port or another targeted country would be relatively easy as well since enough HEU to make a bomb could be hidden in a cargo container, packed inside a lead-lined tube emitting only a trace radiation signature, with little likelihood of discovery. The hardest part for terrorists would be the assembly of a bomb, requiring 20-25 individuals with technical skills and readily-available equipment costing about $7 million.

Nine countries - the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea - have nuclear weapons. Pakistan's father of its nuclear arsenal, A.Q. Khan, exported for profit to Libya, Iran, and N. Korea bomb-making plans and equipment. If Iran manages to obtain nuclear weapons, its neighbors will feel threatened and begin to acquire them as well. However, Pakistan with some 80 bombs and its government in an unstable state presents the most dangerous potential for war with India or fission within.

Accidents have already occurred, fortunately without dire consequences, as when two nukes fell from a disintegrating B-52 over North Carolina in 1961. Other US aircraft have gone down and submarines sunk without recovery of their nuclear weapons. In 2007 six cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52H and flown from Minot AFB in ND to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana without anyone's knowledge or protection for 36 hours. "Low-probability events happen," says political-science professor Scott Sagan.

As for miscalculation, Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mikhail Gorbachev, and others speak about the 30 minutes to Armageddon, leaving the US president and his Russian counterpart seconds to decide whether or not to retaliate. False alarms, including a very close call in 1995 after the breakup of the Soviet Union, have already brought both countries to the brink of launching ICBM attacks following misinterpretations of natural events and military exercises.

With the probability of failure increasing with each passing year: "It will happen." Nevertheless, this well-reasoned approach isn't scary enough to raise most people's consciousness of impending doom, for that we need dramatization such as the 1983 TV movie The Day After.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Patrick Ivers can be reached via e-mail at .