Valerie Plame Wilson on nuclear weapons and ‘countdown to zero’

In 2003, Valerie Plame Wilson went from being an undercover CIA officer specializing in nuclear proliferation to a reluctant celebrity when members of the Bush administration outed her to the press. She has stayed mostly out of the public eye since, but now she’s lending her expertise and her voice to “Countdown to Zero,” a new documentary about nuclear weapons by many of the same people who made “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Director Lucy Walker makes clear that American leaders have been warning us about the threat of nuclear weapons for decades. A quote from one of President Kennedy’s speeches is used many times throughout the film …

?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. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.?

Looking at both the past and present, the film is blunt about the probability of a nuclear bomb going off by accident, miscalculation or madness, and confronts how real the threat of a devastating nuclear attack still is today.