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Q+A: Lucy Walker, "Countdown to Zero" Director, Hasn't Learned to Stop Worrying About the Bomb

_A chat with Lucy Walker about her new documentary._ The math of nuclear weapons today isn't especially comforting. There are still "over 23,500 nuclear warheads":http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/7/16/why-are-there-so-many-nukes--2 around the world...

A chat with Lucy Walker about her new documentary.

In 2002, British filmmaker Lucy Walker was earning Daytime Emmy awards for her work on the kids’ TV program Blue's Clues. Fast forward to 2010: she hit Sundance with not one but two feature films. Waste Land is a profile of artist Vik Muniz and the world's largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where Muniz creates art out of garbage. Countdown to Zero is about something somewhat less heartwarming: the threat of global annihilation posed by nuclear weapons.

As we discovered in this interview with her, This isn’t the product of Cold War paranoia. Produced by the team behind An Inconvenient Truth, Countdown to Zero makes the case for a world free of nuclear weapons. Its chorus includes a few people who know a thing or two about the dangers of nukes, Pervez Musharraf, Tony Blair, and Mikhail Gorbachev among them.

The math of nuclear weapons today isn’t especially comforting. There are still over 23,500 nuclear warheads around the world. Forget about all the near-attacks by governments: highly enriched uranium can be had on the black market, and it’s virtually undetectable in shipping containers. As John F. Kennedy warned at the U.N. in 1961, a large-scale nuclear event could result from "accident, miscalculation, or madness." Ironically, in an era of concerns over terrorism, we seem less concerned about nukes than ever before – and we may have never been more vulnerable.

Here’s the trailer: