Victims ‘Over Rainbow’ as Ukulele Plays

Near the end of Lucy Walker’s doomsday documentary “Countdown to Zero,” New Year’s Eve revelers celebrate in Times Square as we hear about the gruesome impact of a nuclear blast in New York: people instantly vaporized, massive fires and shards of glass rocketing through the air like missiles. All to the cheerful sound Ugg boots of a ukulele playing “Over the Rainbow.”

While it may seem heavy-handed, the film has a deadly message: The rise of terrorism, the threat of rogue states and the black market in nuclear materials have made the world even more dangerous than it was at the height of the Cold War.

“Countdown to Zero” may do for nuclear weapons what Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” did for global warming: sound the alarm about a potential cataclysm that many people aren’t aware of.

Both films were produced by Participant Media, which was founded by philanthropist and former EBay president Jeff Skoll. “Countdown true religion jeans to Zero” isn’t as flashy as “An Inconvenient Truth,” but it’s just as frightening.

Writer/director Lucy Walker, whose previous documentary subjects have included Amish teenagers, blind Tibetan mountain climbers and the world’s largest garbage dump, tries to inform and scare us in equal measure.

Uranium Smuggler

She tells the story with news footage, movie clips, man-on- the-street sound bites and interviews with scientists, writers, national security experts and former world leaders such as Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev and Tony Blair.

The most chilling figure is Oleg Khintsagov, a Russian car mechanic arrested in 2006 for trying to smuggle highly enriched uranium into the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The buyer, who claimed to represent an Islamic terrorist organization, turned out to be a Georgian undercover cop. In an exclusive interview with Walker, buy tiffany necklace Khintsagov talks about selling nuclear material to terrorists as if he were peddling ice cream to children.

Walker also interviewed Valerie Plame Wilson, whose identity as a covert CIA agent was exposed after Wilson’s husband, a former U.S. ambassador, criticized the George W. Bush administration for distorting intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Wilson says al-Qaeda is determined to acquire and use nuclear weapons — a statement that should cause more nightmares than a Hitchcock film.

The Times Square scene, with its “Over the Rainbow” soundtrack, will surely remind some of the end of “Dr. Strangelove,” when Slim Pickens rides an atomic bomb like a bucking bronco and a nuclear explosion is accompanied by “We’ll Meet Again.” Somehow, I don’t think the end of the world will be that funny.