Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2011

The end of the Cold War didn’t put an end to the threat of nuclear holocaust, but in fact, according to this History Channel documentary by Lucy Walker, increased that threat. The concept of mutually assured destruction was understood by the US and Russia. Today that understanding is not so universal. Clearly modeled after Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, this earnest plea for nuclear disarmament⎯more advocacy journalism than straight documentary⎯muses on such things as terrorists making atomic bombs, porous borders, and insufficiently secure stocks of fissile materials. It looks back at some chilling “near-misses” and forward to some nightmare scenarios. It doesn’t really reveal any alarming new information on nuclear proliferation (it’s alarming enough), and it’s kind of preaching to the choir, but for those increasingly uneasy about having such weapons on our planet, a viewing of this well-argued flick is an effective and frightening way to catch up. Interviews with Jimmy Carter, Tony Blair and Mikhail Gorbachev. (Somewhat rudely, it virtually ignores Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but this is about the future, not the past.) Not perfect, but one of those films that everyone needs to see.