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"  Popular Mechanics: How did you get involved with Countdown to Zero? Lucy Walker: I kept joking that you and I were going to talk about how to make an atomic bomb. I got a phone call asking if I was interested in nuclear weapons. I had wanted to work with Participant Media and so when this project came up as a possibility, I guess they thought of me. As we started talking about it, I connected with the issue.  PM: So you were interested in atomic bombs. LW: Oh, absolutely. I knew that a film needed to be made about it. I think that there&amp;#039;s this idea that the issue went away after the Cold War, and I knew enough about it to know that that wasn&amp;#039;t true, and that it shouldn&amp;#039;t have dropped off the radar like it has. People need know that nukes are a real problem. There was a lot that I did discover once I got into it. But I knew that the matter couldn&amp;#039;t be more timely and urgent. This is a 2010--teens? What are we calling this decade?--but I think it&amp;#039;s the coming issue.  PM: How much research did you have to do to prepare for the film? LW: Oh, are you kidding? It&amp;#039;s like, where does it start? You have to know about Iran and North Korea. You have to know about uranium and plutonium. You have to know about history, from the discovery of fission to the Manhattan Project. There&amp;#039;s so much massive science and history and contemporary politics. There&amp;#039;s so much policy and argument. So it was massive, from terrorism to proliferation to policy, too, worldwide. There are some very controversial subjects. What is Iran doing exactly? How do we feel about North Korea? What&amp;#039;s going on in Pakistan? What&amp;#039;s our current president&amp;#039;s policy, and is anything going to get done about it?  There&amp;#039;s just so much to delve into, and not only was the researching massive, but there were a lot of decisions that needed to be made about how to hone the film that would really key people into contemporary threats. I didn&amp;#039;t want to make a history lesson, I wanted to make a movie that people could use a primer to understand the world today as well as nuclear weapons. Figuring out what to put in and what not to put in was tough, as well as figuring out how much to tell people about how dangerous it is. Are you adding to the danger or relieving it by talking about it? I felt very conflicted about that at times. PM: How aware do you think people are about the state of nuclear weapons today? LW: I think a lot of people think the problem has gone away. They think the Cold War&amp;#039;s stopped. We&amp;#039;re not marching anymore, the nuclear freeze of the 80s feels like our parents&amp;#039; generation&amp;#039;s problem. But it&amp;#039;s not. Nuclear weapons are easier to make than ever before, whether you&amp;#039;re a rogue state or a non-state actor--very shortly, non-state actors are going to be able to enrich their own uranium and make their own nuclear weapons, and that&amp;#039;s a very scary world. That&amp;#039;s not the old world of Mutually Assured Destruction, where you had the U.S. and Russia poised to fire, but with more secure arsenals. When you get into the details, there are so many near misses it&amp;#039;s harrowing to contemplate. But when we look into the future, it just gets bleaker and bleaker unless something changes. PM: Do you think there&amp;#039;s any group that&amp;#039;s more of a threat than others? LW: I know that Al-Qaeda is actively trying to go nuclear, and has been for years. That, I suppose, is the number one threat. But we don&amp;#039;t know what we don&amp;#039;t know. Is this the iceberg, or is it the tip of the iceberg?  PM: Where are they getting all the technology? Are people selling it to rogue parties? LW: There are two different phases. There&amp;#039;s making the bomb, and then there&amp;#039;s getting ahold of the uranium and plutonium. And that enrichment process used to be nearly impossible. If you think of the Manhattan Project, for example, almost all the resources went into making the material. The bomb program, the design is way more straightforward, and takes a much smaller budget and a team of personnel. But getting ahold of the enriched uranium or plutonium used to be the real choke point. But Scott Camp at Princeton is doing extraordinary work to say that in the future, it&amp;#039;s going to be so easy to enrich uranium that not only will it be fairly straightforward for states, but it could be something that non-state actors do for themselves. Imagine if terrorists had nuclear weapons. I personally would not live in a city anymore, and I can imagine a lot of people worldwide feeling the same way. That&amp;#039;s just if the possibility exists that terrorists could do this, not even if a bomb goes off. PM: What was the most shocking thing you learned while you were making the film? LW: I hadn&amp;#039;t really realized that not only was it possible for all the steps to occur, but that all the steps [towards making a nuclear weapon] have occurred. People have successfully smuggled nuclear materials and sold them. They&amp;#039;ve turned those materials into bombs. None of those steps is impossible, and not only that, each of those steps has happened. And it just seems that it hasn&amp;#039;t lined up that we know of. It hasn&amp;#039;t resulted in an explosion, but we don&amp;#039;t know what we don&amp;#039;t know. And with Russia--which is where most of the concern about these materials is coming from, because they had tons and tons of the stuff--when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was all unsecure. And not only that, none of it was audited. They didn&amp;#039;t even know what was missing because they didn&amp;#039;t know what they had before. So the only times when people have caught these materials being smuggled, they didn&amp;#039;t actually know they were missing until the smugglers got busted. And Russia&amp;#039;s certainly got no notion to advertise when busts happen or things go missing because it makes them look bad.  We do know that we want to lock that stuff down before anything bad happens. I had this assumption that because the consequences would be so bad, and the stakes are so high, that nothing crazy would go wrong. And you imagine that the sheer scale of consequences protects you. But it doesn&amp;#039;t. Just because something&amp;#039;s really bad doesn&amp;#039;t mean that it can&amp;#039;t happen than something that&amp;#039;s less bad. The statistics, unfortunately just thinking about it from a mathematical perspective, the risk isn&amp;#039;t zero. And as time goes along, if the risk isn&amp;#039;t zero, it&amp;#039;s going to tend toward the possibility of it actually happening. PM: So how do we get rid of all these weapons, especially if they&amp;#039;re potentially in the hands of terrorists already? LW: The chances of these weapons being in the hands of terrorists are low, but we want to make sure that they stay low. The basic answer is that a lot of people today, even who were quite supportive of nuclear weapons in the past, are changing their minds of the issue, because the value that nukes might have as a defense has been outweighed by the risk they pose. And ultimately, any regime that says, well, we nice countries can have them but countries that we don&amp;#039;t like can&amp;#039;t have them, is not going to work. It just isn&amp;#039;t going to hold as a non-proliferation kind of regime for long. If we have them, how can we tell other people they can&amp;#039;t have them? The policy of the president right now is a world without nuclear weapons, which sounds so dreamy and idealistic. It doesn&amp;#039;t sound like a hard-nosed politician action policy at all. But when we get into the issues, you realize that there&amp;#039;s no other solution but zero. Anything that isn&amp;#039;t zero means we&amp;#039;re in trouble.  I hope people watch the film and encourage their politicians to do the right thing. The funny thing about the world these days is that the politicians have really enlightened and great policies, but they need some popular support, some wind at their back to enact these things. So I think that hopefully this film can start to connect the dots for people. It really is a dance to get down to zero. For more information on the initiative to rid the world of nuclear weapons, visit Global Zero "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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