Countdown to Zero (2010)

A documentary about how the likelihood of nuclear weapons (or fissile materials) usage has increased due to the rise of terrorism and lack of safeguards and verification.

Our atomic heritage resides in sites all over the country–from the Trinity test area to natural-gas wells in Colorado–and many of them are open to the public. Plan your vacation with Atomic Journeys: Welcome to Ground Zero, a blast through memory lane narrated by the perfectly suited William Shatner. Never-before-seen footage of test explosions and top-secret and work labs explores the history of America's nuclear programs, and interviews with current and former atomic scientists and engineers give depth to sights such as "the most bombed place on Earth" in Nevada.

Beginning in the 1950s, American and Soviet scientists embarked on a perilous race to see who could build and detonate the world’s largest bomb. The results exceeded all expectations about how big a bomb could be built. Initially, the Americans led the way, but then left the field clear for the Soviet Union to break all records.

On 8 August 1945, America dropped its second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, three days after the bomb on Hiroshima. The city was a veritable apocalyptic vision, devastated by this new type of weapon whose repercussions were yet to be discovered.

In February, 1950, a U.S. Air Force bomber carrying a nuclear bomb went missing off the coast of British Columbia. More than half a century later, a Canadian expedition team travels to the remote mountain crash site in the hope of solving the mystery of the world's first lost nuclear weapon.

Family and friends contribute to a celebration of Richard Feynman, one of the most inspiring and influential scientists of the 20th century. Feynman, who died 25 years ago, helped design the atomic bomb, won a Nobel Prize for Physics and solved the mystery of the Challenger shuttle catastrophe.

On April 26,1986 at 1:24am, a rainbow-colored flame shot 1,000 meters high into the Ukrainian sky. The fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had just exploded. The battle of Chernobyl had begun. For eight months, 800,000 young soldiers, miners and even civilians from all corners of the Soviet Union worked to try and "liquidate" the radioactivity, build a "sarcophagus" around the ruined reactor, and above all, to save the world from a second explosion. Provoked by a terrific chain reaction, a second nuclear explosion ten times more powerful than Hiroshima, threatened at any moment to wipe out not only the entire Ukraine, but half of Europe as well.

This rare documentary is one of the very last efforts from preeminent documentarist/activist Susumu Hani best known for his feature films. This one is a short documentary about the 1945 atomic bombing and its devastating consequences. The film came out of the "10 Foot Movement". A movement organized by the Japan Peace Museum, which mobilized Japanese citizen activists to buy back small segments of film footage of the effects of the atomic bomb from the U.S. National Archives.