sweetsai

When Lucy Walker's throat-grabbingly brilliant documentary about nuclear weapons first surfaced last year at the Cannes film festival, it seemed like the best horror film of all time. I spent most of it softly bleating with fear. Walker wakes us up to our willed, wide flank bras
consensual torpor about nuclear weapons, and the unexamined post-cold war fiction that they somehow don't matter, that the threat doesn't exist and that worrying about it is passe
On the contrary, Walker makes a stomach-churningly plausible case that a nuclear explosion could still be caused by terrorists or rogue states with stolen material, or by an old-fashioned Strangelove cock-up. These two ideological halves of the Armageddon-argument mean that she has secured interviews with heavyweight commentators from both left and right; including Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter and Tony Blair, who, remarkably, appears finally to rediscover some of his progressive roots with a guarded call for "zero" nuclear weapons. There is chilling footage of J Robert Oppenheimer – the father of the A-bomb – gazing into the camera with his Mona Lisa smile, as if amused by man's imminent annihilation. But those hoping for nostalgic black-and-white footage of Michael Foot in his duffel coat at Aldermaston will be disappointed. Walker does not interview anyone from CND or even mention CND, perhaps afraid that her film will be written off as old-style Spartist agitprop.

A good deal has happened since Walker's film was made. Osama bin Laden has been killed by US forces inside Pakistan's borders without, so far, any retaliation – which colours some of the film's probing of Pakistan as a querulous, hair-trigger nuclear power. The Arab Spring is ongoing, which arguably makes Iran's pro-nuke theocracy more isolated than Walker implies, and her film was made before the inconclusive military adventure to unseat Libya's Colonel Gaddafi by a new Coalition of the Semi-Willing, exposing us to jibes that the Allies are in effect assisting al-Qaida in north Africa – the same al-Qaida who are reportedly keen to purchase lumps of enriched uranium from former Soviet states.

But her film is basically not out of date. In fact, it is still screamingly urgent and contemporary. The vast panoply of annihilation-technology is incredible. The secret history of preparation for the apocalypse induces a kind of spiritual vertigo. Perhaps the most gobsmacking anecdote is that concerning a Strangelove near-miss in the 1990s.side supportive bras

The Russians mistook some innocuous American aircraft for a nuclear attack. The Kremlin's generals marched into Boris Yeltsin's office and demanded a response. Yeltsin simply refused to believe the Americans would do such a thing, and the world was saved. One commentator says it was because he was sober. It may have been because he was drunk. Very few films can be classified as unmissable, but this is one.