Valerie Plame Wilson on Countdown to Zero, Public Life and Instant Legend
Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's spotlight on the best in nonfiction cinema. Today we hear from Valerie Plame Wilson about the new documentary Countdown to Zero, which features the famed ex-CIA operative as a key subject and opens Friday in limited release.
The tale of erstwhile CIA counterterrorism agent Valerie Plame Wilson has been told a million times elsewhere -- not likely better or more comprehensively than her own memoir Fair Game. The quick and dirty version would summarize her exposure by the late columnist Robert Novak, which was subsequently traced back to the upper echelons of the Bush Administration as payback for her husband Joseph Wilson's editorialized criticism of the rush to war in Iraq. The rest is history.
It's also serious culture: Fair Game's film adaptation opens this fall with Naomi Watts playing Plame opposite Sean Penn's former ambassador Wilson. (The story was more loosely adapted two years ago in Rod Lurie's Nothing But the Truth.) And now comes Countdown to Zero, an extended look down the barrel of the world's lingering nuclear threat. Forget the Cold War, Cuba, Dr. Stranglove and the quaint evocations of armageddon past. Zero surveys the nuclear ambitions -- and potential -- of the world's terror elite. Director Lucy Walker consults with everyone from former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to president Jimmy Carter to Russian uranium smugglers to the folks who once stood missile-side in the mountains, ready to launch the end of the world at a moment's notice. It's potent, petrifying stuff, never more so than when the prospects for nuclear devastation are laid out via city grids and staggering casualty projections.
And there's Plame Wilson at the front of it all, delivering insights gleaned from her years undercover working against the very enemies vilified by those who outed her. Having experienced arguably the widest swing from private to public life of anyone in the last century, the spy-turned-activist this week sat down with Movieline to talk it all over.
How did you get involved with Countdown to Zero?
About 18 months ago Lawrence Bender and Participant Media called me up and asked if I would be interviewed, and I was absolutely delighted that I could be using my expertise on this nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons -- from my other life as a covert CIA officer -- and use it for something I care so passionately about. Participant are big believers in the power of film to effect positive social change, as they did with An Inconvenient Truth, and I thought, "Well, these are serious people." And I love that I get to do this without all that partisan background noise that I've lived through and have dealt with already in spades.
That's funny. I was talking to a conservative friend of mine last night about our interview, and your name did kind of rankle her.
I'm sure.
Which was interesting: You're still such a polarizing figure, but this film -- this issue, really -- is so obviously not political.
No, this issue should not be a partisan issue. This is our number one national-security concern. And I think the film does a magnificent job of showing that big liberal Ronald Reagan, for instance, was the one who went to Reykjavik in 1986 and sat down with Gorbachev with the intent of eliminating nuclear weapons. They were not successful. You can still see that Gorbachev is deeply haunted by their failure. But I think the film as a whole demonstrates many different voices across the political spectrum that have thought about this and have come to the same conclusion: Zero. That's the only way. You can't do it unilaterally or quickly, but in a disciplined, orchestrated fashion. You have your objective as zero.
But it's going to take more than that to get the New Right to see this film. What would you say to them to see past the political issues?
I would love to get anyone on the right to come see this, because I think you cannot see the film and walk out and say, "Everything should stay the same as it is." At the end, the Rev. Richard Cizik has a great line: "If you haven't changed your mind about anything, pinch yourself. You might be dead." I'm not going to touch the Tea Party or the social issues or the flashpoints. But what you have here, I would say, is that the world has changed dramatically since the Cold War days. Mutually Assured Destruction -- which was the doctrine that worked well for many decades -- is no longer operative. We now live in a world where the chances that the United States and Russia will go to war are pretty much nil. But what we do have is this proliferation of the nuclear technology that brings us new and truly horrifying consequences should it fall into the hands of terrorists. And it's not only terrorists, as you saw. It's madness, miscalculation or accidents -- but the terrorist threat is the one that has people tossing and turning.
Is there too much disclosure in this film? I was surprised that some of the things revealed in this film aren't still classified.
Unfortunately, that is not the case. And by "unfortunately," I mean so much is out there. A former colleague of mine shows up in the film -- Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who is now at Harvard and is absolutely brilliant -- and when he saw the film, he said, "You just scratched the surface." There is nothing in the film that in any way that adds to the knowledge base that is already out there. But what it does do is demonstrate how easily obtainable much of it is -- much to everyone's horror.
[Atomic bomb developer Robert] Oppenheimer was asked back in 1946 by a Congressional committee, "Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, how do you keep a nuclear weapon from being smuggled into an American city and detonated?" And he said, "A screwdriver -- to open every container that comes into the city." He knew back then that the genie as out of the bottle. The proliferation concern was already far beyond what we could [control]. I love that quote from Einstein [paraphrasing], "The nuclear weapon has changed everything except how we think."
On a daily basis in the CIA, when you're seeing the implications of that philosophy, how does that wear on you emotionally? Did you ever think, "Well, there's nothing I can do -- the resistance is too strong"?
On the contrary! I wouldn't even be involved with this if I weren't an optimist. There are a couple reasons for optimism, as gloomy as the whole topic is: In 1986, there were approximately 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world. We are now down to 23,000. In the case of biological and chemical weapons, they still exist in the world, but they're taboo. As part of the whole social action campaign that was constructed around the movie with GlobalZero.org, we had students totally going out as volunteers across the country, sleeping and eating in vans, showing the movie at universities across the country because they think we can make a change.
I can speak to the time in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when so many of my colleagues were sleeping on cots in the office, working 24/7 on those issues -- it can take its emotional toll on you. But you're there not because of the paycheck. You're there because you love serving your country. You're there because -- at the risk of sounding corny -- you're serving something larger than yourself.
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Excellent interview. I have her husband's book, but have never heard her point of view/voice.
No surprise the new 'Countdown to Zero' disarmament documentary omits life-saving strategies from their agenda of banning nukes, like advocating public Civil Defense, to try and better survive nukes in the meantime. The disarmament movement for decades has hyped that with nukes; all will die or it will be so bad you'll wish you had. Most have bought into it, now thinking it futile, bordering on lunacy, to try to learn how to survive a nuclear blast and radioactive fallout. In a tragic irony, the disarmament movement has rendered millions of American families even more vulnerable to perishing from nukes in the future. For instance, most now ridicule 'duck & cover', but for the vast majority, not right at 'ground zero' and already gone, the blast wave will be delayed in arriving after the flash, like lightening & thunder, anywhere from a fraction of a second up to 20 seconds, or more.
Today, without 'duck & cover' training, everyone at work, home, and your children at school, will impulsively rush to the nearest windows to see what that 'bright flash' was, just-in-time to be shredded by the glass imploding inward from that delayed blast wave. They'd never been taught that even in the open, just laying flat, reduces by eight-fold the chances of being hit by debris from that brief, 3-second, tornado strength blast.
Then, later, before the radioactive fallout can hurt them, most downwind won't know to move perpendicular away from the drift of the fallout to get out from under it before it even arrives. And, for those who can't evacuate in time, few know how quick & easy it is to throw together an expedient fallout shelter, to safely wait out the radioactive fallout as it loses 99% of its lethal intensity in the first 48 hours.
The greatest tragedy of that horrific loss of life, when nukes come to America, will be that most families had needlessly perished, out of ignorance of how easily they might have avoided becoming additional casualties, all because they were duped that it was futile to ever try to learn how to beforehand.
The disarmament movement's sincere supporters, just wanting a world safe from nukes, will discover those unintended consequences to be inconvenient truths of the worst kind.
The Good News About Nuclear Destruction! at http://www.ki4u.com/goodnews.htm dispels those deadly myths of nuclear un-survivability, empowering American families to then better survive nukes. For as long as nukes exist, these life-saving insights are essential to every families survival!