Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, front, in a scene from Countdown to Zero. The documentary argues that the world's nuclear weapons future is getting more precarious. (Magnolia Pictures/Participant Media)

British director Lucy Walker insists the intent of her film about the contemporary state of nuclear weapons, Countdown to Zero, isn't to frighten but to educate.

Nevertheless, her documentary, released commercially this week in Toronto, and coming soon to Montreal and Vancouver, sounds a red alert about nuclear armament in the post-Cold War world.

"I didn't set out to scare people," Walker said Thursday in an interview with CBC's Q cultural affairs show. "My question was, what's going on with these weapons in the world today?"

Walker said she set out to talk to "the people with the power to push the button," and she ended up doing more than 80 interviews, with people such as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, former British prime minister Tony Blair and former U.S. secretary of defence Robert McNamara.

Lucy Walker, British director of Countdown to Zero, says she wants her film to help create a political climate that encourages disarmament. (Magnolia Pictures/Participant Media)

"What I discovered was truly frightening," Walker said.

Walker's interview subjects describe a nuclear club grown larger by at least 30 nations in the last two decades and individuals motivated to sell weapons-grade fuel to the highest bidder, including to terrorists.

In the documentary, Gorbachev talks about the "missed opportunity" during the period right after the end of the Cold War when the two major superpowers had enough clout to dismantle the world's nuclear arsenal without having to deal with so many smaller players with difficult agendas.

The film also tells the story of the "Georgian smuggler who was busted selling weapons-grade uranium to someone he thought was an al-Qaeda operative," Walker said. "In his mind, he was prepared to sell to a terrorist cell.

While making the film, Walker also learned that access to a nation's nuclear arsenal is not as restricted as it was in the past, with lower-level officers now possessing nuclear codes.

"You don't need to be a general to set off the whole arsenal any more," she said.

Walker worked on the film with producer Lawrence Bender, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Inglourious Basterds, and the team that made the hit climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

The film mimics the crusading style of An Inconvenient Truth, coming down firmly in favour of complete disarmament.

Walker said she wondered what had happened to the activists who had once protested so vehemently against nuclear weapons. Where were they in the post-Cold War world, and why was there so little public awareness of the precarious state of nuclear weapons?

"Is it just complacency?" Walker said. "Is it just ignorance and a misunderstanding that [bombs] went away? Is it exhaustion? Is it that we're worried about climate change, and we can only think of one thing at a time?"

She sees hope in the April 2009 agreement committing the U.S. and Russia to a "nuclear-free world," as U.S. President Barack Obama put it and hopes her film will help convince people of the importance of carrying out that commitment.

"If the president calls for a world without nuclear weapons, I really want an enlightened population to support that," Walker said.