Anti-nuke film sounds terror warning at Cannes

The Cold War may be long over but "Countdown to Zero" -- from the producers behind Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's climate change polemic "An Inconvenient Truth" -- warns that nuclear bombs are easier to come by than ever.

Through interviews with former world leaders, spies, smugglers and scientists, British film-maker Lucy Walker's work shows how unsecured lumps of uranium in Russia could end up being used by terrorists to destroy cities.

Interviewees include ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Britain's former prime minister Tony Blair and Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan. Their conclusion: the world must push for "zero" nuclear weapons.

Interviews including an exclusive with Oleg Khintsagov, a Russian jailed for trying to sell enriched uranium to the Al-Qaeda network, seek to show how the failure of Cold War-era disarmament efforts allowed the danger to spread.

"This is the most urgent threat we face as human beings," Walker told a news conference after the screening. It "did not go away with the Cold War as we would love to think."