TODAY is Demand Zero Day, as declared by Dogwoof, the British distributor of Countdown To Zero, a new film that highlights “our present nuclear threat”.

Written and directed by Academy Award-nominated documentary maker Lucy Walker, it will be shown at City Screen, York, this evening at 6.30pm, as part of a nationwide premiere.

All the venues will link up afterwards via satellite for a panel discussion at the London BAFTA screening with Queen Noor of Jordan, former Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson and Oscar-winning producer and activist Lawrence Bender.

From the makers of the environmental wake-up call An Inconvenient Truth, Countdown To Zero traces the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs.

At present, nine nations possess nuclear weapons, and as others race to join them, the world is in a delicate balance that could be shattered by an act of terrorism, failed diplomacy or a simple accident.

International statesmen Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair and former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf all contribute to the film’s case for worldwide nuclear disarmament, and the words of the late President John F Kennedy still resonate loudest of all.

“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness,” he warned in his address to the UN in New York in 1961.

Thirty-eight years later, President Barack Obama told the UN: “The time has come for the world to move in a new direction. In an era where our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game.”

The following day, the UN’s National Security Summit adopted a unanimous resolution calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Amid 100 nations uniting in the drive towards Global Zero, Lucy Walker set about making her documentary against the backdrop of constantly changing world events.

“This issue is on the front page of newspapers around the world every day,” she says.

“Not a day goes by that the news doesn’t tell me that this movie could not be more important or more timely.

“On the other hand, we knew we couldn’t be merely ‘newsy’ as we can’t compete with the news cycle, and a movie deserves a long shelf life. I know that I still get a great deal out of older movies about nuclear weapons from Dr Strangelove to The Day After, Threads, When The Wind Blows, Dark Circle… so much great work and more.”

Her challenge was to “sift every piece of information to give audiences the tools to understand the news events as they continue to unfold”.

The resulting film was premiered in January last year and will be provoking debate once more at today’s country-wide screenings.

You can join the discussion by texting your questions to the panel via the website countdowntozerofilm.com, where you can learn more about the campaign. Box office: 0871 902 5726 or picturehouses.co.uk/york