Valerie Plame Wilson is impeccable. The former CIA covert operative, whose identity was famously compromised in a newspaper column in 2003, is sitting in front of a blinding, wall-wide expanse of windows on the top floor of the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan. Her nails are manicured and red and she's wearing a clingy, off-the-shoulder sweater. She's a fox, the perfect spook. Plame is here to answer questions about Countdown to Zero, a documentary about the history of the atomic bomb and the possibility of nuclear disarmament. In a recurring segment in the film, we hear President Kennedy's 1961 address to the UN General Assembly: “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. The weapons of the war must be abolished before they abolish us.” It's a terrifying fact the film won't let us forget, as it runs through one flesh-eviscerating scenario—scrambled signals during a routine launch testing, the disastrous entrepreneurship of A.Q. Khan—after another, the gruesome end product spared us till the end. (Brooklyn does, in fact, lay within the blast zone of a nuclear attack.)

Countdown to Zero's message is at last an optimistic one, and Plame cleaves to this line throughout our interview. Her mind processes questions Mustang-fast, and her answers are unswerving and neat, such that there's a gratifying moment when I feel like I'm being debriefed in the basement of a marble building in Washington. Since 'Plamegate' and her resignation from the CIA, Plame has been living in Santa Fe with her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Here she is on the new nuclear question: disarmament.

How did you get involved with Countdown to Zero? About 18 months ago, Lawrence Bender, who is one of the producers along with Participant Media, who financed the film, approached me and asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed. I knew that they were serious people; they had done An Inconvenient Truth. I was delighted to be able to take my expertise gathered from my days in covert CIA operations at this very intersection of terrorism and nuclear weapons and use it for something that was really meaningful. I didn’t know what it would become, but was happy to do what I could.

Which country do you think poses the greatest nuclear threat to the world? One that I find not necessarily above the others, but that deeply concerns me, is Pakistan. It’s so volatile. I think it is a country perhaps on the verge of implosion. We cannot be sure that their command and control structure has integrity, and they are the country that we believe is harboring Osama Bin Laden. They are neighbors with India. That combination I find deeply unsettling.

How possible do you think it is for Al-Qaeda to find and use nuclear weapons? Extremely possible. As we note in the movie, prior to 9/11 we knew that Osama Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi were looking for nuclear technology and weapons. There is no doubt that they have the will, and they are constantly seeking capabilities and technologies to make that come to pass.

Countdown to Zero’s basic thesis is that, unless all countries with nuclear capability manage to disarm completely, a nuclear incident is inevitable. Do you agree with that? Inevitable is a really big word. I wouldn’t be involved with this if I wasn’t ultimately an optimist and believed that we can turn away from this path of existential destruction. There is some good news. In 1986, at the height of the Cold War, we had 70,000 nuclear weapons. We are now down to about 23,000, so there has been progress. Chemical and biological weapons are now considered taboo. This film was intended as a cold, hard wake-up call. This is an issue that has not been talked about -- it’s not been fashionable since the close of the Cold War. We breathed a collective sigh of relief and went on. So our hope is to believe in the power of film to effect positive social change. We are hoping that we have the same, if not better success than we did with An Inconvenient Truth.

What sort of additional steps would have to be taken to make disarmament possible? They have created an entire social action campaign around this film. Your readers can go to globalzero.org and takepart.com. Folks can petition their senators to ratify the START treaty. They can find out where this movie is playing, go tell a friend, sign the Global Zero declaration. It is such an overwhelming topic that an individual can feel like, ‘What can I do?’ We live in a democracy, and we are still a government of the people. While these treaties are signed at the very highest political levels, obviously, they are driven by a political will that comes from the ground up. We are in a really special moment in time. We have been given this window of opportunity. President Obama spoke very clearly and eloquently about getting to zero. I believe we are a great nation and we have led the world in the last century in putting out this shining vision. This is why millions of Americans want to come here every year, because of this dream. Whether with the Marshall Plan, giving civil rights to all our citizens, putting a man on the moon ... here is our challenge now, to lead the world to the Global Zero objective.

Of the three scenarios we hear President Kennedy outline again and again in the film, “madness, accident, and miscalculation,” which do you think is most likely to cause a nuclear event? The harsh reality is that any of them could happen. The sword of Damocles is hanging over our heads by the slimmest of threads. The movie makes a really compelling case for terrorism. And then, in 2007, a B-52 bomber with nuclear-tipped warheads flew over our country without the crew or the ground crew even understanding what their package was. Any of them are possible scenarios. As we have seen, these low-probability events do come to pass. I’m sure if you had asked BP executives about the probability of a deep-water well exploding, they would say, “It’s a very low probability.” Well, that’s true, but with nuclear weapons we certainly cannot take that chance.

I thought one of the most interesting personalities that came up in the documentary was A. Q. Khan. How was he left unchecked for so many years and left to do so much damage? Are we still seeing the fallout? We are indeed still seeing his fallout. It was my group at the CIA, counter-proliferation division, that ultimately wrapped him up and shut down Libya’s program in December 2003. In intelligence work sometimes you let an operation continue to see where it will lead you, where do the threads go and pulling, pulling, pulling. We wrapped up A.Q. Khan as quickly as we thought was prudent, and that allowed us to peer into his network and to see what else was there. We thought it would be useless early on to just pull him out when so much was still out there that we didn’t know.

I was just reading Dana Priest’s article for The Washington Post about the huge flaws within the United State’s intelligence community. I haven’t read it yet; I’ve only heard of it and very quickly glanced at it. She is such an outstanding journalist. To me, unfortunately, the headlines aren’t news, but I’m glad she is exposing this because our intelligence community is vastly bloated and bureaucratic and relies far too heavily on contractors to get the job done. I hope this has a real sobering affect on lawmakers in Washington, who can realign the community in ways that make sense and are much more affective and keep us safe.

How productive was Obama’s recent disbarment talk with Medvedev in Russia? Obama has made tremendous strides. The START treaty has been signed and needs to be ratified. He completed the nuclear posture review, and in April, he convened 47 world leaders in Washington to speak about nuclear safety, and begin to have tougher monitoring and verification processes. We haven’t had that many world leaders in one place since I think the founding of the nations. So he really has provided tremendous leadership on this. But more has to be done. We have to pick it up and do it.

I would imagine that North Korea would be up there with Pakistan in terms of an international threat. Are they? Well, they are a cult masquerading as a state. Every time I read a story about their leadership and the plight of their people my stomach churns because they are truly enslaved. I believe that we don’t think for a moment that simply because the United States and Russia choose to step down that we will lead by example and North Korea will fall in line. It will take every bit of our diplomatic intelligence, sanctions, and building a strong international census.

What’s your opinion of Truman’s decision to drop the first atomic bomb? My opinion ... The way the history is written now is that it was a decision made by President Truman to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, as terrible as it was. I think that there is still much to that story that we don’t know. We certainly weren’t there to understand what he had available to him to make that decision. The movie doesn’t look at that at all. Of course she showed some footage of Hiroshima, but [director] Lucy Walker made a conscious decision to not include that aspect, because the movie looks forward to what we need to do rather than what is behind us.