TV Reviews : ‘Terror Trade’ Tracks Nuclear Proliferation

“The Terror Trade: Buying the Bomb” (tonight at 9:05 on WTBS cable, repeated Saturday at 7:05 p.m.) hits the scary buttons right away:

How long will it be before Kadafi (roll film of crazy Moammar) or Khomeini (roll film of the evil Ayatollah and his Iranian street people) get their hands on nuclear weapons?

How soon will extremists be able to hold us for ransom by assembling a crude nuke and slipping it into New York City?

Not long and soon are the gloomy answers, according to this solidly reported message-documentary presented by Ted Turner’s Better World Society to try to bring greater attention to the threat to world peace created by nuclear proliferation.

“Terror Trade,” co-produced by director Claudia Milne and reporter George Case for a joint British-Swiss venture, leaves little doubt that there exists a thriving international black market that can supply anyone who’s got the money with the ingredients for making an atomic bomb.

The hour documents how the global boom in civilian nuclear power plants (especially in Europe) is creating more and more plutonium and what is being done to keep it out of the hands of terrorists and terrorist states.

Unfortunately, as everyone from Jimmy Carter to a Sudanese intelligence officer to a former international arms dealer called “Eric” attests, it is virtually impossible for the West to completely prevent the diversion of fissionable material and weapons technology.

“Terror Trade,” which sounds a warning without overdoing the fear-mongering, concludes with calls for improved security of nuclear facilities and tighter international controls and monitoring. It also urges the superpowers to strengthen the Nonproliferation Treaty and put a higher priority on its enforcement.

Yet, as the program itself makes clear, such policing measures--even if practical--will never be able to completely halt nuclear proliferation. And anyway, though the Better World Society and others in the West may fervently wish it were not so, many countries are still determined to join the nuclear club. Pakistan, for instance, sees nuclear weapons as its only genuine defense against stronger and unfriendly neighbors like India.

Ironically, former CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner offers a morally ambiguous but much more realistic method of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons: the superpowers might have to take preemptive military action--perhaps even using nuclear weapons.