TV REVIEWS : A Nuclear Iran Is the Big Question

The terrible fear brought to the surface by the recent World Trade Center bombing is more than concern about terrorism on U.S. soil. It’s all the speculations, ranging from the antsy--when will it happen next?--to the grave--will the next bomb be nuclear?

Nuclear proliferation may be the Cold War’s darkest legacy, and it may be darkly fulfilled in Iran, if “Frontline’s” latest report, “Iran and the Bomb,” is to be believed (9 tonight, KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15; 8:30 p.m., KVCR Channel 24).

Working from reams of documents, lists and reports and culling from circumstantial evidence, producers Herb Krosney and Robert Ross and reporter Jane Corbin never get that image of Iran with its hand in the nuclear cookie jar. But the evidence, circumstantial or not, has been enough to convince many observers of nuclear proliferation that President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s regime is determined to include nuclear weapons in its defensive arsenal against a host of neighboring enemies, from Iraq to Saudi Arabia to Israel.

One of those experts, Gary Milhollin, states the worst case of a nuclearized Iran most starkly when he says, “If the Iranians get the ability to make bombs and distribute them to terrorists, then I don’t think there’s any safety left in the West.” Perhaps, but “Frontline’s” investigation indicates that U.S. high-tech companies, in association with Washington-based lobbyists pressuring for liberal import-export laws, have sought to sneak around U.S. trade restrictions regarding Iran.

The same profit-driven policy of private U.S. firms seems to be behind China’s sale to Iran of a nuclear reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. The same policy also apparently motivates various European companies--suspicion is pointed especially at German firms Leybold and Magnetfabrik and Lampart in Hungary--to sell parts which, amassed together, could build large nuclear and chemical weapons-building programs.

But Iran may not need the parts at all, since the country recently purchased four nuclear warheads from the cash-starved former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. “Iran and the Bomb” shows the first public view inside a formerly super-secret Kazakh nuclear installation, from which Iran may have purchased such key weapons ingredients as beryllium and uranium dioxide pellets.

Nuclear proliferation expert William Triplett concludes that the question of a nuclear Iran is a matter of time, and not whether the country will have the bomb, but whether it will have democratic constraints against use of the bomb. Democracies, he might have added, do not attack other democracies.