In one of last year’s presidential debates, George Bush and John Kerry were asked what was the most serious threat facing the United States.
Both replied without equivocation or hesitation that it was nuclear terrorism.
Since then, we have heard about as much from either guy on the subject as we have discourses on ptarmigan breeding in the Falkland Islands.
To put it mildly — if one can employ so gentle a term in the context of Chicago’s Loop or Midtown Manhattan being largely leveled and fried a bright orange — the threatened nation hasn’t paid much attention, either.
More Top Picks Photophobia Resources
For those truly concerned about said prospect — and that would include especially former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) — this has been an exasperating frustration.
Desperate to be heard
They have tried legislation, congressional debate, speeches, news releases, seminars, briefings and everything short of a major Hollywood movie to somehow catch the public’s attention. Now it’s come to this. They actually have made a movie.
“We tried everything else but haven’t gotten our message across,” said Nunn, now co-chairman and CEO of an awareness group called the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Financier Warren Buffett was the big backer. Ted Turner, the other co-chairman of Nuclear Threat Initiative, has been a major player in the project (he had practice making bombs in the making of his colossal Civil War dud, “Gods and Generals.”) The Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation also gave support.
The film, “Last Best Chance,” is hardly what you’d call a major Hollywood production. For those who prefer their nuclear terrorist films starring the likes of Tom Cruise or Vin Diesel, the best you’re getting here is former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who has left Congress to return to acting and once again plays the president of the United States — a president who does not confine his worries about the threat to campaign debates.
There is only one shootout and no screaming car chase, exploding building or damsel taken hostage in distress. But it’s the most frightening feature film I’ve ever seen on the subject, because — even though Montreal and environs served as Russia and the U.S. — it is so real.
“We worked very carefully with . . . a number of experts, both in technology and policy, to help make it as accurate as possible,” said Nunn. “The man who plays the Russian president is a Russian national who now lives in Canada.”
Ghouls looking for the joys of a nuclear holocaust onscreen will be disappointed. The frying of the Loop will have to be left to the imagination.
The film does show you how easy it would be for terrorists to get their hands on the stuff to do it with.
With bribery the characters’ principal means of manipulation, the movie takes us through the acquisition process, showing us that our lives may be in the hands of some Russian technician (or U.S. lab attendant) who’s desperate for money.
Nunn readily acknowledges that there are more immediate threats, and he lists them in priority as conventional bombs, chemicals, then a tie between dirty bombs, which scatter radioactivity, and biological weapons. Only after that comes “attack with a nuclear weapon.” But it’s such a big worry because it’s the most devastating of the threats.
“It’s the one that would be the least likely but the one with the most consequences,” Nunn said. “If we did have a nuclear explosion in an American city or any other city in the world, it would change the world. The confidence level for international commerce would go down precipitously and be very hard to restore. If one happened, people would assume another could happen. And every would-be terrorist group on the globe would be threatening and keep us off balance for years to come.”
Control the supply
The easiest way to deal with the menace is to safely store or eliminate the highly enriched uranium the bad guys need to make a weapon. Under legislation sponsored by Nunn and Lugar in 1991, the U.S. has spent millions helping Russia and other former Soviet Union states secure or destroy their huge stockpiles of highly enriched uranium left over from the Cold War. But there are still piles of the stuff lying around.
And there’s an added danger from the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear research labs in some 40 countries.
“We’ve still got research reactors with highly enriched uranium in the United States, some of them on college campuses,” Nunn said, noting that there are means available to convert such research to non-weapons-grade, low-enriched uranium. “We hope they’re secure, but we can’t afford to be complacent about it. I think we need to delegitimize the use of highly enriched uranium.”
Once this raw material gets into the wrong hands, it becomes harder to stop it — especially by the time it gets to a major U.S. port or simple border crossing from Canada.
“Last Best Chance” had its premiere in Buffett’s Omaha this summer and has appeared in venues in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, New Mexico and New York, before the Council on Foreign Relations. Talks are under way to bring it to Chicago.
In the meantime, there will be a showing on the HBO cable network at 7 p.m. Oct. 17, with several repeats following.
“It’s not an easy subject for people to get their heads around,” Nunn said. “One of our jobs is to get it down to understandable components. If we had a nuclear explosion blow up an American city, what is it we wished we had done before it happened? Why aren’t we doing it now?”
———-
More Top Picks Best Formula Dispensers For Babies