Hiroshima, mon amour: a new film coincides with the rebirth of the nuclear age

Cross Currents, Spring, 2004 by Carey Monserrate

While no firm timeline has been established, the relationships and activities detailed over the course of these investigations span several decades. The New York Times reported on April 13 that, in recent sessions with interrogators, Khan dated the beginning of his negotiations with the North Koreans on equipment and design sales to the late eighties, but did not actually ship anything until the late nineties. (A June 2002 CLA report estimates that Pongyang first received equipment and technical information for thermonuclear device manufacture in 1997; North Korea may have reciprocated by providing Pakistan with missile technology and material for its nuclear tests in 1998. Although North Korea has never admitted possessing nuclear weapons, it all but declared itself a nuclear state in January 2003 when it withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty--the only nation ever to do so). In the same Times article, Khan is reported to have told investigators that five years ago, while on a trip to North Korea, he was shown three nuclear devices at a secret underground site.

The extent of the current availability of Khan's blueprints and other stolen nuclear technology to other as yet unnamed states--or to "stateless" terrorist and criminal organizations--is unclear.

The Bush Administration, in apparent deference to Pakistan's status as a key ally in its "war on terror"--and in order to avoid embarrassment over its ties to Islamabad--issued a relatively muted response to these developments, framing the unearthing of Khan's nuclear technology distribution network as a coup for the intelligence community, a victory for international security, and one of the "key accomplishments in our efforts to prevent and protect against the proliferation of WMD."

As of this writing, President Bush has not mentioned Pakistan publicly for weeks.

Against the backdrop of these developments, Original Child Bomb will presumably find an interested audience. Although completed before revelations about Dr. Khan's activities surfaced, the filmmakers take note of other near-current developments in quick-edit bursts, furnishing news broadcast clips of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, the military build-up in Iraq, and North Korean missile test footage, interspersed with on-screen "factoids" highlighting the staggering irrationality of nuclear armament (there are more than 22,000 warheads worldwide, most of them orders of magnitude more powerful than those dropped on Japan; nine countries have declared nuclear arsenals, and almost 33 countries have the theoretical capacity to manufacture thermonuclear weapons; the United States has conducted 1,054 nuclear tests to date, some of them undertaken within short distances of human populations). Among the most disturbing clips are those originally broadcast during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when the White House briefly floated the idea of employing "tactical nuclear weapons," "mini-nukes," or "bunker busters" to uproot Saddam and his forces.