The first movie release of Dreamworks, "The Peacemaker," received as many bad reviews in Italy as it did in the United States. Quite frankly, I don’t see what all the criticism is about. And fortunately, judging from the reaction of people leaving the movie theaters, neither does the public. Although action films are not exactly my favorite genre, this one at least has a message which the general public needs to be aware of. And an action film is obviously a more efficient means to get the message across to the masses than an eruditious book on the subject. So what’s the message? The fact that winning the Cold War has not made the world a safer place to live in, but perhaps even the contrary.
Last year, MIT Press published a book called, "Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material," written by Graham Allison, director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government and three of his colleagues also from the CSIA, Owen Cote, Richard Falkenrath, and Steven Miller. The book didn’t reach the best seller lists. Nor did the authors win any popularity contests for some of their apocalyptic exhortations or their exorbitantly costly solutions:
The dissolution of the Soviet Union has left an enormous inheritance of weapons-grade nuclear material, 800-1,000 tons of highly enriched uranium and another 200 tons of plutonium, spread across several hundred sites forming a formidable nuclear archipelago.
When the Soviet Union was still standing, the police state gave top priority to maintaining internal security and tightly guarding its borders. Now most of the facilities which harbor nuclear material are able to boast less security than most international airports!
Although European police have managed to thwart the six known attempts to sell nuclear material that has been successfully smuggled out of Russia since 1991, it is evident that the vulnerability of this material is far from hypothetical or cinematographic fantasy.
The New Russia’s mafia style corruption is well coupled with the nuclear ambition of terrorists, rogue states such as Iran, Libya, or North Korea, and why not, the disillusioned Bosnian with a personal mission of vengeance proposed by the script of "The Peacemaker."
The solution to eliminate the imminent danger suggested by Allison and his colleagues is not exactly music to the ears of those who thought that the end of the Cold War would bring a "peace dividend" after the billions of dollars spent preparing for a nuclear Armageddon.
They propose that we buy off the entire stock, to the tune of $30 billion, and ship it to the US for safe storage. As shocking as that figure may sound as the price to have to pay for having won the Cold War, the alternative could be even more devastating. When seen from the context of the overall defense budget of $250 billion, we’re talking about twelve percent.
Thanks to the mafia and the corrupt military in the New Russia, Hollywood has been able to remove the cobwebs from the once popular "spy film" genre, which suddenly became dated with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The critics complain that there is no point in casting stars without a script that includes enough character development of their personalities. Point taken. However, credit must be given to those with the insight to use the mass means of the grand screen to initiate sensitivity in public opinion to an issue that is in dire need of our attention.
December 1997
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