Blinding Horizon

The most terrifying legacy of September 11th 2001 is the realization that a no-threat scenario is impossible. Another attack can happen at any time; but in the next attack the perpetrators might well be armed with nuclear weapons. Peter Bergen, author of the New York Times best seller Holy War Inc. and the first western television journalist to interview Osama Bin Laden, investigates the secret world of nuclear smuggling to answer the question: is al Qaeda capable of carrying out a nuclear attack on the United States? Documents found in Kabul confirm al Qaeda's keen interest in developing and deploying a nuclear device as a terrorist strategy and Bergen investigates the possibility that Osama Bin Laden may have held meetings in Afghanistan with scientists who had worked on Pakistan's nuclear program. In Moscow, Bergen looks at the level of security employed to protect nuclear materials in Russia from the possibility of theft and we find that there have been an instance of highly enriched uranium being smuggled out of a nuclear facility for sale on the black market. Having established that terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda have an interest in acquiring material for use in a nuclear weapon or radioactive 'dirty bomb', Bergen meets some of the people whose job it is to protect the US from this type of attack. National Geographic Television & Film provides a gripping and unsettling insight into the world of nuclear terrorism and forces us to confront the reality of our modern world where the possibility of a terrorist attack involving nuclear material can no longer be dismissed.