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Television Ad to Draw Attention to Nuclear Threat By Jon Fox WASHINGTON — Beginning Sunday, the Partnership for a Secure America, a bipartisan group of government and foreign policy veterans, will start airing a television commercial in major cities to raise awareness about the threat of nuclear terrorism (see GSN, March 7, 2005). A girl and her mother are window shopping on a city street. As the camera focuses in on a little girl’s eyes, the colors on the screen shift to reds and yellows. Zooming into to the blackness of one of her pupils, the image in the commercial abruptly shifts to a mushroom cloud. The similarities to Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 presidential campaign ad, in which a small girl picks flower petals before apparently being annihilated, are not subtle, and they were not accidental. “It was a not unintentional visual reference,” said Matthew Rojansky, executive director of the Partnership for a Secure America. The 30-second television spot, designed to alert Americans to the need to secure loose nuclear material abroad, is scheduled to begin airing Sunday in major cities. It is part of a push by the bipartisan group to highlight five foreign policy and national security issues during the 2008 presidential election process. “These are issues you should care about,” said Robert McFarlane, a member of the group’s advisory board and national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan. Nuclear terrorism tops the group’s list, which also includes energy security and climate change, encouraging development in foreign countries, human rights and the rise of In the 1960s, the mushroom cloud was a symbol of the nuclear war Americans feared. More than 40 years later, the image illustrates the threat of nuclear terrorism, an ultimate catastrophe that is often invoked both politicians and those in the national security business. “ In the television ad, a girl and her mother are window shopping outside a storefront display filled with teddy bears. An announcer reminds the viewer that while these two are looking for stuffed animals others may be browsing nuclear facilities for the “ultimate weapon.” A man in a dark hooded sweatshirt pulls a silver metal-clad case out of a van on the street, catching the young girl’s attention. Then through her eyes we see the telltale explosion, the suggestion being that inside that case is a terrorist nuclear device. The ad, Rojansky said, is “primarily targeted to what you would call the opinion leader segment” among the voting population. Pressuring the actual decision-makers to take action only goes “so far if you don’t have pressure from the people empowering them, which is the American voter,” he said. “The teaming up of nuclear material with terrorists groups could be catastrophic, obviously,” McFarlane said. “So it bears reminding people that this really is a menace we have to get better control of through controlling nuclear material themselves.” Rojansky said arousing fear is not the goal. Rather, the ad is designed as a reminder that the threat of the nuclear terrorism remains “real,” he said. “They’re aware that there’s a risk of terror attacks but it’s the solution they’re less aware of,” Rojansky said. The commercial notes the Sept. 11 commission’s recommendation to strengthen effort to secure nuclear material abroad through cooperative threat reduction programs, and states that despite that call Securing material at its source is more reasonable that spending “billions of dollars to build an impenetrable fortress around the “There are actually a finite number of facilities out there,” he said. The ad was produced with the participation of the Saga Foundation, which is partnered with the Nuclear Threat Initiative. [EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nuclear Threat Initiative is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by the National Journal Group.]
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