Author Ted Bell: Terrorists Could Get Pakistan Nukes

Saturday, September 25, 2010 11:38 AM By: John Rossomando

Pakistani nuclear weapons could fall into terrorist hands and threaten the United States unless the Islamic state takes steps to secure them, warns New York Times best-selling author Ted Bell.

In an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview, Bell says senior American defense and intelligence figures consider Pakistan’s nuclear weapons a serious threat to national security.

“The Pakistani government has consistently refused the offer of the United States to help them lockdown those weapons, so that none can be stolen,” says Bell, author of “Warlord: An Alex Hawke Novel,” the latest in his espionage series. “They’ve constantly forbidden us to do that because they think once we know the location, we are going to come in and lock them down anyways because they are so dangerous to us and so unstable, but that hasn’t happened.

Best-selling spy novelist Ted Bell, who recently toured U.S. special forces training bases overseas recently, says he was told that nuclear weapons-equipped Pakistan is very unstable and dangerous as an ally. He discusses his latest Alex Hawke thriller.

“We don’t know where they are,” Bell says. “This is a very unstable situation, and one of the quotes I think I heard at Ft. Bragg was, ‘If there is a nuclear event in the United States — pick a city — there is a 90 percent chance that nuclear weapon will have come out of Pakistan.”

The author learned about these concerns while doing research for his latest novel, which details the effort of a fictional global Islamic terrorist group to collaborate with the Taliban and al-Qaida to conduct a string of bombings aimed at establishing a global caliphate.

This scenario reads like the pages of Tom Clancy’s 1991 thriller, “The Sum of All Fears,” in which an Islamic extremist group attacks the Super Bowl with a smuggled nuclear weapon. Hollywood turned this book into a movie in 2002 — changing the villains from Islamic extremists into neo-Nazis.

Bell’s Alex Hawke series could similarly find its way to the big screen.

“We are currently in discussion with two male Hollywood film stars who are interested in the role of Alex Hawke and two major Hollywood studios,” Bell says. “The level has been upped recently. We now have the head of one of those major studios involved in these discussions, so the odds of Alex making it to the big screen are getting better all of the time.”

Hollywood executives have expressed interest in “Warlord” as well as Bell’s previous best-seller in the Alex Hawke series, “Tsar,” but Bell cautions that he has limited control over how the studios choose to interpret his works.

“Anything can happen in Hollywood, and I will do my best to protect my material as well as I can,” Bell tells Newsmax.TV, referring to what Hollywood did to Clancy’s plot. “In the end, the author cannot control the screenplay . . . and by now, I hope we have a clearly defined enemy, so we don’t have to worry about stepping on their toes.

“Whether that remains true or not remains to be seen when we make the film.”