Reality Check

IF EVERYONE HAS 15 MINUTES OF fame, Jessica Stern says, ""I rather hope I'm on minute 13 of mine.'' Stern is an intensely serious, 39-year-old academic. She has a master's degree in chemical engineering from MIT and a doctorate in public policy from Harvard, and she speaks Russian fluently. In the normal course of events, she would now be finishing up a scholarly treatise on the threat of terrorists' using weapons of mass destruction. Instead, as a result of a year she spent working for the Clinton White House, she is watching a glamorous Hollywood version of herself, played by Nicole Kidman, racing around Europe and Asia Minor with George Clooney in the movie ""The Peacemaker.'' It's a disconcerting experience. ""I assume people will realize that character has nothing whatever to do with me,'' says Stern. ""I certainly hope so.''

The movie is preposterous, though hugely entertaining. At a recent screening in Washington, it was possible to tell which rows of the Cineplex Odeon on Wisconsin Avenue were occupied by folks from the executive branch, because waves of giggles convulsed them as one clanger followed hard upon another. For policymakers, the high point is surely when Kidman--magically coordinating the U.S. response to a nuclear blast in Russia and the theft of a Soviet warhead--barks down a phone line: ""This is a presidential directive . . .'' (Only presidents issue presidential directives.) For law-enforcement types, there's the spectacle of Clooney conducting an almost endless demolition derby in the crowded streets of Vienna--smashing his silver Mercedes into the bad guys' black BMWs and then getting out to shoot the survivors--without attracting the attention of the famously attentive Austrian police. And for techno types, the last straw is watching Kidman attempt to disarm a backpack-size nuke with a pocket knife, seeking to set off a supposedly harmless explosion of its nonnuclear trigger. (Such an explosion would disperse enough plutonium to make midtown Manhattan uninhabitable for decades.)

But, giggles aside, people in the arms-control business are treating ""The Peacemaker'' with a degree of respect. ""The movie is Hollywood, but the problem it deals with is real and frightening,'' says William Potter of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, who tracks nuclear smuggling out of the former Soviet Union. He and other experts hope the film will arouse public awareness of the ""loose nukes'' issue, prodding the administration into more vigorous action. ""The idea that popular culture has no role in nuclear-security issues is just wrong,'' says Kenneth Luongo, a former Energy Department official who worked to corral loose nukes. ""Governments respond to public pressure, however it's generated.''

The link between Jessica Stern, policy wonk, and ""Dr. Julia Kelly,'' Kidman's hyperactive bureaucrat, arises from a book called ""One Point Safe,'' by the Washington husband-and-wife journalistic team of Andrew and Leslie Cockburn (288 pages. Anchor Books. $23.95). The book is an oversimplified account of how the Clinton administration struggled through the early 1990s to solve the problem of loose nukes, the trade's shorthand term for the 27,000 nuclear warheads and roughly 1,300 tons of potentially lethal fissile material now scattered across the former Soviet Union and vulnerable to theft or purchase by terrorists. The Cockburns' heroine was Stern, who for a year in 1994 and 1995 worked on the staff of the National Security Council.

The Clinton administration can claim considerable progress on loose nukes. It persuaded Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakstan to relinquish the Soviet nuclear missiles that had been stationed on their territory. It also helped to retrieve more than 1,300 pounds of highly enriched uranium from Kazakstan. With Congress providing financial aid to help the Russians disarm and secure their weapons, the Pentagon and the Energy Department have developed close working relations with their counterparts in Russia.

During her year at the NSC, Stern chaired a working group that coordinated the effort to stop nuclear smuggling. (""It was a swamp of interagency disagreement,'' says Matthew Bunn, a former colleague, ""and Jessica helped drain it.'') Just last week the administration signed an agreement with the Russians that could break the logjam on the 1993 START II arms-control agreement, which Russia's Parliament has refused to ratify. The new accord postpones implementation of START II for five years, until the end of 2007, by which time it should be overtaken by the deeper cuts of START III as outlined last March by Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin.