Viewpoints: Love and the Bomb

By RICHARD SCHICKEL, Jody Fayard

When he was an impoverished law student and she a radiant Portia in a touring Shakespeare company, they spent three delirious days together. It was, Laurence Olivier says, the love of his life, exerting such a powerful hold that he had no choice thereafter but bachelorhood. Katharine Hepburn claims she can't remember a thing about it, but since he is now London's leading barrister, perhaps he will stop his nostalgic mooning and get on with the business of defending the excellent name and fortune she married. Can anyone, after all, seriously believe that she promised to marry an assistant purser of the Mauretanial Could any jury possibly uphold the purser's claim of -L- 50,000 damages in a breach-of-promise suit?

It does seem improbable. One suspects from the beginning of LOVE AMONG THE RUINS (ABC, Thursday, March 5, 9 p.m. E.D.T.) that Hepburn's amnesia is a ploy, that Writer James Costigan will find a way for old love to conquer all. But who cares? His nostalgic Edwardian romance is just a charming conceit designed to bring Hepburn, 65, and Olivier, 67, together. The director is Veteran George Cukor, 75, whose cutting and camera placements impart a subtle tension (and an air of elegant craftsmanship) above and beyond the call of television duty. Indeed, all three conspire to make Costigan seem a much wittier writer than he is. Olivier can get laughs by snuffling or shuffling the papers on his desk. Hepburn in a temper, or just making an entrance or exit, remains, as always, a great theatrical occasion.

Love Among the Ruins may merely be a vehicle designed for veteran talents to exercise the beguiling skills of their youth without risking self-parody, to kindle our nostalgia for the kind of sophisticated romantic comedy the movies used to provide routinely (and television never learned to do) without risking invidious comparison to the way things were. But it is perhaps TV's most delightfully thoughtful gift to viewers this season. qedRichard Schickel

THE PLUTONIUM CONNECTION (PBS NOVA Series, March 9, 7:30 p.m. E.D.T.). It is no secret that ounces of plutonium--a byproduct of nuclear power reactors--could be used to produce a homemade atom bomb. To demonstrate that possibility NOVA commissioned a 20-year-old undergraduate chemistry student to try to design an A-bomb in five weeks, working alone and using only published information available to the general public. The result: a blueprint for a plutonium bomb with an estimated destructive capability of 100 to 1,000 tons of TNT. The student (portrayed by Actor John Holecek) describes the ease with which he mastered basic bomb making, sketching the structure of his bomb in a childlike doodle of two circles and a dot: "You explode the outer ring of TNT which squeezes the tamper which compresses the plutonium core, and boom." Could a similarly self-taught terrorist steal (or, as the experts on the program delicately put it, "divert") the needed plutonium?

A chilling answer to that question is given by the show's investigation of nuclear-plant security and the difficulties of keeping track of plutonium-containing nuclear wastes (one waste category is identified as GKW--God knows what). The danger of nuclear theft was explored earlier by CBS's 60 Minutes (August 1973). But NOVA'S exceptionally lucid and dramatic presentation shows that this complex problem demands persistent retelling. "Judy Fayard

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