By Hook Or By Crook

Some 40 miles east of Tripoli, a complex of white stone buildings sparkles in the sunlight. Beyond the main entrance a courtyard opens onto a verdant Mediterranean garden. One of the surrounding walls is decorated with a brightly colored, stylized representation of Mendeleev's periodic table, the catalog of the elements. The attractive complex, however, is neither a jet- setter's hideaway nor a university campus. An inscription within the periodic table proclaims, "The Revolution Forever!" and outside the gate soldiers mount guard. Welcome to Libya's Tajura Nuclear Research Center.

Libya's persistent bid for nuclear power vividly dramatizes the potential menace of proliferation. For almost 16 years, the country's strongman, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, has been supporting international terrorism and devising schemes to worry the West. Were a nuclear weapon or two to fall into his hands, his capacity for troublemaking would increase intolerably. In 1981 Gaddafi told TIME that the atom bomb was "a means of terrorizing humanity, and we are against the manufacture and acquisition of nuclear weapons." A few days later he reportedly told his top advisers that he planned to channel a substantial amount of Libya's financial resources into obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Though Libya is nowhere near achieving that goal, it has not been for lack of trying. Even before he signed the nonproliferation treaty in 1975, Gaddafi began hatching proposals. In 1970 he sent a top aide, Abdul Salam Jalloud, to Peking in an attempt to buy an atom bomb. China turned him down. Beginning in 1973 the colonel helped bankroll part of Pakistan's bombmaking effort, and even before he was rebuffed several years later by President Mohammed Zia ul- Haq, he had started to make overtures to Pakistan's archenemy, India. When New Delhi restricted the extent of nuclear cooperation with Gaddafi to * strictly peaceful uses, Libya stopped shipments of 7.3 million bbl. of oil a year to India.

Last year, the Libyans reportedly contacted two Belgian firms, Belgonucleaire and Cockerill-Sambre, in an effort to gain engineering assistance for nuclear projects. The contract would have been worth nearly $1 billion, but under U.S. pressure the Belgians backed out. Some support, however, has apparently been provided by Argentina, in return for arms valued at more than $100 million that Gaddafi supplied during the Falklands war.

The most palpable result of Gaddafi's solicitation is the Soviet-built Tajura Center, whose state-of-the-art research facilities were opened in 1982. According to Ann MacLachlan, European editor for McGraw-Hill Inc.'s Nucleonics Week, who has visited the Libyan facility, the Soviets have supplied a small TM4-A Tokamak Nuclear Fusion Facility, which includes a ten-megawatt research reactor and a reactor-training site. Employed at the plant are several hundred Libyans who are studying nuclear operations.

The installation is under firm Soviet control, with more than 100 Soviet technicians on the scene. A strict believer in nonproliferation, Moscow has supplied neither manuals for the software it has provided nor so-called gamma catalogs to describe the detailed workings of the reactor. The Soviets will not disclose the design of the fuel they export and will not license it to other manufacturers. "The Libyans aren't going to get anywhere quickly," says MacLachlan. "And with the Soviets there, I don't see how they can divert anything."

But that should be no grounds for complacency. "Gaddafi will not develop a nuclear program to get a Bomb," warns Abdul Hamid Bakkush, a foe of the colonel's who now lives in exile as the secretary-general of the Libyan Liberation Organization. "If Gaddafi is after a Bomb, he will get it ready- made -- by hiring terrorists to steal it." However he tries to achieve that goal, a nuclear-armed Gaddafi would be a terrifying prospect.