The woman who once ruled Jordan with King Hussein is poised, dressed impeccably in a summer-white suit and 
speaks calmly about the nuclear threat facing her region, and the world.
Nuclear materials are “poorly guarded in unstable regions,” she told WaxWord at a private lunch in Beverly Hills on Friday. That situation intensifies the longstanding threat from Cold War nuclear arsenals – even with significant cuts back in the Reagan era.
It’s been decades since then.
Noor, who was born and raised in America but adopted Jordan when she married King Hussein, may be an unlikely spokeswoman for the reduction of nuclear arms and a new documentary that portrays the danger, “Countdown to Zero.”
But she says it comes from her desire to promote constructive development in poor countries such as her own, and from a frustration at seeing the waste of precious resources over arms in the developing world.
Her region is particularly volatile, with nuclear-powered Israel as a next-door neighbor, the ideologically-driven Iran on a breakneck quest for nuclear parity with the West, at least in terms of know-how, and the terrifying notion of al-Qaeda in the game to acquire nuclear material.
With antagonism between the nuclear-enabled India and Pakistan on the rise, the queen has every reason for concern.
I asked what seemed to her to be the greatest nuclear threat in her region.
“We get (Israeli) radiation in the Jordan Valley, it probably comes from their facilities in Dimona,” the queen answered. But, she added, “the epicenter of the nuclear threat is South Asia.”
Pakistan, I inquired? She nodded, and added that Burma was also believed to be embarking on a nuclear program.
And what about Iran? Here she was pointedly diplomatic. Iran has to be approached as part of the plan to get all 
countries to agree to eliminate nuclear weapons, she said. Iran, she pointed out, has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“How do you make a convincing argument to Iran, when India …hasn’t signed the NPT? Unless there is a framework that is non-discriminatory how do you achieve it? How do you demolish their logic? Their neighbors have (weapons).”
Meanwile, I asked Queen Noor her view of Israel’s deadly interception of a Turkish boat on a humanitarian mission to the Gaza Strip.
She expressed serious concern. “When you have the fraying of a relationship – and the Turkey – Israel relationship has been very important — … that’s a concerning situation,” she said.
“Work has to be done to repair relations,” she said.
The producers of “Zero” have been running across the country and around the globe to whip up interest in “Countdown to Zero,” a film about an important issue that is going to have an uphill battle in the PR and viewership department.
No one wants to think about nuclear proliferation – unless, God help us, some horrible dirty bomb explodes along the way.
It opens on July 23 in Washington DC and New York.
(Photo from WireImage)
