Wednesday’s still tangled and confusing episode in which British customs agents claimed to have thwarted a plot to smuggle to Iraq devices designed to trigger nuclear explosives provides a clear glimpse of the near future. It’s a future in which trafficking in military hardware can be expected to increase and the hardcore authoritarian Moslem regimes will aggressively pursue their objective of developing their own doomsday device.

The principles of nuclear fission, and the technology for building a working atomic weapon have been around for a long time, but even the Islamic states most eager to join the nuclear club: Pakistan, Libya and Iraq, have had their aspirations stifled by fast action on the part of European and U.S. military and intelligence operations, which have pulled the plug on sophisticated smuggling operations or, in key instances, destroyed nuclear facilities.

Even if they could get their hands on enough weapons-grade plutonium, which is hard to come by, expensive and costly politically, states that lack the means to process it properly and set it off are left holding just so much radioactive waste.

That’s what makes the British story so significant. Iraq, its name on the dotted line as a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, apparently was the nation-recipient of the bomb triggers, which late reports indicated might be dummies, substituted for the real thing by British customs officials.

Real or not, the fact that Iraq was willing to expose itself to embarrassment and international shame for its role in procuring illegal, strategic, high-tech military hardware, is an indication of the blind ambition of violence-prone states in their determination to have a nuke. Iraq just recently ended a long, very bloody war with Iran in which it also managed to blast the U.S.S. Stark, killing 26 crewmen who were asleep on their ship in international waters.

Iraq is typical of the new generation of countries that want their own bomb.

Two things are happening that unfortunately may result in more smuggling operations and a severe test of the vigilance of Western intelligence and customs officials.

The sudden easing of tensions between the superpowers has created an unstable international situation in which totalitarian leaders, many of them in Islamic countries, feel threatened by the surge of events and some of the specific consequences of the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, such as the more liberal emigration policies for Soviet Jews.

Eased geopolitical tension also means less business for manufacturers and distributors of military hardware. Peace means stagnant inventories and the lure of illegal sales, apparently not the case in the episode at Heathrow Airport, but a scenario that is guaranteed to unfold.