EXCLUSIVE: Undone producer Submarine is developing a Homeland-style terrorism thriller after optioning two books about nuclear weapons expert Abdul Khan.
The company, which has offices in LA and the Netherlands, has optioned The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World’s Most Dangerous Secrets…and How We Could Have Stopped Him and Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking from authors Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz.
The Nuclear Jihadist tells the story of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani father of the Islamic bomb and the mastermind behind a vast clandestine enterprise that has sold nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Khan’s loose-knit organization was and still may be a nuclear Wal-Mart, selling weapons blueprints, parts, and the expertise to assemble the works into a do-it-yourself bomb kit. Amazingly, American authorities could have halted his operation, but they chose instead to watch and wait. Khan proved that the international safeguards the world relied on no longer worked.
Meanwhile, Fallout examines the huge costs of the CIA’s errors and the lost opportunities to halt the spread of nuclear weapons technology long before it was made available to some of the most dangerous and reckless adversaries of the United States and its allies.
It is now developing the two books as series called Proliferation and Femke Wolting, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Submarine told Deadline that it was set to start talks with writers to adapt the project with a view of taking it to U.S. broadcasters, global streaming services and international networks next year.
Submarine recently produced Undone, Amazon’s first adult animated drama series from Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waskberg and is also producing The Kollective, a drama series based in the world of citizen investigative journalism and written by Gomorrah and ZeroZeroZero writers Leonardo Fasoli and Maddalena Ravagli.
Wolting said, “While Abdul Khan’s life and story may be in the past, it could not be more relevant today. The political landscape we exist in was profoundly shaped by the proliferation that Khan unleashed, and this story is a cautionary tale of how isolated conflicts between nations can spill out on an international scale.”