Richard Lugar, Sam Nunn see continued threat to disarmament
Former U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar is pretty sure he said $150 million.
But two decades ago, in talks over disarming nuclear weapons in Ukraine through his Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the U.S. pledged $175 million.
Indiana's longtime Republican senator chuckled Tuesday over the story but noted how it became a "terribly critical" move — particularly as Ukraine's civil protests now boil over in Kiev, ousting the country's leader.
"What if Ukraine had retained even a part of its nuclear weapons?" Lugar said. "This would be a different sort of world."
Lugar, 81, rejoined his disarmament ally, former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., for a talk Tuesday night at the University of Indianapolis.
The pair ruminated on international threats past and future with moderator Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio.
They rehashed the landmark bipartisan crafting of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction, a program created in the early 1990s that they credit with eliminating about 10,000 weapons of mass destruction before it expired last year.
Lugar recalled being told by Russian acquaintances after the Cold War: "You Americans must know that the security is breaking down around the nuclear weapons pointed at you."
"What do you want?" he asked, trying to figure out how to destroy the weapons threat.
"We're going to need a lot of money," he remembered them saying.
The Nunn-Lugar program provided money and expertise to disarm nuclear weapons, first in the former Soviet Union and then expanding to other parts of the world.
The legislation was a hard sell in an atmosphere of post-Cold War distrust — "remarkable," Nunn said, that it passed at all.
But it wasn't simply a foreign aid offering, the senators said. It was a security program for the U.S.
Lugar remembered once walking into a former missile silo in Ukraine. The walls were lined with beautiful photographs of U.S. cities — the potential targets for the missiles.
"We could've been obliterated," he said, thinking about how oblivious he was to nuclear threats in the years before his Senate service.
In looking forward, the duo stressed cooperation and hinted at an upcoming proposal from Nunn's Nuclear Threat Initiative organization to continue breaking down distrust through discussions involving Russia, NATO and the European Union.
With Russia, the U.S. still has a long way to go, said Nunn, 75. It's not a deliberate war that he fears, he said, but the possibility of an "accidental war" if tensions unintentionally escalate.
The senators said they worried about the nuclear weapons that Pakistan and North Korea have and the ones that Iran could get. But they were more troubled by the increasing ease and affordability of building weapons of mass destruction and the anonymity of cyber or terrorist attacks.
"We're in a race between cooperation and catastrophe," said Lugar, who is a distinguished professor at UIndy.
What stuck with Indianapolis resident and UIndy alumnus Don Ferguson, 64, was how close nuclear threats once loomed — "just how close," he said after the event, "total catastrophe could've happened with a little bit of slip."
UIndy freshman Danielle Hynes and senior Kathleen Weddle said the senators made "that stuff on the news all the time" more relevant and understandable, underscoring the importance of U.S. relationships with other countries.
On stage, the two politicians from opposing parties sat side by side in armchairs, taking turns to talk. They had waved in sync during their introduction, and at the end, they stood, each with an arm around the other.
Call Star reporter Stephanie Wang at (317) 444-6184. Follow her on Twitter: @stephaniewang.