The failed coup launched against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin in 1991 gave the world more than the memorable photograph of Yeltsin standing triumphantly atop a tank outside Parliament in Moscow. The incompetent farce “hastened the fall of an empire,” the journalist and historian Victor Sebestyen wrote on the occasion of the coup’s 20th anniversary.
The butterfingered putsch had one more positive legacy: It arguably led to the most consequential arms control success in modern history. The men most directly responsible for this were Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, the latter of whom died April 28 in Falls Church, Va., at the age of 87 from complications from a neurological disorder. The Indianapolis-born Lugar was first elected to Senate in 1976 and finally defeated, in a Republican primary, in 2012, becoming Indiana’s longest-serving senator. In the space between, the soft-spoken, self-deprecating former mayor of Indianapolis who got his start in politics on the local school board left an outsize impact on the world, most notably with the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction.
Nunn had been concerned that a communication breakdown could bring about a nuclear crisis between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but the attempted coup in August 1991 brought other nightmare scenarios to mind. Days after Gorbachev was released from house arrest, the Democratic senator met with him and probed the former Soviet leader on whether, during the chaos, he remained in full control of his country’s nuclear weapons. “I had met with Gorbachev on a number of previous occasions, and his answers to these questions did not have the same ring of conviction as his statements during our earlier meetings,” he recalled in 1995. “It seemed to me that either he was not himself clear about the status of command and control of nuclear weapons during that crucial period, or he was not comfortable discussing the matter candidly with me.”
The looming breakup of the USSR meant parts of Europe and Asia could suddenly be littered with loose nukes. Nunn’s first attempt at a legislative solution, a billion-dollar stabilization program on which he partnered with Democratic Rep. Les Aspin of Wisconsin, foundered on a surge of noninterventionist sentiment in November 1991. Nunn then turned to Lugar. Writes David Hoffman in The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy, “The addition of Lugar was critical. Within days, Nunn and Lugar had turned around the Senate and gathered the votes for new legislation to set aside $500 million to deal with the Soviet nuclear dangers.”
The accomplishment was massive: “In the years that followed, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine completely abandoned nuclear weapons. A total of 7,514 nuclear warheads, 752 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and 31 submarines were deactivated. These were required by arms control treaties, but Nunn-Lugar provided the resources that made dismantlement a reality. Many of the facilities with unguarded fissile material in the mid-1990s underwent security upgrades.”
Lugar was modest by nature. Though he was born into a farming family, he favored reducing federal farm subsidies. He was an Eagle Scout and Rhodes scholar. His Denison University class co-president was Charlene Smeltzer; after graduation, they married.
Lugar voted to support the Iraq War but became a critic of its prosecution. That would not be the first time he crossed a president of his own party on foreign policy. Ronald Reagan sent the senator to help monitor elections in the Philippines in 1986. The declared winner was the strongman Ferdinand Marcos, a result Reagan initially supported, but Lugar insisted Marcos had benefited from election fraud. Marcos’ opponent was Corazon Aquino, who entered politics after her politician husband was assassinated in Manila in 1983. Benigno Aquino had been imprisoned by Marcos, then exiled to the U.S., and was killed upon his return. Lugar maintained his advocacy for Corazon Aquino as the rightful victor, and eventually, Reagan relented and Aquino took office, furthering a wave of democratization and likely inspiring others to do the same.
In eulogizing Aquino in 2011, Lugar wrote: “Her life reminds us that one remarkable person of modest demeanor can generate peaceful change across the Earth.”
The same might be said of Lugar himself, the senator from Indiana who alleviated nightmares around the world.
Seth Mandel is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
