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.