Lugar, Richard (1932–)

United States senator well known for his authorship of far-reaching foreign policy and agriculture legislature. A member of the Senate since 1976, Richard Lugar is one of the most experienced and respected contemporary U.S. statesmen. His most significant professional achievement remains the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, whose purpose is to help decommission Russia's poorly guarded nuclear, biological, and chemical arsenal.

An Impressive Career

Richard Lugar was born in 1932 in Indianapolis. After attending the city's public school system, he entered Denison University in Ohio, from which he received a degree in 1954. He then attended Oxford University in England as a Rhodes scholar, graduating in 1956.

Straight out of school, Lugar volunteered for the U.S. Army and began serving as an officer and, later, as an intelligence briefer for the chief of naval operations. Upon his return to Indianapolis in 1960, Lugar took up the family's food machinery manufacturing business together with his brother. Seven years later, he was elected mayor of Indianapolis, later winning a second term.

[Page 437]In 1974, Lugar ran a failed campaign for the U.S. Senate, representing the Republican Party. He later won election to the Senate in 1976. Since then, Lugar has been reelected four times (in 1982, 1988, 1994, and 2000). Lugar is the longest-serving senator in Indiana history. He is now serving as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and is a member (and former chairman) of the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee.

Swords into Ploughshares

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, sponsored by Lugar and Georgia senator Sam Nunn and enacted in 1991, has been hailed as one of the most important disarmament-related pieces of legislature signed and implemented after the end of the Cold War. To date, the Nunn-Lugar program has been directly responsible for the deactivation or destruction of more than 6,000 Russian nuclear warheads, 128 bombers, and 27 nuclear submarines.

The program has also been instrumental in denuclearizing the Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, which, after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, had become the third-, fourth-, and eighth-largest nuclear powers in the world. The number of nuclear warheads destroyed in these three countries surpasses the number of warheads currently owned by Great Britain, France, and China combined.

Since the Nunn-Lugar program became operational in 1991, it has occasionally faced two kinds of obstacles—Russian reluctance to permit access to selected nuclear facilities, and criticism in the United States about the funds that it receives from the Department of Defense. Senator Lugar remains in constant communication with Russian authorities and has been able to show his U.S. critics that the program is costing the United States much less than 1% of its annual defense budget.

In 2003, Congress approved legislation extending the Nunn-Lugar project to regions outside the former Soviet Union. Thanks to the program, as well as to numerous other pieces of legislation (in the fields of agriculture, the environment, and science), Senator Lugar is seen as a major figure of contemporary U.S. government.