Nunn-Lugar Revisited
Documents detail “proliferation in reverse” success story
U.S.-Russian cooperation on threat reduction from the Soviet Union in 1991 to Syria in 2013
Organized by the National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 447 Edited By Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya with Anna Melyakova
For more information contact: Tom Blanton 202/994 7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C., 22 November 2013 — The final shipment of highly enriched uranium from former Soviet nuclear warheads to the U.S. on November 14, and President Obama’s award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Senator Richard Lugar on November 20, have brought new public attention to the underappreciated success story of the Nunn-Lugar initiative — the subject of a new research project by the National Security Archive, which organized the first “critical oral history” gathering this fall of U.S. and Russian veterans of Nunn-Lugar.
The former Soviet Union in the 1990s achieved an unprecedented “proliferation in reverse” with the denuclearization of former republics and the consolidation of nuclear weapons and fissile material inside Russia. Notwithstanding the well-grounded fears of policymakers on both sides of the waning Cold War in 1990-1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union did not result in a nuclear Yugoslavia spread over eleven time zones. Instead, the “doomsday clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists marched backwards, in its largest leaps ever away from midnight. Key to this extraordinary accomplishment was the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, colloquially known as Nunn-Lugar after its two leading sponsors in the U.S. Senate, Sam Nunn of Georgia and Richard Lugar of Indiana.
The negotiation of that uranium deal 20 years ago provided one of the opening topics of discussion at the first “critical oral history” gathering of Nunn-Lugar veterans and scholars at the Musgrove conference center on St. Simons’ Island, Georgia, on the weekend of September 26-29, 2013. Strikingly, the conference took place at the exact time the United Nations Security Council was approving the U.S.-Russia brokered deal for the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons – which became the focus of the concluding session at Musgrove and many side conversations throughout.
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