Richard Lugar

US senator who worked to dismantle former Soviet nuclear arms

Richard Lugar worked to alert Americans about the threat of terrorism years before “weapons of mass destruction” became a common phrase following the September 11 attacks.

The longtime Republican senator from Indiana helped start a programme that destroyed thousands of former Soviet nuclear and chemical weapons after the Cold war ended–then warned during a short-lived 1996 run for president about the danger of such devices falling into the hands of terrorists.

“Every stockpile represents a theft opportunity for terrorists and a temptation for security personnel who might seek to profit by selling weapons on the black market,” Lugar said in 2005. “We do not want the question posed the day after an attack on an American military base.”

The soft-spoken and

thoughtful former Rhodes scholar was a leading Republican voice on foreign policy matters during his 36 years in the US Senate, but whose reputation of working with Democrats ultimately cost him the office in 2012.

He died at age 87 at a hospital in Virginia, where he was being treated for a rare neurological disorder, chronic inflammatory demylinating polyneuropathy.

Lugar’s long popularity in Indiana gave him the freedom to concentrate largely on foreign policy and national security matters–a focus highlighted by his collaboration with Democrats Senator Sam Nunn on a programme under which the US paid to dismantle and secure thousands of nuclear warheads and missiles in the former Soviet states after the Cold War.

Lugar served for decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, twice as chairman, where he helped steer arms reduction pacts