Sam Nunn

Senators Nunn and Lugar leave the White House in 1991 after briefing President George H. W. Bush on the Nunn–Lugar legislation

Sam Nunn served as Senator from Georgia (1972–1997). He is the grandnephew of segregationist Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia.

Nunn-Lugar is named after Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN). Sam Nunn cofounded the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) in 2001.

Nunn-Lugar

Excerpt from The National Security Archive at George Washington University:

"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 the Nunn-Lugar program after its two leading sponsors in the U.S. Senate, Sam Nunn of Georgia and Richard Lugar of Indiana. In fact, one could say that in the story of post-Cold War U.S.-Russian relations – so scarred with failures and missed opportunities and persisting animosity – the Nunn-Lugar initiative stands as a towering success.

[...]

"On the Russian side, it took a huge leap of trust and imagination to allow the former opponent into the heart of what used to be perceived as the key to the Soviet identity as a superpower – its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. But late in the Gorbachev years when the principal decisions were made, and early in the Yeltsin years, the Soviet and then the Russian government succeeded in pulling back first the tactical and then the strategic nuclear weapons from the former republics, dismantling the Soviet biological weapons program, and securing Russian fissionable materials, to name just the most visible accomplishments. Russian foreign and defense ministry officials committed to radical arms control and non-proliferation had to overcome fierce resistance from “old thinkers” within their own ranks to bring about unprecedented transparency in the Russian defense industry.

A number of the participants in this grand experiment, along with astute observers like the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist David Hoffman, have reported their understanding of the incentives and motives of the various parties, the political and institutional constraints, the actual fits-and-starts of the cooperative experience, and the model of expert teams working together to reduce threats. But so much underlying primary source documentation on the initiative remains secret on both sides that opening these files will require a sustained declassification effort in Washington, Moscow and elsewhere. And no one has brought together the experts and eyewitnesses for a systematic forward-looking review of the Nunn-Lugar experience in order to draw lessons and models for U.S.-Russian cooperation and future denuclearization efforts.