The Audacity of Hope

and who applied this knowledge to the critical problem of nuclear proliferation. The
premise of what came to be known as the Nunn-Lugar program was simple: After the
fall of the Soviet Union, the biggest threat to the United States—aside from an
accidental launch—wasn’t a first strike ordered by Gorbachev or Yeltsin, but the
migration of nuclear material or know-how into the hands of terrorists and rogue states,
a possible result of Russia’s economic tailspin, corruption in the military, the
impoverishment of Russian scientists, and security and control systems that had fallen
into disrepair. Under Nunn-Lugar, America basically provided the resources to fix up
those systems, and although the program caused some consternation to those
accustomed to Cold War thinking, it has proven to be one of the most important
investments we could have made to protect ourselves from catastrophe.
In August 2005, I traveled with Senator Lugar to see some of this handiwork. It was my
first trip to Russia and Ukraine, and I couldn’t have had a better guide than Dick, a
remarkably fit seventy-three-year-old with a gentle, imperturbable manner and an
inscrutable smile that served him well during the often interminable meetings we held
with foreign officials. Together we visited the nuclear facilities of Saratov, where
Russian generals pointed with pride to the new fencing and security systems that had
been recently completed; afterward, they served us a lunch of borscht, vodka, potato
stew, and a deeply troubling fish Jell-O mold. In Perm, at a site where SS-24 and SS-25
tactical missiles were being dismantled, we walked through the center of eight-foot-high
empty missile casings and gazed in silence at the massive, sleek, still-active missiles
that were now warehoused safely but had once been aimed at the cities of Europe.
And in a quiet, residential neighborhood of Kiev, we received a tour of the Ukraine’s
version of the Centers for Disease Control, a modest three-story facility that looked like
a high school science lab. At one point during our tour, after seeing windows open for
lack of air-conditioning and metal strips crudely bolted to door jambs to keep out mice,
we were guided to a small freezer secured by nothing more than a seal of string. A
middle-aged woman in a lab coat and surgical mask pulled a few test tubes from the
freezer, waving them around a foot from my face and saying something in Ukrainian.
“That is anthrax,” the translator explained, pointing to the vial in the woman’s right
hand. “That one,” he said, pointing to the one in the left hand, “is the plague.”
I looked behind me and noticed Lugar standing toward the back of the room.
“You don’t want a closer look, Dick?” I asked, taking a few steps back myself.
“Been there, done that,” he said with a smile.
There were moments during our travels when we were reminded of the old Cold War
days. At the airport in Perm, for example, a border officer in his early twenties detained
us for three hours because we wouldn’t let him search our plane, leading our staffs to
fire off telephone calls to the U.S. embassy and Russia’s foreign affairs ministry in
Moscow. And yet most of what we heard and saw—the Calvin Klein store and Maserati
showroom in Red Square Mall; the motorcade of SUVs that pulled up in front of a
restaurant, driven by burly men with ill-fitting suits who once might have rushed to
open the door for Kremlin officials but were now on the security detail of one of
Russia’s billionaire oligarchs; the throngs of sullen teenagers in T-shirts and low-riding