Two politicians who were instrumental in the formation of landmark U.S. nuclear security policies, former Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and former Congresswoman and State Department negotiator Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), died this week.
Lugar, 87, died suddenly Sunday in Fairfax, Va., from complications related to chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, according to a press release from the nonprofit Lugar Center. A brand name in the nuclear policy world, Lugar helped write the famously formative Nunn-Lugar amendment: the legislative bedrock of a U.S.-led effort to keep Soviet weapons of mass destruction from proliferating to bad actors after the Iron Curtain fell.
Tauscher, 67, died Monday in California after a long bout with pneumonia. The disease, Tauscher herself said on Twitter last month, was aggravated by complications related to a 2010 surgery to treat esophageal cancer. The former Bay Area congresswoman served seven terms before joining the Barack Obama State Department and helping negotiate the New START arms-control treaty — an agreement Lugar shepherded through GOP opposition in the Senate.
Lugar had the longer career in Washington, joining the Senate in 1977 in the thick of the Cold War. Together with the equally renowned Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), Lugar authored the legislation now called the Nunn-Lugar amendment, which President George H.W. Bush signed into law in 1991.
Nunn-Lugar, part of the 1992 National Defense Authorization Act, created the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, under which the U.S. helped the collapsing Soviet Union secure and dismantle nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
A few years before an upstart Republican challenger soundly beat Lugar in 2012 amid a national swell of Tea Party sentiment, the arms control veteran helped secure — but “not easily,” he said in congressional testimony in February — a two-thirds Senate majority to ratify New START.
The treaty, which expires in 2021 but can be extended into 2026, caps deployed long-range Russian and U.S. nuclear warheads at 1,550 for each nation. Some Republicans who voted for the treaty did so on condition that the U.S. would subsequently modernize its nuclear arsenal, which is now being done.
Lugar, who left the Senate in 2013, remained a prominent voice in arms control nearly until his last day. In his February appearance before the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, Lugar took a dim view of the Donald Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. He also said the White House would also do well to extend New START for five years through 2026.
“To leave the INF Treaty and then to leave New START altogether really calls for a total new beginning, and right now, I don’t see that kind of initiative in the administration or the Congress,” Lugar said. “So we had best hold on to what we have there.”
Lugar told the committee that the future of arms control depends not on “negotiating brilliance,” but on “leverage” that the White House cannot gain by walking away from agreements with Russia: the only other nuclear-armed nation with an arsenal as expansive and destructive as that of the United States.
Tauscher, meanwhile, was directly involved with the U.S. nuclear arsenal until the day she died.
When she passed, Tauscher was chair of the University of California Board of Regents’ national laboratories subcommittee. In that role, Tauscher oversaw the university’s work as the lead partner on the management and operations teams for both the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories: the Department of Energy’s main nuclear-weapon design sites.
Then-California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) appointed Tauscher to the university’s Board of Regents in 2017. She replaced Norman Pattiz as chair of the national labs subcommittee in February 2018.
From 2009 to 2012, Tauscher served in the Obama administration as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. She joined the department from Capitol Hill, where she represented California’s 10th Congressional District.
As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, she played a key role in writing the annual National Defense Authorization Act that sets defense policies for Pentagon nuclear forces and the National Nuclear Security Administration.
