INDIANAPOLIS (AP) Richard Lugar worked to alert Americans about the threat of terrorism years before weapons of mass destruction became a common phrase following the Sept. 11 attacks.
The longtime Republican senator from Indiana helped start a program 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.
The soft-spoken and thoughtful former Rhodes Scholar was a leading Republican voice on foreign policy matters during his 36 years in the U.S. Senate, but whose reputation of working with Democrats ultimately cost him the office in 2012. He died Sunday at age 87 at a hospital in Virginia.
Lugars 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 Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn on a program under which the United States paid to dismantle and secure thousands of nuclear warheads and missiles in the former Soviet states after the Cold War ended.
Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, who spent more than a decade as chief of staff to Lugar, said, The world is safer from nuclear danger because of him. And so many of us, while falling far short of the standards he set, are vastly better people because of him.
