Richard Lugar: Better Safe…

Republican Richard Lugar, the senior senator from Indiana, is noted among his Republican and Democratic colleagues for his expertise in foreign affairs. In 1991, he and Sam Nunn, a Democrat from Georgia, sponsored a continuing series of U.S. initiatives aimed at helping to dismantle the Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons. In 1997, he was pivotal in securing ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
But on October 7, just days before the test-ban vote, Lugar issued a statement explaining why he would vote “no.” The heart of his statement is presented here.
W. K. H. Panofsky, one of the nation’s most distinguished high-energy physicists and director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, takes issue with Lugar in an open letter, beginning on page 47.
Panofsky was a consultant to the Manhattan Project. In recent decades, he has been involved in a wide array of arms control and international security issues. He is a member of the JASONs, a group of high-level scientific advisers to the government on national security issues, and he has been a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences since 1981.