Jane VaynmanNunn-Lugar to the Rescue!

We don’t get many feel good stories on a nonproliferation blog.

This Washington Post piece is pretty close though. Next up, Nunn and Lugar superhero suits. Capes of course, but minus latex.

PODOLSK, Russia, Aug. 29 — Heavily guarded trucks rolled up to the Luch nuclear institute here on Tuesday night and unloaded five green reinforced containers holding a total of 21 pounds of uranium, about a third of it highly enriched, which had been quietly removed from a research reactor in Otwock, Poland.

[snip]

On Wednesday, as workers prepared to open the casks from Poland, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) got a firsthand look on a visit to Luch at the struggle to locate the fissile material and keep it from falling into the wrong hands, a program that they created more than 15 years ago and now faces new challenges.

[snip]

Later Wednesday, Nunn and Lugar witnessed the burn-off of a solid-fuel second-stage engine from an SS-25 intercontinental ballistic missile at a site northeast of Moscow. The burn is part of Russia’s effort to destroy the missiles in keeping with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

Along with U.S. Ambassador William J. Burns, Nunn and Lugar were invited to press a large red button on a boxy panel in a control room to start the burn. They then watched on closed-circuit television as the engine roared for two minutes 15 seconds.