PREVENTING WAR
& PROMOTING PEACE

Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, Cls 60, Hon PhD 08, is working to save the world from weapons of mass destruction. And nobody knows better than him that no man, no party, no country can go it alone in this race between collaboration and catastrophe.

Summer 2018 Vol. 94 No. 2 | STORY BY ROGER SLAVENS | PHOTOS BY BEN ROLLINS

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Sam Nunn may have recently turned 80 years old, but there’s no sign of him slowing down. And with good reason. His mission is an urgent, unending one: nothing less than halting the threat of nuclear war and other catastrophic loss of life caused by weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

“We are in an ongoing race between cooperation and catastrophe, and right now cooperation is not running a very strong race,” Nunn says. “When you look at these weapons, whether they’re nuclear, chemical, biological or now even disruptive—cyber—in nature, they constitute an ongoing problem that will never be completely solved. However, every bit of progress reduces risk, saves lives and makes the world a better place.”

After spending more than 24 distinguished years of service as a Democratic U.S. Senator from Georgia—during which he chaired the powerful Senate Committee on Armed Services for eight years—Nunn left Congress in 1997 to pursue more focused interests. He returned to his roots as an attorney, becoming a partner at top Atlanta law firm King & Spalding, and he sat on numerous corporate, governmental and nonprofit boards. Nunn even took a faculty position at Georgia Tech, where he still serves as a distinguished professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs that was named in his honor.

However, Nunn says his most important pursuit was co-founding the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) with his long-time friend and media mogul Ted Turner in 2001. The NTI was the natural evolution of Nunn’s work that began in Congress to secure and dismantle nuclear, biological and chemical stockpiles from the former Soviet Union and other countries around the globe.

Ten years before, Nunn reached across the aisle to collaborate with Richard Lugar, then a Republican U.S. Senator from Indiana, to author the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program. This program was designed to ensure that Soviet nuclear, biological and chemical weapons were accounted for and dealt with after the country’s break-up into separate, independent republics.

Thanks much in part to Nunn’s passionate leadership and diplomatic prowess—backed by the Nunn-Lugar Act and then the NTI—the international community has worked together to deactivate thousands of nuclear warheads and secure nuclear materials around the globe since the effort started nearly 30 years ago.

Nunn’s mission to avert catastrophe continues in earnest today, but the threats keep changing. The growth of terrorism, the rise of rogue nations with nuclear aspirations, and the renewed tension between the U.S. and Russia all make it a more challenging task than ever. The work is compounded by an ever-increasing arsenal of technological threats, which include state-sponsored cyber attacks designed to disrupt everyday life and laboratories researching and even recreating dangerous diseases that could be weaponized.

This is the story of how Sam Nunn is still trying to save the world. And how he somehow manages to carry his share of the burden with a sense of optimism and hope.

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“In the last 20 to 25 years, we’ve gone from 50 or so countries that have weapons-usable nuclear material down to 22,” Nunn says, with an earned sense of pride. “And it’s happened under both Democratic and Republican administrations, starting with President George H.W. Bush.”

Securing nuclear materials is a rare topic that policy makers on both sides of the aisle have often agreed upon. But then Nunn built a strong reputation of bipartisanship during his distinguished tenure in the U.S. Senate—he wasn’t afraid to work with his Republican counterparts and often broke ranks with his party to develop solutions that he felt were in the best interest of the American people.

“If you want a real, sustainable solution to anything in this country then or today, you have to include both parties, both Democrats and Republicans, in the process,” Nunn says. “When you have the majority in Congress, you might be able to pass legislation without the support of the other side, but when the pendulum swings back and you lose that majority, they’ll likely work to undo it immediately.

“It can be a vicious circle. We’re seeing that happen today with the Republican-led Congress erasing as much of President Obama’s legacy as possible. And as soon as the mid-term elections this November, the pendulum could swing back and everything could be again reversed. It’s like running on a rug.”

Or, in other words, our elected officials need to find some common ground or understanding before they will be able to make any lasting progress.

In the case of the Nunn-Lugar Act, progress was indeed made when shared interest not only united the parties but also created an unlikely partnership with Russia. “The U.S. government forged a close relationship with Russia to account for the nuclear materials and weapons that the Soviet Union produced, but were no longer in Russia’s possession,” Nunn says. “Over about a 12-year period, our nations worked together for a cause that benefited the whole world. We located and transported nuclear weapons back to Russia, where they were dismantled and the nuclear material was extracted, blended down into low-enriched uranium and repurposed as fuel for countries around the globe to use.”

Nunn says that one of the amazing statistics people have a hard time grasping is that, from about 1995 to 2013, 10 percent of electricity in the U.S. came from nuclear power using nuclear material that had once been in weapons pointed at us. “This was truly turning swords into plowshares,” he says.

While they agreed on the overarching mission, they didn’t agree on how long it would take. “Ted thought you could get rid of nuclear weapons very quickly when we started this,” Nunn says. “He was imagining a Hail Mary, while I knew it would be more like three yards and a cloud of dust, having gone through the process before with the Soviet Union.”

As envisioned, the NTI would work with governments to encourage their efforts to secure weapons-grade nuclear materials and weapons of mass destruction across the globe by building up public awareness and support—helping to serve as a catalyst for governments to keep doing more. Nunn still believes the long-term goal should be to get rid of all the unsecured nuclear weapons on the planet. “That’s what 191 countries signed up for with the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968,” he says. “The problem is that the treaty didn’t outline the steps on how to get there. That’s a role the NTI has strived to fill, working with former U.S. Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, along with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry. We’re also working closely with the U.S. government and other nations to make progress. In different moments in time, we’ve had enough international consensus to take major leaps forward.”

But in the last three to four years, Nunn says, it’s been very difficult for the U.S. and Russia to work together because of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, support of the Syrian regime and suspicion of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “Any time these two countries can’t cooperate with or trust each other, the world gets much more dangerous,” he says. “That’s happening right now.”

The risks with nuclear weapons and materials, in particular, have changed significantly in the past two decades. Nunn isn’t as worried that a country will intentionally let loose its nuclear arsenal as he is that it will sell some weapons or materials to—or have them stolen by—terrorist agents who would have no qualms about using them.

“North Korea might be tempted to launch a nuclear missile, but ultimately it’s got a return address and they know they’d be doomed if they did,” he says. “That’s a huge deterrent. But because the country is so desperate and poor, they could try to sell nuclear materials or weapons for big sums of money.”

To keep pressure on countries with weapons-usable nuclear materials, such as highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the NTI has developed the Nuclear Security Index with the help of the Economist Intelligence Unit that ranks countries on how secure their nuclear materials are from theft, as well as how secure their nuclear power facilities are from sabotage.

“The index has moved the needle considerably,” Nunn says. “Governments don’t like it when they score poorly—and neither do their citizens. So many countries have taken it upon themselves to either get off the index completely by eliminating their nuclear material stockpiles or moving up in the rankings by locking down their materials with better security and processes.”

Another big success of the NTI is the launch this year of an international nuclear fuel bank based in Kazakhstan that was initially funded by business magnate and investor Warren Buffett. “Back in 2006, Warren put up $50 million as seed money through the NTI and allowed me to go to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria, to propose the world meet us 2-for-1 on the challenge,” Nunn says. “The idea was to have a facility that would provide low-enriched nuclear fuel to countries who want to build nuclear power plants.”

The IAEA estimates that about 30 countries are interested in building nuclear power facilities. However, to start their own programs they would either have to buy it from an existing supplier or make it themselves. The concern is that if they decide to go it alone, the technology for enriching uranium for use in power plants could also be used for developing weapons. Nunn and the NTI wanted to make sure that no new countries would be tempted to follow that path.

The European Union, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Norway, the United Arab Emirates and the United States all contributed money toward the low-enriched uranium bank. In 2010, the IAEA voted to start the bank and in 2015, they selected Kazakhstan—the world’s largest producer of uranium ore—to host it.

“It took more than 10 years, but we were able to make it happen by working hand-in-hand with the IAEA and governments around the world.” Nunn says. “I’ve traveled to Kazakhstan twice in the last three years. This is a country that despite its uranium riches had given up all of its nuclear weapons and at one time had the fourth or fifth largest arsenal in the world after the Soviet Union dissolved. President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his country have been really great to work with and I helped convince him—way back when we started exploring this idea—that Kazakhstan should take the lead on the fuel bank.”

A third major accomplishment of NTI is that it helped create the World Institute of Nuclear Security (WINS). “Recently I announced at its headquarters, also located in Vienna, that WINS now has almost 5,000 members—nuclear operators who are committed to best practices in civil nuclear power and handling nuclear materials securely,” Nunn says. “These operators have always been concerned with safety, but they haven’t been as focused on security. Safety inspectors often go in and find the plant equipment and systems working properly with no dangers, but then discover there are no locks on the doors or areas open for sabotage. We want WINS to be the security counterpart to what IAEA has done on the safety side.”

All in all, the NTI doesn’t claim exclusive credit for any of these wins, Nunn says. Again, unsurprisingly for him, it’s all about collaboration. “The Nuclear Threat Initiative has always been meant to be a strong influencer and to help broker cooperation among our allies such as Britain and France as well as our sometimes colleagues, sometimes adversaries like Russia and China,” Nunn says. “Thankfully, no matter our differences, we all share a vested interest in securing weapons of mass destruction.”

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“My process for deciding which college I was going to attend, in my view, is not a very good example for young people today,” Nunn says. “I think I ended up in a great spot, but I had two key things on my mind at the time. I was looking to play basketball at the collegiate level and I also wanted to join the Naval ROTC. Auburn and Georgia Tech offered both, and each university was part of the competitive Southeastern Conference (SEC) back then.”

Some small colleges had offered him a scholarship to play basketball, but not any major university. Nunn was only 5 feet 11 inches tall and—in his words—slow.

“I wasn’t going to be a superstar,” he says. “Originally I was set to attend Auburn in the fall of 1956 and I even had a roommate—until about three weeks before school started. That’s when I was preparing to play in a North-South high school all-star game, and the [Tech] Coach Hyder came to practice every day—the game was held in O’Keefe Gym on Tech’s campus—to scout us. After watching me play, he asked me to think about switching from Auburn to Tech. He said he didn’t have any scholarships to give right then, but if I did well, I’d have a chance to earn one. So I switched, and attending Tech became one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.”

However, Nunn’s freshman year at the Institute proved to be full of ups and downs. “I flunked the first test I ever took at Tech—the eye test to get into Naval ROTC,” he says. “I’d never worn glasses, never had seen an eye doctor, but found out I had 20/80 vision, which made me ineligible for Naval ROTC. One of my reasons for going to Tech was gone the first day.”

Nunn shrugged off the disappointment and switched to Army ROTC, which didn’t have the stringent vision requirement. “Everybody took ROTC at Tech those days—we still had the draft,” he says.

But some good things happened, too. At Tech’s 1956 homecoming, Nunn won the Freshman Cake Race against hundreds of other runners—not bad for someone who thought himself something of a slowpoke. “It came as a complete surprise,” Nunn says. “I’d never run track before, but I was in better shape than I had thought. I guess I had been practicing basketball all summer long in our cracker-box gym in Perry, with no air conditioning in hot weather and lost weight and built up my stamina. It’s more of a marathon than a sprint, but I had no idea I’d even contend.”

Nunn played basketball from the get-go at Tech, and also joined the golf team his sophomore and junior years.

“I just loved playing basketball,” he says. “We had two scholarship guys—Bobby Tillman and Dave Denton. The rest of us were, I’d say, recruited walk-ons. Denton was a great basketball player and he eventually became All-SEC. Tillman turned his attention to baseball and wound up being a catcher for the Boston Red Sox and the Atlanta Braves.” (Tillman played nine seasons in the major leagues.)

Academically, Nunn did well at Tech, except for one area. “I had difficulty with mechanical drawing—it’s not that I didn’t work hard on it, I guess I just was missing a part of my brain for it,” he says. “In any case, you had to pass three courses in mechanical drawing to graduate—no matter your major—and I struggled to get a ‘D’ in the first course on the second try. In my third year, I realized it would take me too long to pass those courses so I left for Emory.”

The Institute finally bestowed Nunn with a degree—an honorary doctorate in 2008. “I told the crowd at commencement that I was delighted to be back at Georgia Tech now that it’s dropped mechanical drawing as a requirement and added women. When I attended, there were no more than a dozen women enrolled.”

Nunn finished his undergraduate studies at Emory University and went on to earn a law degree from the Emory School of Law in 1962. He has since held a strong affinity for both Emory and Tech over the years, and he remains a huge fan of Yellow Jacket sports—especially the men’s golf team.

After leaving Tech, he signed up for the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, where he served on active duty for six months at Cape May, N.J., and remained in the reserves until 1968. Once he completed his active-duty service, he attended law school, passed the bar and joined the staff of the House Armed Services Committee in 1962. After one year in Washington, D.C., he returned to his hometown of Perry and set up his shingle to practice law, while also helping to manage the family farm.

But it didn’t take long for Nunn to realize he had an affinity for public service. He was named president of the Perry Chamber of Commerce and then decided to run for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives, winning in 1968. Nunn then ran for the U.S. Senate in 1972, besting incumbent U.S. Senator David Gambrell in the Democratic primary and then Republican U.S. Representative Fletcher Thompson in the general election. “The elections back then were a lot different than they are now,” Nunn says. “I didn’t have any money personally to fund a campaign, and I think I raised and borrowed somewhere between $600,000 to $700,000 for the primary, the run-off and the general campaign in a state-wide race. When my daughter (Michelle) ran for U.S. Senate in 2014, she spent somewhere close to $17 million.”

And it wasn’t just the amount of money involved that was different. “The time spent raising money for campaigns also is far greater today,” Nunn says. “I spent most of my time—about 95 percent of it—traveling around the state and meeting people, talking to them, doing interviews and the like, but only about 5 percent on fundraising. Today it’s practically the reverse.”

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CHANGING TIMES MEAN CHANGING PRIORITIES
The complexity of running for office isn’t the only thing that’s changed since Nunn’s early days as a U.S. senator. Geopolitics has undergone a countless series of drastic shifts over those nearly 50 years, the latest being the Trump administration’s turning of tradition and decorum on its head.

Nunn sees both the good and bad in it. For one, he thinks President Trump was right to meet with Kim Jong Un to discuss the disbanding of North Korea’s nuclear endeavors. “I’m one of those that believes Trump should have talked to North Korea,” he says. “I think that was a good thing to do. But I had hoped for more to come from it—a better understanding about how far along the North Koreans are with weaponizing their nuclear materials, to get an inventory, some kind of baseline.”

But he’s frustrated that all that was achieved in the initial meeting was a faith-based agreement. “It was nothing tangible, though we did break through and talk to them,” Nunn says. “We pushed back from a cliff of a conflict which we would win, but would likely be a disaster for South Korea and our allies. There would be a huge amount of death and destruction if we ever got into a war with North Korea.”

Nunn is waiting to see what comes next in negotiations with North Korea. “Now both Trump and Kim Jong Un have to put some meat on the bones, to get some agreements in writing,” he says. “And it can’t be just nuclear—North Korea also has biological and chemical weapons. Plus they’ve got a couple million people fully armed sitting 30 miles from Seoul.”

He believes that ultimately, the move has to be toward the denuclearization of the isolated country. “But that’s going to take some big economic carrots and promise of progress,” Nunn says. “And South Korea is going to have to play a huge role, as well as Japan. It’s simply not going to happen overnight, but rather it will take a few years, at best. I think the Trump administration is beginning to understand what’s involved and what’s at stake. It’s a problem the president inherited, and to his credit he’s trying to do something about it—though it’s just the beginning and what’s been accomplished so far shouldn’t be exaggerated.”

On the other hand, Nunn thinks President Trump and his officials blew it with Iran. “I was in favor of the Iranian nuclear agreement, even though it wasn’t perfect,” he says. “The deal only addressed the enrichment of nuclear materials to make nuclear weapons, not the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles or antagonistic behavior in the region. Still, the U.S. under President Obama led a strong coalition, which included Europe, Russia, China and India, in bringing Iran to the table through economic pressure. When Trump canceled the deal, it caused huge strains with our allies. Not only have we left them hanging, but also we’ve told them we’re going to penalize them if they move forward with a deal on their own. It’s a mess, and the Trump Administration has no plan B.”

Nunn thinks the most important aspect of the Iranian nuclear agreement was the buying of time to figure out a way to resolve critical issues with Iran and their neighbors in the Middle East. “The deal had bought us about 15 years, but in 15 years—if you look at all the polls in Iran and look at the discontent of the young people—a lot of things can happen to stabilize the country and the region,” he says. “I think the Iranian agreement was a real step forward, and I think opting out of it was a strategic mistake. For one thing, the next time we try to get a coalition together on anything in the world and try to leverage a strict economic embargo, it’s going to be very hard to do. We’ve sorely damaged the trust we had with our world partners.”

Still, Nunn likes to be optimistic. “There’s ample time for Trump to open up a discussion with Iran like he did with North Korea,” he says. “It would be a smart thing to pursue.”
Other pressing matters concern Nunn, especially the possibility of terrorists gaining access to nuclear materials or the NTI’s dawning grasp of the biological threats that exist throughout the world.

A small nuclear weapon—small being half the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II—could be put together by people with a little nuclear know-how, he says. “It wouldn’t be easy; it would take some expertise. But the way to make a crude nuclear weapon is out there, and all it would take is to gain access to plutonium or highly enriched uranium. That’s what the NTI is trying to prevent.”

Even a small device going off in a major city would have catastrophic and lingering effects. “If you had that happen, not only would there be immediate damage and loss of life, but the confidence of the world would be shaken,” Nunn says. “It’s critical that we—the NTI, the U.S. government, our allies, our wary partners—never let this happen.”

Biological weapons may pose an even more difficult threat to deal with than nuclear, he says. “When an outbreak happens, you don’t initially know whether it’s Mother Nature that’s behind it or something more deliberate and sinister,” Nunn says. “And the facilities required to research and develop bio agents are much easier and smaller than with nuclear—you can fit a biological laboratory in a small conference room while development of weapons-usable nuclear material take pretty massive footprints.”

The NTI has taken several steps to reduce biological threats. First, they worked with the World Health Organization to set up a revolving fund of millions of dollars to assist health investigators, especially in poor countries, to travel to affected areas and set up research and medical efforts immediately after an outbreak is detected,” Nunn says. “The fund has been turned over a number of times already,” he says.

In addition, the NTI has helped set up early warning and detection centers around the world. “The most unlikely success story is a working coalition in the Middle East, where Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian health officials all work together whenever there’s an outbreak,” Nunn says. “Even with the tensions very high in that area, they overlook their differences and collaborate to solve problems.”

One problem Nunn sees on the horizon in biological agents is CRISPR genome editing. “Scientists have made great strides in manipulating DNA with some huge upsides, but there’s also very worrisome downsides,” he says. “For instance, there’s a group in Australia that has developed a way from scratch to develop a synthetic horse pox. It’s a first cousin to smallpox, which we of course know devastated the world at one time, and to the horror of a lot of people they’ve published their work for anyone to try to copy. Suffice to say that this generation and future generations are going to be dealing with threats we never dreamed of a few decades ago.”

One final way NTI is grappling with such developments is to create a Biological Threat Index—similar to its effective Nuclear Security Index—that will measure countries’ capacities to deal with contagious diseases. “We’ve done a pilot project with about four countries and over the next year to 18 months we’ll produce our first biological index,” Nunn says. “The goal is to encourage nations to improve, and we’ll point the way.”

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On the other hand, while there’s plenty to worry about, Nunn is also optimistic about mankind’s progress and the overall state of the world. “Looking back on the past 30 years, we’ve made amazing progress almost all the way across the board,” he says. “Through technological advances and humanitarian efforts, we’ve lifted millions and millions of people out of abject poverty. And though it seems like there’s untold conflicts and clashes in the world, there are far fewer wars being waged. China and India, in particular, have made great economic strides.”

In balancing these fears and hopes, Nunn believes that fostering good relationships between nations, even among those with differing goals and ideals and situations, is more important than ever before. Similarly, Nunn believes the relationships in the U.S. between Democrats and Republicans need to be repaired.

“We’ve got to figure out a way to set aside our differences and work together again at all costs, both on matters of foreign policy and with issues on our home front,” he says. “Thinking back, there wasn’t a single significant piece of legislation I ever passed in the Senate that didn’t include a Republican partner. We need that mindset again. Unfortunately, right now, heading into the midterm elections, if you’re a candidate who says you want to work together with your rivals—that you want to cooperate and build upon common goals—then you’ll probably be defeated. I’ll say it again, we have a choice between cooperation and catastrophe and right now, right here, we’re making too many bad choices.”

The Honorable Sam Nunn will be the Keynote Speaker at Georgia Tech’s 2018 Homecoming & Reunion Weekend.