It was one such program that led Nunn and Turner to a warehouse in Ust-Kamenogorsk, an industrial city in eastern Kazakhstan, in October 2005. They were there to size up an effort, paid for in part by N.T.I., to “blend down” 6,400 pounds of highly enriched uranium — enough to make dozens of bombs — into a form that couldn’t be used in weapons. The uranium was spent fuel from a decommissioned nuclear power plant situated near the Iranian border. A few years earlier, he had made the following offer to Kazakhstan’s president: N.T.I. would provide its expertise to relocate and then blend down the uranium, and it would pay half of the $2 million cost to do so. By the time Nunn and Turner toured the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, the project was close to completion. A portion of the uranium had not yet been blended down, however, and it lay stored in 20 or so tubes in a corner of the warehouse. Nunn and Turner stood and gazed solemnly at it. “Here was the potential, right there in that little corner, in the hands of the wrong people, to wipe out cities around the world.” Nunn says. “That’s a pretty stark realization.”

N.T.I. intervened in Kazakhstan, Nunn explains, because the U.S. government did not act first. It’s not the only such example: in mid-2002, more than 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium — stored in portable canisters that emit little radiation — was lying at the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, a civilian research reactor in Belgrade. The security there would have been no match for even a small terrorist squad. And Islamic militants operated in the region. Clearly Vinca was a high-priority problem. Yet even though the first American plans to rescue the material were drawn up during the Clinton administration, no action had been taken a year after Sept. 11. The obstacle was bureaucratic: in return for giving up the uranium, the Serbian government demanded help cleaning up Vinca’s spent reactor fuel. That qualified as an environmental cleanup, however, which the U.S. lacked the authority to pay for. So N.T.I. stepped in and covered the $5 million cleanup fee. It wasn’t until August 2002 that a motorcade of technicians and machine-gun-toting commandos finally transferred the uranium from the Vinca Institute to a cargo plane that flew it to Russia to be blended down.

“If there’s anything that most Americans would think the government would happily chip in for, it’s getting highly enriched uranium out of a place where it could fall into terrorist hands,” says Matthew Bunn, a former nuclear-arms official in the Clinton administration who is now at Harvard and whose work is partly financed by N.T.I. “Yet” — in Vinca — “the government could not get this done without N.T.I.’s money.”

Image Credit... Photomontage by Peter Hapak

A small-town lawyer and politician who won an underdog campaign in Georgia in 1972, Nunn quickly made his name in Washington as a defense-policy wonk. Thanks to an intimidating expertise on defense affairs and a bespectacled air of judicious authority, Nunn was “looked upon with awe” by colleagues in both parties, says Pete V. Domenici, the Republican senator from New Mexico. Such was his authority, in fact, that he comfortably rebuffed offers from George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton to serve as secretary of defense, knowing that he wielded even more power from his longtime perch as chairman of Senate Armed Services. Nunn used that influence to consistently pro-military ends. During the 1970s, he fought with liberal Democrats seeking to cut defense budgets and ultimately forced Jimmy Carter to accept substantial increases in defense spending. Nunn also strongly defended the value and morality of nuclear weapons. The nuclear-freeze movement, in his mind, was naïvely utopian. “We had to have a nuclear deterrent,” he says today. “Not only that, but a first-use policy,” which refers to the U.S.’s stated willingness in certain circumstances to strike first with nuclear weapons.

Nunn considered a run for president in 1988, and his name surfaced again after Michael Dukakis’s crushing defeat in November of that year, which further persuaded centrist Democrats that they needed a Southern moderate as a candidate. But that talk ground to a halt after Nunn opposed the first gulf war. He urged at the time that sanctions and diplomacy be given more time and, in January 1991, voted against the Senate’s war resolution. A sign went up on a Georgia highway calling him “Saddam’s Best Friend,” and some suggested that he was cynically appealing to liberal Democratic primary voters. As it happened, however, opposing such a short and easy war probably ruined Nunn’s shot at the White House. In Washington, his vote was considered a colossal political blunder. “He got a lot of political flak,” says his friend Al From, the chairman of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. “It probably hastened his decision to retire from politics.” (Nunn’s vote “profoundly influenced the next generation of senators that confronted plans for the second invasion” 11 years later, says a former Clinton defense official who advises Congressional Democrats. White House officials even invoked Nunn’s “mistake” as they lobbied Congress to vote for war.)

By the mid-1990s, the cold war was over and the stature of defense gurus diminished. Moreover, politics on Capitol Hill were changing. The rise of fierce, Gingrich-style cultural politics made life uneasy for all Southern Democrats. In 1993, Nunn resisted Bill Clinton’s attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the military, prompting a gay-rights spokesman to brand him a “Jesse Helms Democrat.” Washington was growing far less hospitable to a moderate with little taste for the blood sport of partisan politics. “The premium is on stirring up your base,” he says now. When Nunn announced his retirement in 1995, even the Republican Strom Thurmond urged him to stick around. Nunn was just 58 when he left the Senate. For more than 20 years, his life had been defined by the cold war and the fight against Communism. That cause was over.