One of the first times that I followed Barack Obama's work in the Senate after his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention was during his 2005 trip with Senator Richard Lugar to Russia, Azerbaijan, and especially Ukraine, the former Soviet republic that took the brave and admirable step of disarming its nuclear weapons in 1996. While the objectives of their meetings in Kyiv (Ukraine's capital) and Donets'k (a prominent industrial city in eastern Ukraine) centered on issues of nuclear proliferation, Obama met with President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yuliia Tymoshenko to facilitate, along with Lugar, an additional agreement pertaining to the threat of biological terrorism that, in Obama's words, "will help Ukraine improve its capacity to diagnose, detect, and respond to public health threats by providing Ukraine with more modern central reference libraries and a network of regional epidemiological monitoring stations."
As we know, Obama's work with Lugar in the former Soviet Union would eventually lead to the Lugar-Obama Initiative, which was enacted and fully funded ($48 million) in 2007 to dismantle stockpiles of conventional weapons and to find and interdict weapons and materials of mass destruction. In light of recent talk of the so-called "Commander-in-Chief threshold," it deserves to be revisited.
Lugar-Obama is no run-of-the-mill legislative achievement As a package of critical preventative measures that confront the most deadly, and often most overlooked, threat to our national security today, Lugar-Obama is a substantive, "preemptive strike" against the 3 am call.
It is also indicative of Obama's singularly comprehensive vision among the remaining presidential candidates in addressing the problems of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. As Joseph Cirincione, Senior Fellow and Director for Nuclear Policy at the Center for American Progress, writes in a recent (and terrifying) article in the New York Review of Books titled "The Greatest Threat to Us All":
John McCain devoted just one paragraph to [nuclear] proliferation in a Foreign Affairs article late last year, focusing on stricter export controls, harsher punishments for proliferators, and increased budgets for nuclear inspections...
The Democratic side has the greatest potential for transforming nuclear policy. Barack Obama has promised to lead a global campaign not just to reduce but to eliminate nuclear weapons. Obama has the most developed plan in the campaigns, based in part on work he has done with Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana and a bill he has introduced with Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. In an October 2007 speech he endorsed a comprehensive plan to control and eliminate nuclear weapons around the world. According to the plan, the US would (1) secure during his first term as president all nuclear materials in the fifty countries that have them; (2) negotiate radical reductions in US and Russian nuclear stockpiles; (3) negotiate a verifiable global ban on the production of fissile materials; (4) create an international nuclear fuel bank; (5) increase funding for the inspections and safeguards done by the IAEA; (6) seek a global ban on all intermediate-range missiles; and (7) lower the current alerts that keep thousands of nuclear warheads ready to launch within fifteen minutes, thus reducing the risk that the weapons would be used by accident or misperception.
Hillary Clinton has argued that she has met the "Commander-in-Chief threshold." Fair enough. But given his judgment on the Iraq War and his leadership in addressing the dangers of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, which constitute the greatest threat to our country today, Obama passed that threshold by years ago.
The right judgment on the use of military force, and the right action in preventative measures to enhance our national security. This is the substance of the Obama candidacy, and it is a message that we should promote going forward.