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CARNEGIE
CORPORATION TRUSTEE SENATOR SAM NUNN AND SENATOR RICHARD G. LUGAR
HONORED WITH TENTH ANNUAL HEINZ AWARDS
New
York, NY—December 4, 2003. The Heinz Family Foundation
awarded Senators Sam Nunn and Richard G. Lugar, along with five
other honorees, the Tenth Annual Heinz Awards. The two senators
were honored with the foundation’s Chairman’s Medal,
which is awarded on occasion to recognize a record of especially
notable achievement.
Recognizing
the lingering post-Cold War threat posed by stockpiles of nuclear
weapons, in 1991 U.S. Senators Richard G. Lugar and Sam Nunn forged
a bipartisan congressional coalition that ultimately authorized
$500 million for the purpose of dismantling Soviet weaponry, which,
at the time, numbered tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Senator
Lugar, a five-term senator from Indiana, who serves as the chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has since introduced
legislation that would expand the original program beyond the former
Soviet countries. He serves as co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat
Initiative along with Senator Nunn, who retired from the Senate
in 1996. Senator Nunn also serves as chief executive officer of
the Initiative, a nonprofit organization that works to reduce the
global threat from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
“I'm
particularly honored that the transforming idea Senators Nunn and
Lugar stewarded through Congress was conceived at a Carnegie Corporation-sponsored
Aspen retreat on Russia,” says Vartan Gregorian, president
of Carnegie Corporation. “We have always believed these congressional
retreats offer lawmakers an opportunity to meet with scholars on
critical international issues and to have the time to think through
new policy options. This award from the Heinz Foundation not only
honors the two senators but the concept behind these meetings.”
In
making the award, the Heinz Foundation noted that the Nunn-Lugar
program has been credited with deactivating over 6,000 warheads
and destroyed 515 ballistic missiles, 441 ballistic missile silos,
115 bombers, 400 submarine-launched missiles, 408 submarine missile
launchers and 27 strategic missile submarines. Believing the United
States must have the ability to identify all weapons of mass destruction
and the capabilities to guard and systematically destroy them, the
two senators hope that the success of Nunn-Lugar will be replicated
in such global hotspots as North Korea and Iran and help reduce
tensions in Pakistan and India.
Nominations
for the Heinz Awards are submitted by an invited Council of Nominators,
all experts in their fields, who serve anonymously. The Heinz Foundation
Board of Directors selects award recipients for the Heinz Awards
upon review of the jurors’ recommendations.
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