I’ve slighted my share of Republican senators in print. But I can only think of one to whom I owe an apology. In fact, I may even owe him my life. Let me explain: Back in 1996 I was a smart-alecky TNR intern eager to wisecrack my way into print. Richard Lugar was a Republican senator running one of the most hopeless presidential campaigns in modern history. Lugar was an awful candidate. His grimacing, mechanical approach to primary-state retail politics made Steve Forbes look like Warren Beatty. Stating the obvious during the campaign, he told one reporter, “I’ve never purported to be an entertainer or performer or a bon vivant.” His candidacy was instead based on that perennially losing theme of technocratic mastery. Lugar’s edge was that, as a hardworking 20-year senator, he simply knew the issues better than anyone else did. Naturally, his candidacy went nowhere.And so perhaps the most rational, levelheaded candidate of all time, acted like a maniacal dictator: He went nuclear. In December 1995 Lugar ran a four- part ad campaign telling the story, docudrama-style, of terrorists who steal three Russian nuclear warheads and threaten to detonate them in the United States. In one spot, a little girl plaintively asks at bedtime, “Mommy, won’t the bomb wake everybody up?” Others depicted panicky aides begging a befuddled president for guidance. The implication was that most presidential candidates would be ill-equipped to deal with such a calamity. But not Lugar. Long before The Sum of All Fears gave Americans mass nightmares, Lugar had become fixated on the possibility that former Soviet nukes might be stolen and exploded on American soil; he had spent countless hours working on that very question in the Senate. And so the ads concluded with Lugar, looking solemn--and, back then, vaguely ridiculous--issuing his grave warning: “Nobody wants to talk about nuclear terrorism. But hiding from it won’t make it go away.” In those blissfully ignorant days Lugar’s doomsday ads felt like a desperate, even exploitative, ploy. And so I smugly typed out a short, unsigned item for TNR’s “Notebook,” declaring that Lugar had “managed to undermine the one element that sets him apart from his competitors: seriousness.” That showed him! Today Lugar’s nightmare scenario feels rather less cartoonish--especially here in Washington, a city whose security Dick Cheney comments upon by decamping to his “undisclosed location.” Yet I’m surprised how few Washingtonians talk seriously about the risks involved with living here. When Bill Keller wrote a terrifying, 8,000-word cover story in the May 26 New York Times Magazine chronicling the nuclear-terror risk, he concluded, “The problem is not so much that we are not doing enough to prevent a terrorist from turning our atomic knowledge against us (although we are not). The problem is that there may be no such thing as ‘enough.’” He went on to note, “I’m not evacuating Manhattan, but neither am I sleeping quite as soundly.” Well, if there may be no such thing as “enough,” at what point do we evacuate? Big-city dwellers are today playing an unspoken game of chance or retreating into denial. But that could change. A journalist friend of mine recently confessed, for instance, that The Bomb would be a factor in his decision the next time a job offer in a smaller city came along. This might suggest a future pattern: Because no one wants to be a coward, people aren’t fleeing D.C. or New York. But given a good excuse, we just might conveniently relocate. It’s a checklist for a new generation: How good are the schools? How high are the taxes? What does the threat matrix say? Dick Lugar, bless him, saw this coming a decade ago. And he’s probably worked harder than anyone else in Congress to protect us. A program he formed with then-Georgia Senator Sam Nunn in 1991 has spent billions keeping nuclear weapons from reaching our shores. Nunn-Lugar pays for everything from alarm systems at a plutonium dump in Belarus to gainful employment for bribe- susceptible former Soviet nuclear scientists. It’s that rarest of federal programs: forwardlooking, efficient--and utterly lacking a political constituency. As a result, although the United States is satisfied with security systems at only 20 percent of Russian nuclear storage sites, Nunn- Lugar has spent just $4.5 billion over the past decade and even next year will spend only $1.3 billion more--about 0.3 percent of the Pentagon budget, a level of funding The Economist last month declared to be “outrageous folly.” As the White House promotes its shiny new homeland security strategy, it could use some reminding that it’s a lot easier to keep a nuke from reaching the homeland than defending against it once it’s here. And so I hereby nominate Dick Lugar to replace Tom Ridge. As you can probably tell, my little pre-September 11 swipe at the Indiana senator has been weighing heavily on my post-attack conscience. Things got worse when I learned recently that Lugar is a faithful reader of TNR. In fact, one of his aides explained to me, Lugar has been known to ask about his copy when it hasn’t arrived on time. I stammered out some expression of gratitude-- but found myself secretly awash in guilt. I had a chance in 1996 to give Lugar a small morale boost when he needed it most; but I blew it. Now I fear that if Washington is vaporized, historians will look scornfully upon my “Notebook” item. So I apologize. I’m the one whose seriousness was undermined, not Lugar. Paranoid though I may be, I’m not prepared to abandon Washington just yet. But I was happy to escape briefly last month on a trip to northern Montana’s gloriously pristine Glacier National Park. Even in this rugged Eden, however, the memory of Mohammed Atta and friends loomed. A small but lovely portion of Glacier Park lies north of the Canadian border, and this “international” aspect of our trip posed difficulties. My friends and I had planned to take one of the most popular day trips: riding a boat from the Canadian side of the huge and shimmering Waterton Lake to its Montana shore and, from there, hiking a scenic trail known as Goat Haunt. But the modest Montana dock had been newly deemed a “point of entry,” and the U.S. Customs service had closed it pending a decision on how best to monitor travelers. The restriction was patently foolish--a would- be terrorist would still have to hike miles through grizzly-infested wilderness to reach the nearest road; and any terrorist determined enough to hike that far could still hike around the lake--and mainly served to upset plans like ours. (Meanwhile, none of the checkpoints on area roadways prevented us from brazenly smuggling coolers filled with contraband fruits and alcohol over the border and back.) Customs eventually realized its mistake. A few days after my visit, Goat Haunt was reopened to documented American citizens. And just in time: I was getting ready to complain to President--er, Senator Lugar.