The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [149]
“That is anthrax,” the translator explained, pointing to the vial in the woman’s right hand. “That one,” he said, pointing to the one in the left hand, “is the plague.”
I looked behind me and noticed Lugar standing toward the back of the room.
“You don’t want a closer look, Dick?” I asked, taking a few steps back myself.
“Been there, done that,” he said with a smile.
There were moments during our travels when we were reminded of the old Cold War days. At the airport in Perm, for example, a border officer in his early twenties detained us for three hours because we wouldn’t let him search our plane, leading our staffs to fire off telephone calls to the U.S. embassy and Russia’s foreign affairs ministry in Moscow. And yet most of what we heard and saw—the Calvin Klein store and Maserati showroom in Red Square Mall; the motorcade of SUVs that pulled up in front of a restaurant, driven by burly men with ill-fitting suits who once might have rushed to open the door for Kremlin officials but were now on the security detail of one of Russia’s billionaire oligarchs; the throngs of sullen teenagers in T-shirts and low-riding jeans, sharing cigarettes and the music on their iPods as they wandered Kiev’s graceful boulevards—underscored the seemingly irreversible process of economic, if not political, integration between East and West.
That was part of the reason, I sensed, why Lugar and I were greeted so warmly at these various military installations. Our presence not only promised money for security systems and fencing and monitors and the like; it also indicated to the men and women who worked in these facilities that they still in fact mattered. They had made careers, had been honored, for perfecting the tools of war. Now they found themselves presiding over remnants of the past, their institutions barely relevant to nations whose people had shifted their main attention to turning a quick buck.
Certainly that’s how it felt in Donetsk, an industrial town in the southeastern portion of Ukraine where we stopped to visit an installation for the destruction of conventional weapons. The facility was nestled in the country, accessed by a series of narrow roads occasionally crowded with goats. The director of the facility, a rotund, cheerful man who reminded me of a Chicago ward superintendent, led us through a series of dark warehouse-like structures in various states of disrepair, where rows of workers nimbly dismantled an assortment of land mines and tank ordnance, and empty shell casings were piled loosely into mounds that rose to my shoulders. They needed U.S. help, the director explained, because Ukraine lacked the money to deal with all the weapons left over from the Cold War and Afghanistan—at the pace they were going, securing and disabling these weapons might take sixty years. In the meantime weapons would remain scattered across the country, often in shacks without padlocks, exposed to the elements, not just ammunition but high-grade explosives and shoulder-to-air missiles—tools of destruction that might find their way into the hands of warlords in Somalia, Tamil fighters in Sri Lanka, insurgents in Iraq.
As he spoke, our group entered another building, where women wearing surgical masks stood at a table removing hexogen—a military-grade explosive—from various munitions and placing it into bags. In another room, I happened upon a pair of men in their undershirts, smoking next to a wheezing old boiler, flicking their ashes into an open gutter filled with orange-tinted water. One of our team called me over and showed me a yellowing poster taped to the wall. It was a relic of the Afghan war, we were told: instructions on how to hide explosives in toys, to be left in villages and carried home by unsuspecting children.
A testament, I thought, to the madness of men.
A record