President Barack Obama's praiseworthy effort to establish a bipartisan national security team, epitomized by his decision to maintain Robert Gates as secretary of defense, continued with his and Gates' appointment of Kenneth A. Myers III as the new director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).
Myers previously worked on the personal staff of Sen. Richard Lugar, who himself has a long history of reaching across the aisle to build bipartisan coalitions on behalf of various national security initiatives. Along with then-Sen. Sam Nunn, Lugar helped launch the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program at the Defense Department in 1991. In combination with related programs in the departments of Energy and State, CTR has provided expertise and funding for diverse projects seeking to secure and eliminate excess weapons, materials and technologies -- nuclear, chemical and biological -- inherited by the former Soviet republics at the end of the Cold War. ...
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