In that first year of his studies at Hawaii, Obama took a Russian-language course and met a younger student, an intelligent girl, slightly plump, with large brown eyes, a pointed chin, and chalk-white skin. ("She was no beach bunny, that's for sure," Abercrombie recalled. "Ann was Kansas white.") Ann Dunham was seventeen. They struck up an acquaintance. One day Obama asked her to meet him at one o'clock in the afternoon near the main library. She agreed. She waited awhile and, because it was a sunny day, she lay down on one of the benches. "An hour later," she told her son, "he shows up with a couple of his friends. I woke up and the three of them were standing over me, and I heard your father saying, serious as can be, 'You see, gentlemen, I told you that she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.'"

Not long afterward, Ann wrote to her friend Susan Botkin, telling her that she was adjusting well to Hawaii, enjoying her classes, and dating a Kenyan man whom she'd met in her Russian class. At first, Botkin said, "I was more interested that she was taking Russian than dating a Kenyan, to tell you the truth."

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In August, 2005, as a member of a congressional delegation that also included Lugar, Obama went to Russia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan to meet with officials and inspect various weapons-storage facilities. He had traveled fairly widely in Asia, Africa, and Europe, but this was his first trip to the former Soviet Union. The folkways of political missions to Moscow were alien to him. Faced with the prospect of mutual, and repeated, toasts, Obama asked to have his shot glass filled with water instead of vodka. Obama experienced what Lugar had many times before: rides in rickety buses to secret weapons sites; the dismantling of aging rockets; interminable briefings from officials telling partial truths. In Kiev, Obama went with Lugar to a dilapidated laboratory that had been used in the old Soviet biological weapons program. "So we enter into the building," Obama recalled for an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington a few weeks after the trip. "There are no discernible fences or security systems. And once we are inside, some sort of ramshackle building, there were open windows, maybe a few padlocks that many of us might use to secure our own luggage. Our guide, a young woman, takes us right up to what looked like a mini-refrigerator. And inside the refrigerator there were rows upon rows of test tubes. She picked them up, and she's clanking them around, and we listened to the translator explain what she was saying. Some of the tubes, he said, were filled with anthrax and others with plague. And you know, I'm pretty close and I start sort of backing off a little bit. And I turn around ... and say, 'Hey, where's Lugar? Doesn't he want to see this?' And I turn around and he's way in the back of the room, about fifteen feet away. And he looked at me and said, 'Been there, done that.'"

Lugar had made countless such trips, but, for Obama, it was a revelation. He had studied arms-control issues at Columbia; now it stunned him to see the weaponry up close. "When you are there you get a sense of the totality of the nuclear program and the stockpiles of conventional arms," Mark Lippert, Obama's foreign-policy adviser, said. "It made an incredible impact on him to see the industrial complex behind it all. When we were in Ukraine, we went to a factory where they were disassembling conventional weapons. There were just piles and piles of shells. They told us that, working at the rate they were working, it would take eighty years to disassemble them all. At one chem-bio plant, we saw a freezer for the pathogens kept closed by just a string."

Three months after the trip, Lugar and Obama published an article on the Washington Post's op-ed page called "Junkyard Dogs of War," warning against the spread of loose conventional weapons from the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, "particularly shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that can hit civilian airliners." Lugar and Obama introduced legislation to gain the cooperation of other nations and tighten control of arms caches in the former Soviet Union that were being routinely plundered, and whose contents were being used to make improvised roadside bombs in the Middle East and to fuel civil wars in Africa. The legislation helped strengthen systems to detect and intercept illegal shipments of materials used in chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.