Campaign Ads for Lugar Make Explosive Point : Politics: In TV spots, the presidential hopeful seeks to highlight his foreign policy skills by focusing on the threat of nuclear terrorism.

In a presidential campaign where candidates are aggressively pushing such “hot-button” issues as media violence and abortion, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) has just jabbed what may be the most inflammatory button of all: the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Beginning today, Lugar’s campaign launches a series of three 30-second advertisements and one 60-second spot in Iowa and New Hampshire in which fictional terrorists threaten to detonate nuclear bombs in the United States.

In one scene, a little girl looks up as her mother is tucking her into bed and asks, “Mommy? . . . Won’t the bomb wake everybody up?”

The point, driven home in the final 60-second segment, is that America needs, and the Republicans should nominate, a foreign policy expert as president--someone such as Lugar. “Nobody wants to talk about nuclear terrorism. But hiding from it won’t make it go away,” Lugar says in the final ad.

“All of us in the race promise to balance the budget, cut taxes, shrink government,” Lugar says. “What this is about is electing a president you can trust with your life.”

Mark Lubbers, Lugar’s campaign manager, insists that the ads are meant “to educate Americans about something they should know about and don’t.”

But some media analysts suggest the real intent is to wake up voters to a candidate who so far has won over only 3% of voters in Iowa and 2% in New Hampshire, according to recent polls.

Titled “Loose Nukes,” the dramatization begins with images of terrorists unloading nuclear fuel from an airplane, followed by scenes in which the CIA is alerted to the threat.

The second ad features a fictional family watching news reports, in which an anchor intones: “The central logic of terrorism is to maximize horror. What could be more shocking than to vaporize an American city?”

In the third ad, the stock market dives, traffic snarls and the military moves in. And the final ad recaps the threat, then focuses on Lugar, who says: “I’ve been on the front lines fighting this battle and I can tell you that ready or not, the next president will be forced to deal with it. . . . “

Some GOP strategists question whether this sort of doomsday message will appeal to voters--particularly during a holiday season.

Other analysts, however, think Lugar may have hit on something. “It’s a terrific card to play post-Oklahoma City bombing,” says Robert Silverman, co-author with Edwin Diamond of “White House to Your House”--a new book about politics and the media. The ads are important because they have the potential to put Lugar in the national spotlight, Silverman said.

Like other media analysts, Silverman likened Lugar’s ads to Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 commercial that linked his opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), to the threat of nuclear war.

That so-called “Daisy” ad, which only aired once but was repeated in news coverage, showed a little girl plucking petals from a flower and counting down “10-9-8. . . . “ until a fireball obliterated the screen.

Lugar’s ad could have a similar impact in attracting attention to the candidate, said Michael Robinson, a fellow at the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press in Washington.

Lubbers called comparisons to the Daisy ads “phony.”

“Lugar’s style,” he said, has always been “to make a decision about what’s important, and then make public opinion follow him.”

Indeed, Lugar’s campaign has, from the start, attempted to establish its candidate as a serious statesman who can be counted upon in moments of crisis.

Lugar, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has an image of “being very calm and extremely experienced, and my sense is that the [impact] of the ads is not to invite a sensationalized response, but rather to make salient the issues that feature his expertise.”

Still, it would appear that the ads are also having the effect the more cynical analysts suggest it was aiming for.

As Robinson said: “I’ve been called by reporters about all the candidates in the last few months, but nobody has ever called me about Lugar. Until now.”