As the historic summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un approaches, the question on many minds isn’t Will it be a success? but What would success even consist of? Perhaps the people best qualified to answer are former senators Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., who devised the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program in 1991 that successfully removed nuclear arms from the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine at the end of the Cold War. The two senators laid out their ideas in a Washington Post op-ed on April 24, and at the invitation of Vice President Mike Pence met with President Trump in the Oval Office last week to explain their program and how it could provide a framework for the talks in Singapore.
According to Lugar, the president seemed receptive.
“President Trump sat behind his desk and we had a good conversation, during which Sam and I argued that the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program could provide a formula for a successful summit with North Korea,” Lugar told Yahoo News.
The key elements of the Nunn-Lugar program are reciprocity, concrete commitments by both sides and the designation of point persons by each side with the authority to drive the process forward. Nunn also stressed the need to set realistic expectations. He fears that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s stated goal of “rapid denuclearization, total and complete, that won’t be extended over time” is probably out of reach.
By James Kitfield.
Full story at Yahoo News.
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