Expert: It will be a long road to nuclear disarming
As the Trump administration races to start talks with North Korea on what it calls “rapid denuclearization,” a top federal government adviser who has repeatedly visited the North’s sprawling atomic complex is warning that the disarmament process could take far longer, up to 15 years.
The adviser, Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, and now a Stanford professor, argues that the best the United States can hope for is a phased denuclearization that goes after the most dangerous parts of the North’s program first.
The disarmament steps and timetable are laid out in a new report, circulated recently in Washington, that Hecker compiled with two colleagues at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Hecker has toured that nation’s secretive labyrinth of nuclear plants four times and remains the only U.S. scientist to see its facility for enriching uranium, a bomb fuel. U.S. intelligence agencies had missed the plant’s construction.
Hecker’s time frame stands in stark contrast with what the United States initially demanded, on what could be a key sticking point in any summit meeting between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader.
Two U.S. delegations, one in Singapore and one in North Korea, are attempting to work out a meeting between the two leaders. Trump canceled the meeting in a letter to Kim last week but has been working to reconstitute it ever since, posting Twitter messages that say he is confident the North Korean economy will prosper if an accord is reached.
The delegation in Singapore is discussing the logistics of a meeting, to be held June 12 or afterward. The other, led by Sung Kim, a U.S. diplomat with long North Korea experience, is meeting senior officials of the North Korean Foreign Ministry at the Demilitarized Zone to work on the wording of what kind of communiqué might be issued by the two leaders. But the White House and State Department have said nothing about the details of those discussions.