In 1991, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, we wrote legislation to provide technical and financial assistance for the inventory, destruction, and disposal of nuclear and chemical weapons and their delivery vehicles in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. This became law as the Nunn-Lugar Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991 — also known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program.
The initiative also helped to fund productive, peaceful scientific work for scientists who had worked in the weapons complex, and also helped to prevent the proliferation of their know-how to other states and nonstate actors — including the extraordinary lab-to-lab program in which Russian and American scientists worked cooperatively to secure materials usable in nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia learned to cooperate on threat reduction by working together in implementing the program from 1991 to 2012. With this valuable joint experience, if we are going to rebuild cooperation between Washington and Moscow, North Korea is a good place to start.
We believe this concept should be a critical component of any effort to verifiably and irreversibly dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons and related programs, as well as prevent future proliferation of weapons, material or know-how.
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