Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday will huddle with a pair of former U.S. senators who played a key role in reducing the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal amid its collapse, according to a White House official who described the meeting as a valuable precursor to President Trump’s upcoming nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The former lawmakers, Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., authored legislation in the early 90s that became the basis for a Pentagon program that aimed to destroy the Soviet Union’s nuclear and chemical weapons inventory, facilities, and delivery vehicles using a portion of annual defense spending.
Because the program required unusual cooperation from Russia, an ideological and political enemy of the U.S., it has been likened to Trump’s current effort to work with the Kim regime to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.
“The United States and Russia learned to cooperate on threat reduction by working together in implementing the program from 1991 to 2012,” Nunn and Lugar wrote in an April op-ed. They suggested a “broad-based” nuclear agreement with Pyongyang could help the U.S. “rebuild cooperation between Washington and Moscow.”
Most U.S. officials have praised the Nunn-Lugar program for successfully preventing nuclear weapons in former Soviet states from falling into the wrong hands, though some remain concerned that the program failed to reduce the scientific know-how to make biological weapons. Modeling disarmament efforts with North Korea after the Nunn-Lugar program could present difficulties as the Kim regime has largely shrouded its biological weapons capabilities.
Pence’s meeting with Nunn and Lugar comes a week before Trump is slated to hold a historic meeting with Kim in Singapore on June 12. The president has cast the meeting as a “get-to-know-you” forum, which could open the door to a process by which North Korea agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for sanctions relief and reintegration into the global system.
“The topic will be North Korea and next steps following the summit,” a White House official told the Washington Examiner ahead of Tuesday’s meeting.
