A U.S. senator who helped formulate a dismantlement program for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in former Soviet states said Thursday the same experience should be applied to North Korea, Yonhap news agency reported in Washington.
Sen. Richard Lugar and former Sen. Sam Nunn are the architects of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program that set up an annual globally collected budget of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars for WMD removal as well as for the training and re-employment of Soviet nuclear scientists and to clean up nuclear material and sites.
"The United States and Russia should be exploring how the Nunn-Lugar experience can be applied in North Korea," Yonhap quoted Lugar saying at a hearing.
"The Nunn-Lugar program would have a different orientation in North Korea than it does in the former Soviet Union, but the program has the authority, flexibility and experience to adapt to the Korean situation," he said.
South Korea's top nuclear envoy, Chun Yung-woo, met U.S. experts while visiting here earlier this month to specifically learn more about the dismantlement program and its possible application to the North. Seoul is one of the contributors to the Nunn-Lugar initiative, Yonhap said.