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Officials from the United States, China, North Korea and Russia will have a closed conference in China on November 27-28 to discuss ways to adopt the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, or CTR, for North Korea’s nuclear dismantlement, according to a report by Radio Free Asia on November 21.

A close aide to Delaware Senator Joe Biden is going to visit China this weekend to discuss how to expand the application of the Nunn-Lugar program to North Korea, RFA reported. According to the RFA report, the United States will request that China and Russia also take part in the discussion. Regarding this, Senator Biden’s aide reportedly talked with Kim Myeong-gil, deputy ambassador of North Korea’s mission to the United Nations in New York, on November 16.

If the Nunn-Lugar program is applied to dismantlement of the regime’s key nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, North Korea will be eligible for U.S. assistance to complete this process. The Nunn-Lugar program is based on a 1992 U.S. law sponsored by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, and involves U.S. assistance for securing and dismantling weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructures in former Soviet Union states like Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. In an interview with RFA on November 5, Sen. Lugar said that he had recently sent two aides to North Korea to explain the political and economic gains which the communist regime could expect to receive in return for dismantling its nuclear facilities.

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