In Hanoi, the Devil is in the Details

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — What are the “corresponding measures” President Trump is prepared to take in return for a promise from Chairman Kim Jong-un to dismantle his Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, which has been producing both plutonium and highly-enriched uranium for North Korea’s nuclear weapons?

Kim and his representatives have been offering up Yongbyon in private conversations since last June’s US-North Korea summit. The most explicit proposal came at Kim’s meeting last September with South Korean President Moon Jae-in when their joint declaration announced North Korea was willing to undertake Yongbyon’s dismantlement “as [long as] the United States takes corresponding measures.”

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