NOVANEWS
White House national security adviser John Bolton said on Sunday he believed the bulk of North Korea’s weapons programs could be dismantled within a year, as the United States and North Korea resumed working-level talks.
Bolton told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Washington has devised a program to dismantle North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological and nuclear – and ballistic missile programs in a year, if there is full cooperation and disclosure from Pyongyang.
“I’m sure that the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, will be discussing this with the North Koreans in the near future, about, really, how to dismantle all of their WMD and ballistic missile programs in a year. If they have the strategic decision already made to do that and they’re cooperative, we can move very quickly,” he said. “Physically we would be able to dismantle the overwhelming bulk of their programs within a year.”
Bolton is the last person you’d expect to be this bullish on the North Korea talks. What is going on here? Is he creating the unrealistic expectation the weapons can be dismantled this quickly, so that when they are not, he can scream Koreans are not cooperating? Or is he now so loyal to Trump this hyping up of the Korean peace process is sincere??
I won’t pretend to know the answer, but in the CBS studio interview where he said this, he — except on Iran — sounded almost reasonable. He even goes to say he doesn’t necessarily disbelieve Putin when the latter says there was no Russian state meddling in the US 2016 election. And he defends the idea of Russia talks — which he after all helped set up.
If Trump has indeed turned the Walrus of Death into a Korea peacenik this would be a bigger miracle than retiring on the national level the Bushes and the Clintons both in 2016.
