美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible' A Tough Goal For North Korea Summit

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

CVID is an acronym¹ you're about to hear a lot. The Trump² administration has been using it in the run-up to next week's summit with North Korea. And those four letters have meant different things to different people, as NPR's David Welna reports.

DAVID WELNA, BYLINE³: Last month at his swearing-in ceremony, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out what you might call a PVID strategy.

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MIKE POMPEO: We are committed to the permanent, verifiable, irreversible dismantling⁴ of North Korea's weapons of mass destruction program.

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HEATHER NAUERT: We're calling it CVID now.

WELNA: That's State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert the very next day. Overnight, Pompeo's permanent turned into complete, and his dismantling was now denuclearization.

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NAUERT: The government likes acronyms⁵ so much. We've got a new one - CVID, complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization. That is our policy. And that is the policy of Secretary Pompeo.

WELNA: CVID, in fact, is not new at all. Here's State Department official James Kelly 14 years ago explaining to Congress the George W. Bush administration's nuclear talks with North Korea.

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JAMES KELLY: Our goal - complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement⁶ of North Korean nuclear programs.

WELNA: So while dismantlement has been replaced by denuclearization, the CVID catchphrase endures. That bothers Robert Gallucci, who was chief negotiator with the North Koreans during the Clinton administration.

ROBERT GALLUCCI: My concern here is that we latch⁷ onto a standard which is physically⁸ not actually plausible⁹.

WELNA: Gallucci, who now teaches at Georgetown University, says demanding North Korea's irreversible denuclearization is simply unrealistic.

GALLUCCI: As long as the scientists and engineers who designed and built the facilities are still alive and living in the country, it can be built again.

WELNA: And it's not at all clear that denuclearization, however it's defined, is the plausible demand. Yesterday at a Senate hearing, Colorado Republican Cory Gardner raised that concern with Joseph Yun, who before quitting in March was the State Department's point man on North Korea.

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CORY GARDNER: Complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization - do you believe Kim Jong Un is committed to that level of CVID?

JOSEPH YUN: I would say, we don't know.

WELNA: Testifying alongside Yun was Victor Cha, the top North Korea expert in the Bush administration. He said while North Koreans too speak of denuclearization, they're not talking about giving up their nuclear arsenal¹⁰ in the foreseeable future.

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VICTOR CHA: They use it to mean, sometime in the future, they believe that the Korean Peninsula should be free of weapons when there is no longer any threat in the world to North Korea.

WELNA: Yun, for his part, said the U.S. should be taking a step-by-step approach with North Korea, guided by a different word that also begins with the letter D.

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YUN: The crucial step is the first step - declaration. Without knowing what they have, how are you going to negotiate with them?

WELNA: Strikingly, neither of these seasoned North Korea experts used that old term, now back in vogue¹¹, CVID. David Welna, NPR News, Washington.

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