'India, Pak must learn from US-Russia on nuclear disarmament'

Washington: Countries like India and Pakistan should learn from the experiences of Russia and US on the issue of nuclear disarmament, a former US Senator has said, while acknowledging that it will be a “huge challenge” “I think India and Pakistan can both learn from the Soviets and the US. I don’t think we should be lecturing, but I think there’s a lot of dialogue that can take place there,” former US Senator Sam Nunn said at the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Symposium at the National Defense University. Having just returned from China, Nunn, who co-authored Congressional legislation that dismantling of a large number of nuclear and chemical weapons, along with Senator Richard Lugar, said that the dialogue on nuclear disarmament with China is just beginning. [caption id=“attachment_544179” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] “I just returned from a week in China, and it’s a dialogue that is just beginning with China. India and Pakistan is a huge challenge. I think if I listed one area of the world where that would be the most dangers, it would be that,” Nunn said in response to a question. Even as the Nunn-Lugar program has been successful because of the co-operation between US and Russia, the former Senator said there is need to involve other countries as well. “We’re going to have to have partners far beyond US and Russia all over the globe, but it starts with the US and Russia because we have 90 percent of the material and weapons,” he said. “We also have to get China and India and a number of other countries involved in this,” he added. “I believe that the Cooperative Threat Reduction is going to go through some very substantial change. We’re going to have to understand in this country that reciprocity is going to be one of the things we have to deal with. We’re not going to simply have access to sites in other countries they deem to be sensitive without having some more transparency in our own. We’ve led the way in many elements of transparency, but I think we’re going to have some demands that are going to be difficult and are going to have to be debated,” Nunn said. PTI