Barry Soper: Getting rid of nukes is one thing - the test is shutting the gulags

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel told us a story after meeting former Prime Minister John Key in 2015.

She said as a girl she used to sit in East Berlin and look at the German Bundestag, the Parliament, and sadly think she'd never see that up-close in her lifetime.

She was trapped behind the wall that many had died trying to cross the short running distance to get to the West.

Go to the Korean Demilitarised Zone and imagine the soldiers who daily look into the West, to South Korea, although their view of soldiers looking back at them isn't nearly as alluring as West Berlin. But their lifestyle, and their freedom, is.

It was a privilege to be in Germany as they were chipping away at the Berlin Wall in 1989 to take pieces home as souvenirs. Mine is sitting at the bottom of a junk drawer somewhere.

With the fall of the wall the East Germans, and in fact all of the countries behind the Iron Curtain celebrated. They thought the riches of the West automatically flowed with democratisation. They came to realise that takes time, generations in some cases.

The people of North Korea undoubtedly won't know it yet, but if the promises made by their deified, God-like leader Kim Jong Un are kept, then their lives will change. The crippling sanctions that have turned them into scavengers will be lifted.

There'll be investment in the country that's put most of its resources into building its nuclear stockpile at the expense of most of its people with exception the few loyalists anointed by the Kim family. Detractors are expelled to the countryside or eliminated depending on their transgression.

The Singapore summit was the culmination of a long held ambition of Donald Trump, who envisioned himself back in the 80s brokering an anti-nuclear deal with Moscow, but nobody took the real estate entrepreneur seriously.

At one point he even told the negotiator of the George Bush snr presidency how to deal to those in possession of nuclear weapons, other than the Americans themselves that is.

Arrive late, poke your finger into your adversary's chest and swear at him with a vulgar insult, he advised, and they'll know you mean business.

His approach with Kim was a little different. At the end of their meeting with officials he whipped out an iPad and played a short propaganda programme for Kim and his acolytes, showing them what North Korea could be like and repeatedly showing shots of both leaders who the viewer was told will decide its destiny.

Trump declared later that anyone can make war but only the courageous can make peace.

The reality is that getting rid of the nukes is one thing, but it's getting rid of the fear and intimidation of the regime that locks its people up in gulags, imprisons around 50 thousand Christians and executes citizens for the most trivial of transgressions that is the real test.

North Korean is the Albania of Asia and addressing the treatment of its people must be the next step.

If the Singapore summit was the first step along that road then Trump's claim that "it was a great moment in the history of the world" could, in a relatively small way, have some validity, at least in the North Koreans' world.