Event Summary
"I am a little short of terrified at some of the storage facilities for nuclear material and nuclear weapons - and relatively small investments can yield enormous improvements in storage and security." -- Howard Baker
"The public needs to be reawakened, without being panicked, as Senator Baker said, about the spectrum of threats. And it needs to have the benefit of films like ''Thirteen Days,'' hearings like this." -- Lloyd Cutler
At a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 28, former Senator Howard Baker, former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, BCSIA Director Graham Allison and others presented the findings of the Task Force on the Department of Energy''s Nonproliferation Programs with Russia.
The Task Force recently released a Report Card on the Department of Energy''s Nonproliferation Programs with Russia which reviews all DOE programs intended to safeguard Russia''s nuclear materials and calls for increased funding and stronger mandates for the programs.
"There aren''t any issues of national defense that are more important in my view, short of ultimate survival of the nation, than seeing that we reduce the threat of proliferation; and the greatest threat of proliferation is not the development of new sources but the protection and safeguarding of existing sources of nuclear material," said co-chair Howard Baker.
http://www.hr.doe.gov/seab/
(Seth Jaffe contributed to this article.)