Two former US government nonproliferation officials – Kenneth Luongo and Matthew Bunn – will brief Congressional staff on the implications of the president's FY11 budget on the administration’s goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear materials worldwide within four years, as well as the broader arms control/nonproliferation agenda.

The global stockpile of fissile (nuclear) materials is large enough to build more than 120,000 nuclear bombs and this material continues to accumulate in unstable regions of the world.  The 9/11 Commission and subsequent studies have confirmed that al Qaeda is actively seeking nuclear materials to use against America.  Experts have uniformly recommended strengthening our efforts to limit the availability of nuclear material by eliminating this material from the black market, locking down existing stockpiles, and reducing the number of nuclear weapons around the world that can fall into the hands of our enemies.

President Obama has called for all vulnerable materials worldwide to be secured in four years and is convening an unprecedented heads-of-state summit in April to shore up international commitments to this goal. The FY11 budget provides funding for the second of the four-year effort to secure these dangerous materials.

Luongo and Bunn are members of the Fissile Materials Working Group (FMWG). The FMWG was convened as a coalition of top US nuclear policy experts within weeks of President Barack Obama’s April 2009 speech in Prague. It consists of more than 40 US issue experts, academics, and advocates devoted to meeting the policy priority of preventing nuclear terrorism. For more information on the FMWG, please visit: www.fmwg.org.

The briefing is sponsored by the Stimson Center's Security for a New Century program.

Note: This briefing was originally scheduled for Feb. 5 but has been postponed due to inclement weather in Washington, DC. It is now scheduled for 11 a.m.-Noon in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, room G-11.