Opening Plenary Speech Promoting Global Best Practices

It’s an honor to address the premier international professional society for nuclear materials management. My talk today is a simple appeal to all of you to play a larger role in the world’s number one security imperative—keeping nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands. This is the most significant, clear, and present danger to global security, and there is a dangerous gap between the threat and our response. For more than four years now, the organization I serve as president, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, has worked to help close that gap between the threat and the response—and reduce the chance weapons of mass destruction will ever be used by anyone, anywhere, whether by intent or accident. We pursue this goal by serving as a catalyst for new thinking, by encouraging governments to act and transform public policy, and by developing start-up programs that we hope governments and the private sector will replicate on a larger scale. There is a special advantage we bring to our work, and it is an advantage we share with your organization and all non-governmental entities: although we act with full transparency to our government, we can act without the regulatory restrictions and policy constraints of government. This ability, I believe, is key to an important new approach we need to bring to preventing nuclear terrorism. It’s this approach I will be urging you to examine, advocate, and perhaps take on as your own.