Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Dr. Bunn, for being here. I hope you made it through last week's snowstorm unscathed. I'm from Nova Scotia myself. You handed it off to us. We really appreciate that. Again, welcome.
It says on page 18 of your 2011 report entitled “The U.S.-Russia Joint Threat Assessment on Nuclear Terrorism“, and I think you presented some of that today:
Counting assembled nuclear weapons is far easier than accounting for nuclear material in bulk form. Some weapons-usable nuclear material (particularly in the civilian sector) does not have the same level of security that nuclear weapons have. As a result, terrorists’ best chance of achieving a WMD capability may be a long-term effort to construct an IND with weapons-usable material stolen or purchased on the nuclear black market.
How easy is it to construct a nuclear bomb using stolen or black market nuclear material, which can be purchased throughout the world really?