Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today. It's one of the greatest amounts of expertise we've ever seen at this table at the same time. I'm kind of daunted about how to get enough questions in, in the time available.
I'm going to start with Mr. Fadden because I have, in a different hat, in a different Parliament, asked questions of him when he was a civil servant. I look forward to hearing his expertise without any of the possible traces that may have been on him in the past. Others may guess from that that we maybe had testy exchanges in a previous Parliament.
I have always respected your expertise, and I certainly do on the question of threats. I want to ask you a bit more about the threat situation. In particular, as the members of the committee know, I've been concerned about the increasing nuclear threat, and not just through proliferation. Since the end of the Cold War, both the United States and Russia have developed the idea of battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons, which they tend to call low yield, which is not a backyard firecracker but something the size of Hiroshima.
I have concerns about both the security of those kinds of weapons in the field and also the drift of decision-making down the chain of command. I wonder whether you could comment on your views on this as an additional threat to peace and security.