Senior Administration Officials Hold a News Briefing Via Teleconference On the Nuclear Security Summit

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Senior Administration Officials Hold a News Briefing Via Teleconference On the Nuclear Security Summit

BEN RHODES, DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR FOR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS, AND GARY SAMORE, SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT AND SENIOR DIRECTOR FOR NON-PROLIFERATION HOLD A NEWS TELECONFERENCE ON THE NUCLEAR SECURITY SUMMIT, AS RELEASED BY THE WHITE HOUSE

APRIL 9, 2010

SPEAKERS: BEN RHODES, DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR FOR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS

GARY SAMORE, SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT AND SENIOR DIRECTOR FOR NON-PROLIFERATION

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL SPOKESMAN MIKE HAMMER

[*] HAMMER: Hello. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Today we have with us Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes, who will kick off a brief introduction of what is coming up this exciting week. And then he will be followed by Gary Samore, who's actually the sherpa for the Nuclear Security Summit and will walk through the specifics of the schedule and some of the issues that we expect will be coming up. So with that, let me just turn it over to Ben. Go ahead, Ben.

RHODES: Great. Thanks, everybody, and thanks for joining the call. We're actually flying back from Prague where we -- the President signed the new START treaty with President Medvedev. So if my connection is not good, I apologize for that, and if I fall off, my colleagues are more than capable of going forward. But I do want to say a few words about the summit before we get into the schedule and then turn it over to Gary Samore, who can walk you through the summit, and then we'll move to your questions.

The first thing I'd just say is that the summit is dedicated to nuclear security and the threat of nuclear terrorism. And I think that it is absolutely fundamental to view this summit with the starting point of the grave nature of the threat of nuclear terrorism. We know that terrorist groups, including Al Qaida, are pursuing the materials to build a nuclear weapon, and we know that they have the intent to use one. This of course would be a catastrophic danger to A...

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