On Thursday, 10 December, the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) presented Global Fissile Material Report 2009: A Path to Nuclear Disarmament in Washington, DC to Congressional staff, government officials, and nuclear arms control and disarmament groups at an event sponsored by the AAAS Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy and another organized jointly by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and Non-Proliferation and the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

To help inform the Washington policy making process, IPFM members James Acton, Alexander Glaser, Zia Mian and Frank von Hippel presented some of the key technical and policy issues and IPFM recommendations for practical steps toward verified world-wide nuclear disarmament developed in Global Fissile Material Report 2009. The presentation (available here) covered the context of the new disarmament debate, the status of fissile material stockpiles and their implication for a disarming world, how declarations of fissile material stocks could be verified using nuclear archaeology, the verifiable dismantlement of nuclear weapons and the disposition of the roughly 2000 tons of fissile material existing today (both plutonium and highly enriched uranium) that could be used for weapons.