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Thank you all very much and thank you Ray for that kind introduction.

I want to thank the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Eisenhower Library for organizing the Atoms for Peace Plus 50 Conference, which the Department of Energy is sponsoring. I am also grateful to the many DOE laboratories that provided exhibits for the conference and I hope everyone had a chance to tour the exhibit area.

We are proud of the legacy we in the Department have inherited from President Eisenhower’s extraordinary initiatives. Now, almost exactly fifty years from the date of the President’s historic speech at the United Nations, is the right time to examine that legacy…both where we have been and where we are headed.

The proceedings of this Conference will serve as a critical reference point and guide for the future and I look forward to reviewing them.

Let me also take this opportunity to thank the organizers of the 2003 Enrico Fermi Awards, which we are celebrating in tandem with our Atoms for Peace Conference. I am grateful for the work you have done and appreciate the time and effort that goes in to events such as this.

PAUSE

It is now my great pleasure to offer personal congratulations to the winners of this year’s Enrico Fermi Award and to thank past winners for joining us this evening.

We will hear more a bit later about these gentlemen, but let me just say now that I believe John Bahcall, Raymond Davis, Jr., and Seymour Sack represent what is best about DOE science. They were willing to take risks in their research and to stand by it when others had doubts. Dr. Davis’s exquisite experiments and Dr. Bachall’s magnificent theoretical insights illustrate how perfectly theory and experiment can be joined. Dr. Sack was instrumental in seeing that America had a credible deterrence when it needed it most. And each is dedicated to the critical importance of basic research.

Gentlemen, congratulations.