Mr President, can I say that the recent events with regard to the trafficking of illicit nuclear materials in Germany reveal a desperate situation which is a danger to the people of Europe and to the people of the whole world. It is clear that we have to take all possible measures to stop this happening within the territory of the European Union. That will require an exchange of information between customs and police authorities across the European Union, and an enhanced role for organizations like Europol. It is far more important for us that Europol should help to deal with the problems of the illicit trafficking in nuclear materials than that it should chase down the last desperate Serbian deserters who do not want to fight in one of Yugoslavia's civil wars and have them sent back to be placed on the front line with their lives in danger. So it must be a priority for us.

Nevertheless it is clear that it cannot be done by Europe alone; and what we need to be doing is actually looking at the source. There, as my colleague Mr Linkohr has said, we need to be looking at inspection of nuclear facilities. After the collapse of the Soviet empire we now effectively have third-world countries with nuclear materials and nuclear capabilities. Where they are not seen to be looking after those materials, we have to threaten sanctions against them. But, of course, in exchange we need to offer aid and assistance to those countries.

However, it is not just the raw materials that create a problem for us. You cannot make a nuclear weapon just with raw materials. You need qualified scientists and engineers. We have the problems of the live machines - the people with those skills and abilities - who are being sought at the moment in the former Soviet Union and in countries like Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Pakistan. We need to be providing assistance to those people, to the qualified scientists and engineers from the nuclear industry, to enable them to stay in their own countries and help development in the former countries of the Soviet Union rather than the production, as nuclear mercenaries, of weapons of mass destruction that threaten the future of all of us.