Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with reference to the Answer of 10 November 2015 to Question 14817, what progress the Government plans to make towards nuclear disarmament beyond the steps outlined in the Strategic Defence and Security Review 2010.

The UK is widely recognised as the most pro-active of the nuclear weapon states on nuclear disarmament. We remain committed to maintaining a minimum credible deterrent and we believe that our nuclear arsenal is the smallest of the five Nuclear Weapon States as recognised by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We have reduced our nuclear forces by over half from their Cold War peak in the late 1970s. We reduced the number of deployed warheads on each submarine from 48 to 40 last year and we are reducing our overall stockpile to no more than 180 warheads by the mid-2020s. We possess around 1% of the total global stockpile of approximately 17,000 nuclear weapons.

In addition, the UK plays a leading role on disarmament verification with the US and Norway and continues to press for key steps towards multilateral disarmament, including the entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and successful negotiations on a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty in the Conference on Disarmament.