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Mr. Chaytor: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on the UK's undertaking to work towards the total elimination of British nuclear weapons. [221455]
Mr. MacShane: The United Kingdom is fully committed to its disarmament obligations as a nuclear-weapon state recognised by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), including all the undertakings agreed at the 2000 NPT review conference. We also support the agreements made at the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference that called on the nuclear-weapon states to pursue systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons. We are the only nuclear-weapon state that has reduced its nuclear capability to a single weapons system and we have reduced the total explosive power of our nuclear forces by over 70 per cent. since the end of the cold war.