Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 3:08 pm on 7 February 2002.
My Lords, these are essentially discussions between the United States and Russia. It is a treaty between those two parties. But naturally we are interested in ensuring that they have peaceful and useful discussions. I do think that the US posture review has taken this position forward. The START I treaty allows both sides to have in the region of 6,000 deployable warheads. The American proposals would reduce the deployable operational warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200. We await the Russian response to that. Another key part of their discussions will be the arrangements that can be made between those two countries on transparency and verification. We very much encourage them to stick at those discussions.