§ Mr. Deakinsasked the Secretary of State for Defence what obstacles exist to the conclusion of an international agreement to end underground nuclear testing; and what effort Her Majesty's Government have made in the past year to overcome them.
§ Mr. LuceI have been asked to reply.
As I said to the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Strang) on 11 December, at column 450, current techniques of seismic verification require significant improvement as a first step towards a comprehensive test ban. We were disappointed that there was no discussion at the conference on disarmament at Geneva last year of the paper on verification problems tabled by the United Kingdom in 1983. However, we took part last year in a worldwide experiment to test methods for exchanging seismological data.