Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty: Destruction of Nuclear Warheads (Hansard, 18 March 1999)

§ Lord Hoyle

Both the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT 1, which entered into force in 1972, and SALT 2, which was signed in 1979 but never ratified, sought to limit long-range strategic ballistic missiles rather than warheads. They imposed no separate limits on the number of warheads themselves and there are, therefore, no provisions to account for the destruction of nuclear warheads by the United States, the then Soviet Union or Russia, whether under national initiatives or their bilateral arms control agreements. We are, however, confident that the US and Russia have dismantled a large number of nuclear warheads from their previous strategic and non-strategic nuclear arsenals. Both have declared very large amounts of surplus fissile material from this source in recent years. All the nuclear weapons deployed in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus on the collapse of the Soviet Union have been returned to Russia for destruction and these three states have joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as non-nuclear-weapon states.