To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how much his Department has spent on research into nuclear weapon science in each of the last 20 years. (74426)

A very wide and diverse range of individual research topics might conceivably be interpreted as falling within the scope of the overarching description “nuclear weapons science”. Costs are neither collected nor reported in such a way as to enable the compilation of complete, definitive or reliable totals to meet this description. Such figures could be provided only at disproportionate cost, if at all. Overall Ministry of Defence research statisticsare however published annually by the Defence Analytical Services Agency and can be found at www.dasa.mod.uk/natstats/ukds/2005/ukds.html.