[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 10 (Wednesday, January 14, 2026)]
[House]
[Pages H804-H810]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
EXPIRATION OF NEW START
(Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Foster
of Illinois was recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the
minority leader.)
General Leave
Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may
have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and
submit extraneous material to the Record.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentleman from Illinois?
There was no objection.
Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to open the Special Order hour
to discuss the expiration of the New START treaty, the importance of
arms control, and the urgent need to strengthen global nuclear
security.
I thank the Members who will be joining me this evening for their
leadership and their willingness to engage on issues that carry
existential consequences for our country and for the world.
As many of my colleagues know, I am the only Ph.D. physicist
currently serving in the United States Congress. Before coming to
Congress, I spent more than two decades as a high-energy particle
physicist and particle accelerator designer at Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, where we were smashing together protons and
antiprotons to make particles that have not been around since the big
bang, designing and building the big particle accelerators and
detectors, and analyzing the data. I was on the team that discovered
the top quark, the heaviest known form of matter.
Because of that background, I feel a special responsibility to engage
deeply on issues of nuclear weapons, arms control, and strategic
stability, not as abstract policy debates but as matters grounded in
technical reality.
Arms control is not about unilateral disarmament, wishful thinking,
fantasies of dominance, or trusting adversaries. Arms control is about
verifiable limits, predictability, and reducing the risk of
miscalculation between nuclear-armed states.
For decades, arms control agreements have helped prevent a
catastrophic nuclear exchange, not by eliminating deterrence but by
stabilizing it.
The New START treaty, which stands for Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty, was signed in 2010 and extended in 2021. It is the last
remaining bilateral nuclear arms control agreement between the United
States and the Russian Federation.
New START places verifiable limits on deployed strategic nuclear
weapons and delivery systems and provides for data exchanges,
notifications, and onsite inspections that give us direct insight into
Russia's nuclear forces.
New START followed a long line of arms control agreements, from SALT
to START I to SORT, that helped reduce the global nuclear arsenal from
the Cold War highs of more than 70,000 weapons to fewer than 13,000
today. These agreements were supported by Democratic and Republican
administrations alike because they made the United States safer.
Under New START, the United States does not rely on guesswork, on
satellite imagery alone, or on worst-case assumptions. We rely on
legally binding limits and on verification
[[Page H805]]
measures backed by some of the most sophisticated scientific and
intelligence capabilities of the world.
Today, that system is fraying. Russia has suspended its participation
in New START. Onsite inspections remain paused. The treaty itself is
set to expire in less than 1 month.
Anyone who remembers past arms control negotiations understands the
gravity of this moment. Negotiating a successor agreement will take
years, not months, and we are already past the danger zone.
If New START expires without a replacement, there will be no legally
binding limits on the world's two largest nuclear arsenals for the
first time in more than half a century. The consequences of that
outcome would be serious and immediate.
The United States would lose treaty-mandated insight into Russia's
deployed nuclear forces. Both countries would be free to increase the
number of deployed warheads on existing missiles. Strategic planning
would increasingly be driven by worst-case assumptions rather than
verified facts. At the same time, we would face a far more complex
nuclear environment than during the Cold War.
China is rapidly expanding its nuclear forces. Russia continues to
engage in irresponsible nuclear saber-rattling during its illegal war
in Ukraine, and Iran and North Korea continue to change the global
nonproliferation regime.
In this environment, allowing arms control to collapse is not a show
of strength. It is an abdication of leadership that increases the risk
of miscalculation of arms races and, ultimately, nuclear use by design
or by accident.
Verification will be at the heart of any future arms control effort,
and this is where America's scientific enterprise plays a critical
role. Our national laboratories provide the technical backbone for
verification, monitoring, and treaty compliance, and they are essential
to maintaining U.S. leadership in this area.
As co-chair of the Bipartisan National Labs Caucus, I have seen
firsthand how investments in science and scientific talent directly
translate into national security.
If you are a Member of Congress, you have the opportunity, if you
ask, to go into the room where you see our nuclear weapons taken apart.
You talk to the experts about why the design choices were made, what
the design margins are, and why they have to be built the way they are.
If you walk into that room and see those weapons and think about what
they are capable of, if that doesn't make you take your job seriously,
you are not thinking clearly.
Verification is not a diplomatic afterthought. It is a scientific
challenge that demands sustained investment and expertise.
The choice before us is not between arms control and national
security because arms control is national security. It remains one of
the most effective tools we have to reduce nuclear risk while
maintaining a credible deterrent.
The expiration of New START without a successor would mark a
dangerous turning point, signaling that restraint and verification no
longer matter.
This Special Order hour is about sounding the alarm, but it is also
about reaffirming that Congress has a responsibility to engage.
Congress has a role in oversight, a role in funding verification and
nonproliferation, and a role in insisting that arms control remains a
core pillar of the U.S. national security policy.
The next few years will be decisive, and decisions that we make or
fail to make will shape whether the world moves toward stability or
toward, once again, unconstrained nuclear arms races.
I look forward to the discussion this evening.
I am now proud to introduce my colleague, John Garamendi of
California, a longtime advocate for arms control, with whom I have had
the honor of spending a weekend underneath the north polar ice cap in a
nuclear submarine.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr.
Garamendi).
Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Foster for bringing us
together to talk about this profoundly important situation.
We stand here today on a precipice. In less than a month, the New
START treaty, the last remaining major arms control agreement between
the Soviet Union, or Russia, and the United States, is set to expire.
{time} 1810
If we allow this treaty to lapse without a replacement, then we will
be entering a world we haven't seen in decades, a world without limits
on the nuclear arsenals of the two largest nuclear powers: Russia and
the United States. We will be stripping away the last guardrail
preventing a catastrophic return to the unchecked nuclear buildup of
the Cold War.
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
declared a profound truth: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never
be fought. That principle has been the bedrock of global security for
nearly 40 years. It led us and Russia to eliminate nuclear testing, to
shrink bloated stockpiles, and to prioritize communication over
conflict.
Yet today we are close to forgetting that profound blessing. Instead
of prioritizing deescalation, we see a resurgence of the same Cold War
mindset that once pushed us to the brink of annihilation. We see
hawkish perspectives pushing the U.S., Russia, and now China to a new,
three-way nuclear arms race.
Proponents tell us that this buildup will make us more safe and that
more is better. They tell us that pouring trillions of dollars into a
nuclear modernization is the only way to be safe, but nothing--
nothing--could be further from the truth.
Without nuclear arms control agreements like the New START, every new
weapon we build only fuels an unwinnable arms race as our adversaries
respond in kind. We build. They build. We build. They build. And the
cost of this race is staggering.
Let me give you one example, Mr. Speaker: The Sentinel program aims
to replace the Minuteman III ICBMs. This single program has already
ballooned to cost over $200 billion, an 81 percent cost overrun. We are
spending blindly. We are on remote control: more bombs, more, more, and
we will be safe.
That is nonsense, just nonsense. We will not be safer.
Instead of doing the hard work of diplomacy, we are being asked to
plow billions of taxpayer dollars into a dangerous fantasy: the so-
called Golden Dome, a missile defense system. We will be safe. We will
build more bombs, and we will stop their bombs.
We are told the system would cost only $175 billion and it will
provide the perfect shield. However, a recent working paper showed that
this system that actually attempts to defend against the full range of
Russia and China will cost as much as $3.6 trillion, a multitrillion-
dollar gap between rhetoric and reality.
So what do we get for that price?
The same report concludes that with this unlimited spending, such a
system will still fail to be 100 percent effective.
Are we prepared to spend trillions of dollars on a shield that cannot
be 100 percent effective?
Oh, well, only if one or two bombs get through, forget about New York
and forget about Washington, D.C. After all, who needs Washington,
D.C.?
We have to be prepared to think differently. We cannot spend
trillions of dollars on a shield that cannot protect us all the while
that we are building more and more bombs so that our adversary will
build more and more bombs and find a way to evade the shield.
They will. We cannot engineer a technological fix for a political
problem. Decades ago we realized the only true shield against nuclear
annihilation is not a Golden Dome. It is the hard, unglamorous work of
a verifiable arms control treaty.
When we forget the lessons of the past, then we are doomed to make
the same mistakes. Luckily, we still have time, a very short time, to
do the hard work of diplomacy instead of resting the fate of our
Nation, in fact, humanity, on the fantasies of fool's gold.
We still have a choice. We can choose to continue down the path of
unconstrained spending and escalation and drift toward a future where
security is based upon a perpetual threat of annihilation, or we can
choose to modernize our thinking rather than just our
[[Page H806]]
weapons. We can prioritize diplomacy over escalation and arms control
over an arms race. In short, we can learn from history.
That is why I am a proud cosponsor of H. Res. 100, authored by our
leader today and support arms control agreements and negotiated
constraints.
This resolution is not just about a treaty. It is about sanity. It is
about reaffirming our commitment to arms control, to oversight, and to
policy based on reason and restraint, not on fear and reflex.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Illinois for organizing this
evening. We have 1 month in which to extend the New START treaty or we
can fall into an arms race. We have choices. We have time, and we have
the power to change.
Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks.
Mr. Speaker, I have to say the gentleman is absolutely right about
the messaging that is surrounding the Golden Dome effort. This is a
system that has never been tested against countermeasures that we know
our adversaries have. For 40 years physicists have been patiently
explaining to Members of Congress and members of the administrations
that systems like this will never work at the reliability level that
they need. For 40 years we have been howling at the wind, I guess,
because we don't have hundreds of billions of dollars to waste on a
system that you can calculate from elementary principles that doesn't
have a chance of working and has failed the majority of times it has
been tried.
For those who have not, please take the time to see a recently
produced movie called ``A House of Dynamite.'' It is a recent one that
actually talks about what a modern nuclear war would look like from the
point of view of the participants who have to make those decisions and
the equipment and provisions they have to aid those decisions.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Beyer).
Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Dr. Foster for gathering us
here to help shine a light on what remains the most serious existential
threat facing our country and our planet. It is too easy to forget in
these days of polycrisis that we are on the brink of a new nuclear arms
race.
Very soon, one of the last remaining pillars of the nuclear arms
control regime, the New START treaty, is due to expire. This treaty
restricted the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and provide some
measure of stability in our bilateral relationship.
Sadly, the Trump administration has failed to do anything to get
ahead of the expiration of New START and has done a lot to raise
nuclear tensions. The President has made threats, endorsed insanely
expensive plans to expand our arsenal, pushed for the resumption of
explosive testing, and advocated for an impractical missile defense
system that will only encourage our adversaries to accelerate their own
weapons program.
I am particularly horrified that the President may choose to ignore
the comprehensive test ban treaty which has given comfort and safety to
the world for two generations.
Meanwhile, Russia has expressed an interest in maintaining New START
restrictions on its stockpile for another year while the terms of a new
treaty can be hashed out, but, unfortunately, the White House has not
responded to their offer, and it has shown no interest in engaging with
China either on nuclear arms reduction, this despite the danger China
is dramatically trying to build up its nuclear arsenal. If ever there
were a time to talk to China, it would be right now.
It is not hard to guess what happens next if nothing changes. Each
side will be adding now weapons to their arsenal for the first time in
decades. We would come back to 10,000 nuclear weapons aimed at the
Soviet Union, 10,000 aimed at us, to 1,500 to 1,800 each.
Now we are going back to that feedback loop that was reminiscent of
the first days of the Cold War. Not only will this cost a tremendous
amount of money and put us on an even more dire fiscal trajectory, it
will ratchet up the very real danger of a nuclear exchange.
{time} 1820
Mr. Speaker, we can already destroy the planet many, many times over
with our own existing nuclear stockpiles. Why on Earth do we need to
spend more of our scarce resources on these incredibly expensive
weapons? We have gone through this cycle before. We were very lucky,
but I am terrified we will not make it through again.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. It has never been partisan.
Republican Presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan to George
W. Bush have all led on arms control agreements.
I have been critical of my own party's approach to nuclear weapons.
The Biden administration, despite campaign promises, refused to adopt a
first-use or no-sole-use nuclear policy.
Currently, the U.S. President can order the launch of hundreds of
nuclear warheads within 15 minutes, with no oversight or even
conversations with the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of Defense,
the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and including Congress. Vesting
this much power in one person, particularly this President, is
irresponsible, dangerous, and unnecessary.
Given our massive conventional military advantages over our
adversaries--think of Venezuela--there is no plausible circumstance
that could justify the use of nuclear weapons to deal with a nonnuclear
threat.
Removing the specter of the U.S. using nuclear weapons first in a
conflict would go a long way toward slowing down this renewed global
arms race. I am so glad to see my colleagues here share my concerns. I
hope we can make a dent in the common sense here in this Congress.
While I have you here, today I voted against a funding measure that
would enshrine the Trump administration's illegal destruction of the
United States Agency for International Development, USAID.
Among the litany of illegal, immoral, and illegitimate acts committed
by this administration, what President Trump and Elon Musk did to USAID
will echo in our history as one of the most evil and pointless
decisions made by this country.
Hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people in the world have
died already because of this decision so far. Their premature and
tragic deaths are the direct moral responsibility of Donald Trump, Elon
Musk, and Marco Rubio. They remind me of the comments of an unnamed
French diplomat speaking of the horrors of World War I: The war I
cannot find it to be so bad. The death of one man, that is a
catastrophe; 100,000 deaths, that is a statistic.
Our global reputation and soft power around the world have suffered
permanent damage. Our ability to fight future global pandemics and
diseases has been crippled, and U.S. farmers have suffered needlessly
on top of the hundreds of public servants who were harassed and thrown
out of their jobs. Beyond the human cost, far from saving the taxpayer
any money, the State Department's own assessments show that shutting
down the agency will cost more than $6 billion.
The whole point of this misguided crusade against starving and sick
children overseas was to find waste, fraud, and abuse that simply did
not exist. This was a case of the very worst of us attacking the very
best of us.
I have heard from hundreds of my constituents, former USAID public
servants, who dedicated their lives to making the world a better place.
Their overwhelming regret is not that they lost their jobs but that the
critical work they did to help the poor, the sick, and the starving has
stopped.
I am sickened by what this administration has done to USAID and to
the world. I will do everything I can to reverse this awful decision.
Mr. Speaker, I thank Dr. Foster for convening us together and for his
leadership.
Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for the many excellent
points he made, one of which was how foolish it would be for the United
States to resume testing of nuclear weapons.
The fact is, the United States has the best database of nuclear test
results of any country on Earth by far. If we resume nuclear testing,
we will, as will all the other nuclear-capable countries on Earth, they
will rub their hands with glee, and soon they will have a dataset of
performance of their weapons that is as good as ours. We have a
tremendous advantage, and this would be a foolish way to give it away.
[[Page H807]]
I now yield to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hoyle).
Ms. HOYLE of Oregon. Mr. Speaker, at a time when global tensions are
rising, the last thing we need is more weapons. That is why it is so
important that the New START treaty, set to expire in 21 days, is
renewed by the administration quickly and in good faith.
The New START treaty reduced the number of nuclear warheads in the
United States and Russia to the lowest level since 1950. This is not
the time to start going in the other direction.
Nuclear risks continue to rise, and when we see countries like Russia
testing their nuclear delivery systems, the danger grows for everyone,
including many Oregonians.
In southern Oregon, the Federal Government rushed to mine uranium in
the 1950s to fuel the Cold War. Two open-pit mines outside Lakeview in
the Fremont National Forest supplied the material that went to the
Hanford site to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
When that rush ended, we were stuck with that contamination. It took
decades for the EPA to declare the mines as Superfund sites, leaving
the land poisoned.
At the Albany Research Center, construction workers built,
maintained, and later tried to clean up the nuclear weapons complex,
often without being told what they were exposed to. Decades later,
workers are still fighting to get screened for cancers and other life-
threatening illnesses caused by their exposure to radiation. Taxpayers
are still paying the price from the arms race.
The Federal Government has paid out more than $27 million to more
than 430 Oregonians who were uranium workers exposed to fallout or
downwind of testing. This is what happens when we forget what nuclear
proliferation cost us.
Yet, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy plan to
spend more than $900 billion over the next decade to modernize our
nuclear arsenal.
The cost of the Sentinel ICBM missile program alone has exploded,
pushing the cost per missile to $161 million, an 81 percent increase
from its original projections. The cost of nuclear acquisition programs
will be 11.8 percent of the Department of Defense's planned acquisition
costs over the next 10 years. Remember, this is an agency that cannot
pass an audit. This is out of control.
We will always find the money for war, but not to take care of our
workers or Tribal partners or to compensate the communities who paid
the price for that last generation of weapons, so we must act in good
faith to ensure an open-ended arms race does not happen.
Nuclear nonproliferation has not been and should not be a partisan
issue. We don't need more weapons. We need more affordable healthcare,
upgrades to our transportation infrastructure, expansion of U.S.
manufacturing capacity, and to focus our taxpayer dollars on things
that benefit the American people and that make our communities safer.
Mr. Speaker, I am happy to work with any of my colleagues to develop
a commonsense approach to limiting our nuclear stockpiles and to keep
this administration from taking us down a costly and destabilizing
path, which is why I am proud to have cosponsored H.R. 100, which,
again, just reiterates my position on nuclear proliferation. I thank
Dr. Foster for all his work.
Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman is absolutely right about
the real costs of restarting the arms race.
As a physicist, I have some guilt, frankly, collective guilt for
physicists about some of the irresponsible things that were done during
the arms race when we said the only thing that was important was to
have better weapons and more weapons than our adversaries, and forget
about the damage that it can inflict on our American soldiers, our
American workers, and the populations downwind.
Mr. Speaker, I now yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr.
McGovern).
Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Illinois, Dr.
Foster, for yielding me the time and for scheduling this hour on this
most important topic.
The threat of nuclear weapons challenges our conscience. It is a
threat not just for Americans, but for all humanity and all species of
life on our planet.
The idea of nuclear conflict isn't an issue that families normally
discuss around the kitchen table, but it is real. It is deadly serious.
It demands our urgent attention. We cannot afford to throw our hands up
and say there is nothing to be done.
The United States can take concrete action today: Extend the New
START treaty. The arc of arms control is one of success led by
Presidents of both parties.
{time} 1830
Forty years ago, there were 70,000 nuclear warheads in inventories
around the world. Today, there are 12,400--far more than we should
have, but it is progress.
Arms control is hard work. It involves technical expertise,
diplomatic skill, and political will. Today, we need all three. That is
because the last control agreement remaining in force between the
United States and Russia expires on February 5, in only 22 days.
The New START treaty limits the number of deployed strategic nuclear
warheads for each party to 1,550, on no more than 700 deployed long-
range missiles and bombers. Extension is common sense for our security.
First, New START promotes stability. With the war in Ukraine,
tensions between the U.S. and Russia are high. Negotiating an extension
offers space within that relationship to lessen tensions.
Second, if not renewed, we risk the possibility that each side will
go beyond the treaty's limit in a misguided pursuit of geopolitical
advantage.
Third, there is no nuclear strategic gain from deploying more
warheads on more delivery vehicles. Our massive, largely invulnerable
nuclear arsenal is more than sufficient for deterrence.
Fourth, increasing our strategic forces might incentivize China to
accelerate its nuclear buildup.
Lastly, it would cause us to funnel billions more taxpayer dollars
into our nuclear arsenal when we should be restoring funding to
healthcare, medical research, and food and nutrition programs here at
home.
Why is it that we always have money for bombs, but when it comes to
helping improve the quality of life for our people, we are told we
can't afford it? It doesn't have to be this way, and both Vladimir
Putin and Donald Trump seem to agree. Both Presidents have spoken
favorably of extending New START.
In September, Putin said: ``Russia is ready to continue to adhere to
the central quantitative restrictions under the START treaty for 1 year
after February 5, 2026,'' if the United States reciprocates. In
response, Trump said: ``Sounds like a good idea to me.''
Here we are, 22 days from expiration. The White House has yet to
reply to the Kremlin's offer. The clock is ticking.
I ask the administration to respond to the Russians today: announce
we will abide by the New START limits, build confidence, and create
time and space for negotiation.
President Trump can be a leader for peace. Last year, he said, from
the Oval Office: ``There is no reason for us to be building brand-new
nuclear weapons. We already have so many. You could destroy the world
50 times over, 100 times over, and here we are, building new nuclear
weapons, and they are building nuclear weapons.''
President Trump, I have to say, you are right. He can join Richard
Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan among the Presidents with major
arms control wins.
Mr. Speaker, as a Member of Congress, I have worked to reduce the
threat of nuclear weapons. With Representative Jill Tokuda of Hawaii, I
introduced H. Res. 317, a resolution that calls on the U.S. Government
to return to the negotiating table on nuclear disarmament and to lead a
global effort to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons.
I have also introduced, with Senator Ed Markey from my State of
Massachusetts, the Hastening Arms Limitation Talks Act of 2025, or the
HALT Act. Our bill outlines a vision for a 21st century freeze on the
testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons.
We never thought there would be a need to revive the nuclear freeze
movement, but here we are.
[[Page H808]]
Let me quote from Michael Klare, an arms control expert at Hampshire
College and a constituent of mine: ``February 6 is likely to bring us
into a new era, not unlike the early years of the Cold War, in which
the major powers will be poised to ramp up their nuclear warfighting
capabilities without any formal restrictions whatsoever. That
comfortable feeling we once enjoyed of relative freedom from an
imminent nuclear holocaust will also then undoubtedly begin to
dissipate. If there is any hope in such a dark prognosis, it might be
that such a reality could, in turn, ignite a worldwide anti-nuclear
movement like the Ban the Bomb campaigns of the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s.''
We have a path out of this. Trump can make good on his statement that
there is no need for new nuclear weapons. He can extend New START
limits on deployed warheads.
For our sanity and for the safety of Americans and all of humanity,
let's make the world less dangerous.
Mr. Speaker, I again thank the gentleman from Illinois for leading
this effort.
Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Massachusetts is
absolutely right. Diplomacy is not a lost cause. There have been some
big wins from diplomacy.
Back when I was younger, the number of countries possessing nuclear
weapons was higher and then decreased. We convinced, through diplomacy,
South Africa to give up their nuclear weapons. At the time of the end
of the Soviet empire, Ukraine possessed the world's third-largest
nuclear weapon inventory, which they voluntarily gave up in return for
a guarantee of territorial integrity--one, unfortunately, which we are
not abiding by.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Takano).
Mr. TAKANO. Mr. Speaker, I thank my esteemed colleague, Dr. Foster,
for yielding, for organizing and hosting this Special Order hour, and
for his leadership on nuclear nonproliferation issues.
In my many years as a Member of Congress, I have watched many a fiery
floor speech filled with overstatement and hyperbole, grandiose
pronouncements laced with exaggeration and puffery, but it is entirely
right and proper to say that the expiration of the New START treaty
will make the world and every inhabitant blessed to live on it less
safe.
Formally, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, otherwise known as
New START, caps U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals and
underpins onsite inspections.
It is the latest in a series of treaties that have reduced the global
nuclear warhead stockpile from a high of 70,000 in the mid-1980s to
roughly 12,000 today.
Now that is meaningful, serious progress, but instead of building on
that progress, we are weeks away from reversing those hard-earned
gains.
On February 5, New START is slated to expire. That expiration will
mean the end to limits or verification of the still-formidable nuclear
arsenals of the United States and Russia.
New START is by no means perfect, but removing these safeguards will
create a vacuum, and we all know nature abhors a vacuum. Without these
limitations, there are fewer constraints, fewer eyes, and fewer brakes
on how Vladimir Putin expands and modernizes Russia's nuclear forces.
In this wilderness, we would see a broader breakdown of norms on
nuclear weapons.
Both the United States and Russia have openly mused about potentially
restarting nuclear weapons testing. After we have worked so hard to
bring some clarity to nuclear weapons regimes, we risk the steady
erosion of the few safeguards against these terrible and awesome
weapons, but the U.S. is not without options or agency.
If this expiration comes to pass, it is because we have allowed it to
happen. Russia has offered to voluntarily maintain the New START limits
for 1 year. We should take that deal not because we trust Vladimir
Putin but because inspections and limits protect us, not him.
Arms control is neither an act of faith nor of naivety. It is an act
of cold logic and discipline, a process that reduces the risk of
miscalculation, escalation, and catastrophic error. The year will not
only keep America and the world safer, but it will also give time to
hammer out a new accord.
As the U.S. sits across the negotiation table, there should be no
illusion. We know that Putin and his cronies in the Kremlin are
adversaries of the United States. They would like nothing more for our
Nation to falter, but they are also self-interested.
Both the United States and Russia benefit from a stable, controlled
nuclear regime. That mutual self-interest lies at the heart of why New
START was signed in the first place. To throw it all away would be a
mistake of immense proportions.
While time is short, we can step away from the edge. I add my voice
to a host of others calling on, pleading for, demanding action from the
Trump administration.
I know the threat of nuclear weapons can often seem so large and
abstract, so unimaginable that it becomes easier just to ignore it all,
but to say nothing is not an option, especially for someone like me.
Many of my family, my distant family, were in Hiroshima on the day
the atom bomb fell. That memory is not just historical. It is personal
for me and my family.
{time} 1840
Mr. Speaker, the atomic bombs of 1945 caused unimaginable horror.
Some died instantly, many over subsequent days and months. Others
suffered for the rest of their lives, afflicted with burns, radiation,
and cancer.
The modern nuclear weapons of today are orders of magnitude more
horrifying. It is incumbent on all of us to ensure that these weapons
are never used again.
New START is a concrete step toward ensuring that future. It is one
where no person--no man, woman, or child--lives under constant threat
from nuclear annihilation.
Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Takano for reminding us of
Hiroshima.
Mr. Speaker, I had the opportunity for the first time in my life to
visit, and the things that stick in your mind are hard to describe.
One of them is they have the steps of--I think it was a bank. Someone
was sitting on the steps, having a meal, when the nuclear weapon went
off overhead. All that remained of that person after his or her entire
body was vaporized was a shadow of where they were sitting on those
steps.
The power of these weapons is not easy to describe. I can calculate
it. The descriptions of the survivors are worth spending a day just
listening to and trying to understand what is at risk here.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Titus).
Ms. TITUS. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Foster for having this
Special Hour on such an important topic.
Mr. Speaker, I have seen the movie ``A House of Dynamite'' as well as
``Oppenheimer'' the previous year, which introduced a lot of people in
the moviegoing world to the development of our first atomic bomb at the
Manhattan Project.
It is very important that we go from popular culture to real history
and talk about this in terms of the destruction that will occur if we
do not continue the New START treaty.
I am a former political science professor. I have taught and written
about the history of nuclear weaponry. I am now a Member of Congress,
representing southern Nevada. A lot of testing is right in our own
backyard. Over the years, I have learned quite a bit about our nuclear
legacy, both good and bad.
Nevada was the focal point of nuclear development throughout the Cold
War. Over four decades, the Nevada test site, which is located about
100 miles north of downtown Las Vegas, hosted over 900 nuclear tests,
more than any other place in the country.
Throughout the 1950s, the visible mushroom clouds often loomed in the
distance. They could be seen from the strip, and they became part of a
tourist attraction there in southern Nevada.
These tests were conducted for a number of reasons. They were to
better understand the power and effects of nuclear weapons, what were
the consequences, how could we make them bigger, and how could we make
them cleaner. All of these things were part of that testing.
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The test site became a real player and had a major role in shaping
our policies, both nationally and internationally, regarding testing
and nonproliferation.
The radiation given off by more than 100 atmospheric tests had
devastating impacts, however. It wasn't a tourist attraction to those
downwinders who were exposed. That fallout caused cancer and premature
deaths for thousands across the West.
That is what prompted me to introduce the PRESUME Act. It would
ensure that radiation-exposed veterans, who did war games there at the
test site, could receive their rightful benefits from the VA.
Furthermore, there were 800 underground tests that sometimes vented,
and radioactive contaminants came out in the air or the water table.
That is a problem we are still dealing with today. Some of you may know
the story of the Baneberry shot.
Last year, the Nevada Legislature passed a resolution urging the
Federal Government to maintain the moratorium on nuclear weapons
testing. That has been in effect since 1992. They cited risk of
environmental damage and also health hazards from what had been caused
by testing before.
My colleagues may remember that in 2020, the first Trump
administration called for a resumption of nuclear testing in the breach
of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Back then, I led the
charge in the FY 2021 NDAA process to ensure that that didn't happen
and that we couldn't resume that testing in the United States.
Pardon my bad French, but ``the more things change, the more they
stay the same''; ``plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.''
On October 29, 2025, just last year, Trump announced that he was
directing the Department of Defense to again resume nuclear testing in
a disastrous policy reversal. It is really not surprising because it is
in Project 2025, which is the policy blueprint of this disastrous
administration.
Just look on page 399, and you will see that Project 2025 calls for
the rejection of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty once again.
It would allow testing here at home but would also give a green light
to other nuclear powers around the world to start doing the same.
This would put us on a disastrous collision course of catastrophic
proportions with Russia and China. It would allow the proliferation of
these weapons to nonnuclear States that seek its development. It would
also put the health of Nevadans once again in jeopardy.
By foolishly announcing his intention to resume nuclear explosives
testing, Trump will trigger a dangerous nuclear arms race that could
blow apart our strategy for the last decades and any kind of nuclear
nonproliferation treaty.
There is no technical national security or political reason for us to
resume nuclear testing. If a power resumes testing because the U.S. is
abandoning the moratorium, those countries will develop new types of
warheads, close the technical and scientific advantage that we have
always had, and be a detriment to our national security.
Furthermore, scientists are already doing groundbreaking experiments
and simulations, as our professor knows. They test the existing
stockpile to make sure it is safe, secure, and reliable. These
subcritical tests are done without an explosion of any kind.
The last time a nuke was tested was 2017 by North Korea. That was a
good while ago, the longest period since 1945 that we have gone without
a nuclear test. Are we really the ones who want to break that record
and start testing again?
For these reasons, I introduced the RESTRAIN Act to prohibit the
resumption of explosive nuclear testing and prevent any funds from
going toward Trump's misguided policy.
Amidst all this nuclear saber-rattling, the New START treaty that we
are here to talk about tonight, which is the last remaining arms
control agreement between the U.S. and Russia, expires in just 21 days.
That treaty caps deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 each and
limits deployed systems for delivery to 700 per side.
Without this treaty in force, there would be no legally binding
limits on the size or composition of the U.S. and Russia strategic
nuclear arsenals. This would be the first time in over half a century.
Without limits, both countries could expand their nuclear forces
without constraint and potentially trigger a renewed arms race
internationally just like we had during the Cold War. Letting that
treaty lapse without a successor closes the door on incremental
progress toward broader, multilateral nuclear arms control.
If President Trump really wants to be the President of peace and
really thinks he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, he would stop invading
and threatening to invade other countries, he would drop the idea of
resuming nuclear testing, and he would make tangible, necessary steps
to prevent New START from expiring, to make sure the catastrophic
consequences of a new nuclear arms race are averted.
Unless there is dramatic action, the world will be a much more
dangerous place after February 4. We cannot let that happen.
Again, I thank Mr. Foster for his time and for allowing me to join
him on this important topic.
Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I have to say Ms. Titus is absolutely right
about the fact that there is no necessity to resume nuclear testing.
We have a very extensive program. It is called the Stockpile
Stewardship Program. Every year or so, the heads of the weapons labs
and the head of NSA have to sign a document to the President that says:
If you push the button, these weapons will detonate at their designed
yields.
The reason they are confident to do that is we have a lot of test
data from the nearly 1,000 tests--many of them took place in Nevada--
and the extensive data we have and the fact that we can then put that
data back into simulation programs to get the right answer.
Mr. Speaker, that tells us that these will work and they will work
with design margin. Even if small things go wrong, the device will
work. That is what our opponents have to know. We don't need to test.
If we decide to use them, they will work.
{time} 1850
It is an important thing to bear in mind, because our adversaries,
many of them, have weapons that they have not tested, and they don't
really know how well they will work. We do because we have some of the
most, I have to say, beautifully designed weapons that I could ever
imagine that could have existed.
Mr. Speaker, as we conclude this Special Order hour, it is important
to restate a fundamental reality that nuclear weapons remain one of the
greatest existential threats facing humanity. For more than a half of a
century, the United States has worked across administrations and across
party lines to reduce the risk that those weapons will ever be used.
Arms control agreements like New START have been central to that
effort, providing real, enforceable, and verifiable limits on the
world's most destructive arsenals. The extension of New START is set to
expire, and with it goes the last remaining treaty that limits and
monitors the world's two largest nuclear arsenals.
As New START expires without a successor, we would lose onsite
inspections, data exchanges, and mutual visibility into the Russian
nuclear forces. That loss does not make the United States safer or
stronger. It increases uncertainty. It fuels worst-case assumptions and
raises the risk of a dangerous miscalculation.
That is why I am proud to be leading H. Res. 100, which calls on both
Russia and the United States to continue abiding by the numerical
limits set under New START, even in the absence of a successor treaty.
I thank the 24 Members of the House, several of whom spoke here
tonight, who have cosponsored that resolution. Maintaining those limits
are an essential step to preserve strategic stability while we work on
future arms control.
I thank the many organizations and nonprofits who helped drive
interest in this Special Order hour and who work every day to reduce
nuclear risk. Those organizations play a vital role in public
education, policy development, and maintaining dialogue during times
when official channels are strained or closed.
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Finally, I thank all of my colleagues who joined me tonight in this
Special Order hour. Preventing nuclear war has never been a partisan
goal, and history shows that bipartisan cooperation is not just
possible, but it is necessary. The choices that we make in the coming
months will shape global security for decades to come, so I urge all of
my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to recommit to arms control,
to verification, and to the hard work of reducing nuclear risk.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to refrain from
engaging in personalities toward the President.
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