The Increasing Threat of Nuclear Weapons

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I stand with my colleagues today to help raise the alarm about our unsustainable and reckless nuclear posture. Sadly, we have come a long way in the wrong direction since Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev pledged to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Many of my friends in this Chamber, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle, speak passionately and eloquently about our fiscal trajectory and the rising national debt. I share their concerns and believe we need to be clear-eyed about the scale of the increasingly serious debt problem and we must seriously consider the merits of additional spending in a difficult fiscal environment.

Yet, many seem to forget this issue when it comes to the larger defense budget and, specifically, our nuclear weapons modernization program.

The CBO estimates that it will cost us over $1.5 trillion over the next 30 years and $800 billion over the next 10 years. Please remember that our current estimates in defense costs are always wrong, and they are always wrong on the low side. We always underestimate significantly, sometimes dramatically.

Mr. Speaker, while I appreciate the need for nuclear deterrence, particularly with Russian saber-rattling and an expanding Chinese nuclear arsenal, our spending priorities and nuclear strategy are becoming divorced from reality, a reality of scarce resources and a variety of competing national security priorities.

We are on track in the next NDAA to authorize billions of additional dollars in spending on a host of unnecessary nuclear programs that have, at best, a marginal benefit to our national security and, at worst, destabilize the fragile peace we have today.

For example, the measure being negotiated would likely have us continue to pour billions of dollars into a new nuclear sea-launched cruise missile program, which is a costly solution to a nonexistent problem. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Russia or China would be any more deterred from using nuclear weapons if we were able to field yet another low-yield weapon. We already deploy a vast array of such weapons.

The reality is that our current nuclear arsenal presents more than enough of a deterrent to our adversaries, and we simply do not have the resources to spend lavishly on redundant nuclear weapons systems while also maintaining and modernizing our conventional military capabilities.

I am deeply concerned that, while we continue to overspend on our nuclear arsenal, we are neglecting to engage in meaningful nuclear disarmament diplomacy on the international stage, which is the only real way to safeguard the country and the world from the horrors of nuclear war.

I applaud the Biden administration for offering last year to discuss, without preconditions, a new nuclear arms control framework with Russia and a separate bilateral nuclear risk reduction arrangement with China, but we need to do more in Congress to support these efforts and encourage the next administration to carry the torch.

At the very least, before the expiration of the New START Treaty in 2026, the U.S. should propose to Russia that both sides maintain the current limits of the numbers of deployed strategic nuclear weapons until a more comprehensive agreement can be reached.

Looking ahead, the cornerstone of future arms nuclear talks should be the adoption of a no first-use policy when it comes to our own nuclear arsenal. Currently, the U.S. President has the ability to order the launch of hundreds of nuclear warheads within 15 minutes with no oversight or input required from anyone else, including Congress. Vesting this much power into one person, Democrat or Republican, is irresponsible, dangerous, and unnecessary.

Given our massive conventional military advantages over our adversaries, there is no plausible circumstance that could justify the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a nonnuclear threat.

Removing the specter of U.S. nuclear weapons first in a conflict would be an important first step toward increasing strategic stability and slowing down or stopping the global race to develop new nuclear capabilities and advanced conventional-strike weapons.

In an increasingly unstable word, it is incumbent on all of us to reduce the existential risk of nuclear war in every way we can. Let me explain my use of the term ``existential.'' It is about actual existence.

While we fret over who won or lost in a given election, we must not forget that the real danger and the real challenge is the continuation of humanity itself. Will we live as a species, or will we die? That is the simple question before us.

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