Expiration of New Start

Floor Speech

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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.

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 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.

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