Expiration of New Start
Floor Speech
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
I now yield to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hoyle).
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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).
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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.
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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.
Titus).
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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.
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.
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.
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