EXPIRATION OF NEW START

On 2026-01-14, Representative John Garamendi (D-CA-8) delivered a floor speech titled "EXPIRATION OF NEW START" in the House. The speech addressed immigration and also covered taxes, the environment. It referenced legislation including HR100, HRES100, HRES317.

EXPIRATION OF NEW START

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 10 (Wednesday, January 14, 2026) [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 

Referenced legislation: HRES100, HR100, HRES317