Protect the Gig Economy Act of 2025

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.

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.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi).

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. 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).

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. 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. 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).

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.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.