Expressing support for the continued value of arms control agreements and negotiated constraints on Russian and Chinese strategic nuclear forces.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address one of the most serious issues of our time, the risk of conflict with nuclear weapons. It is a threat that challenges our conscience. It is a threat not just for Americans but for all humanity. It is a threat not just to humans, but to all species of life on our planet.

We raise this issue in the context of a series of important anniversaries. One week ago, July 16 marked the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon in New Mexico. We still live with the legacy of above-ground nuclear tests.

Two years ago, the Defense Department awarded the Atomic Veterans Commemorative Service Medal to the still-surviving veterans of that era and their family members.

We must also honor the downwinders, civilians whose health and land suffered from the effects of radiation from these tests. Many were in the State of Nevada. In addition, we cannot forget the Pacific Islanders who have not been able to return to their home islands or the Uyghurs and others whose homeland in Xinjiang was the location of China's nuclear tests. They, too, have suffered long-term health consequences.

In 2 weeks, we will commemorate the first use of a nuclear weapon in a conflict--and that was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945--and the second, the bombing of Nagasaki, on August 9. Let us pray that Nagasaki will be the last. Let us work to make sure that it is.

Sadly, the threat from nuclear weapons is only increasing. There are estimated to be 13,400 nuclear weapons in the world today. Some 90 percent of these are in the arsenals of the United States and Russia. The rest belong to the U.K., France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine and even against NATO nations. North Korea uses its nuclear weapons program to intimidate the United States, Japan, and Korea. China continues to build up its nuclear arsenal. It has some 600 warheads today and is expected to pass 1,000 by 2030, according to the Pentagon.

The question of Iran's nuclear program has been at the top of our concerns. The military strikes by Israel and the United States were, as stated, designed to degrade or eliminate Iran's nuclear development capabilities. However, as The Washington Post reported last week, U.S. intelligence agencies assess that only one of Iran's three principal nuclear facilities was destroyed by the U.S. attacks. This tells us that military action is not a reliable way to counter nuclear threats. In 80 years of the nuclear era, the only proven, demonstrated way to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict and to lessen the scale of its destruction is through diplomacy and negotiations.

If not for past arms control agreements, Mr. Speaker, today's arsenals would be larger and more dangerous. If not for limitation on above-ground and atmospheric testing, many more people would suffer from radiation and contamination.

However, our challenge is made harder by the fact that there is only one arms control agreement remaining in force between the United States and Russia. The New START Treaty limits the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads for each party to 1,550. The treaty expires in February 2026. There are scant signs that either government is interested in extending it.

President Donald Trump can and should take forward steps on nuclear arms control. He can follow in the footsteps of other Republican Presidents. President Eisenhower, in his ``Atoms for Peace'' speech, expressed the moral imperative to warn Americans and the

world of the destructiveness of atomic weapons.

President Reagan in his second term negotiated the INF Treaty with the Soviets. He spoke privately with Gorbachev about the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Earlier this year, President Trump 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're building nuclear weapons.''

He added: ``We're all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully much more productive.''

On this point, Mr. Speaker, President Trump is right. President Trump has the opportunity to make nuclear threat reduction a part of his legacy.

As a smart first step, he and Putin can strike a deal to respect New START's central limits and set the stage for a more comprehensive nuclear arms control framework agreement.

Next, President Trump can put nuclear weapons on the agenda when he meets with Xi Jinping. He expressed a willingness to do this in his Oval Office comments.

Even talking about negotiations in itself can help reduce tensions. A deal requires a first step, and I encourage the President to take it and to take it soon.

We, in Congress, can use our voice. Along with our colleague, the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Ms. Tokuda), I am the proud sponsor of 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. It reaffirms our country's moral and strategic obligation to prevent nuclear war and pursue a world free of nuclear weapons as a national security imperative.

This call is in the spirit of Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan and Presidents Carter and Obama, and we hope President Trump. I am pleased to report that Senators Markey, Merkley, Sanders, Welch, and Van Hollen have all introduced a version of our resolution. I urge the foreign policy committees of both bodies to consider these resolutions promptly.

Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, activity in House committees is taking us in the wrong direction. Last week, the Appropriations Committee approved an energy and water bill that cuts the National Nuclear Security Administration's Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account by $412 million. That is 17 percent. These activities help the U.S. stop the spread of nuclear weapons, detect hidden nuclear activities, and support arms control efforts. Why would anybody think it is a good idea to cut that account?

Also last week, the Armed Services Committee approved the National Defense Authorization Act. It authorizes $62 billion for the nuclear enterprise, which represents a 26 percent increase over President Biden's request last year. Unfortunately, the Committee rejected an amendment by the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi) to restrict funding to create a new land-based nuclear delivery system, the Sentinel missile, a $180 billion boondoggle he has called an endless money pit.

The threat of nuclear war is an existential one. We have a moral imperative to address it and address it urgently. Debates over the utility and morality of nuclear weapons are as old as the nuclear age. Notably, many of the people who helped make atomic weapons turned out to be some of the most powerful voices against their use and for the reduction in their arsenals.

Mr. Speaker, 2 years ago this week, the film ``Oppenheimer'' premiered. It told the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who helped create the atomic bomb but then pushed against the development of more powerful weapons. For that position of moral courage, he paid a political price.

Mr. Speaker, 2 months ago, Dr. Richard Garwin passed away at the age of 97. He is best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb. Less widely known is that he spent decades working tirelessly in arms control and disarmament, as well as scientific panels, conferences, and government boards.

In a 2018 interview, Dr. Garwin said: ``There is a myth, and you saw it operate many times in the past, that if there is a perceived security problem, well, no difficulty, we will just buy more nuclear weapons. But that doesn't improve our security. What we want is less nuclear weapons and less cause for using them on the other side.''

When I was a staffer for the late Congressman Joe Moakley in the 1980s, I recall going to hear Dr. Garwin and Dr. Carl Sagan give a talk on nuclear weapons and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Dr. Sagan, of course, is the physicist who helped us understand the idea of a nuclear winter, which is the hemisphere-wide Dark Age caused by the radioactive ash sent into the atmosphere following multiple nuclear detonations. It would wipe out food supplies and cause untold deaths from starvation, even beyond the millions killed by the blasts.

For us today, the dynamic Dr. Garwin identifies isn't in the past. It is in the present. Our inboxes are full of policymakers expressing fears about the growth of China's nuclear arsenal or Vladimir Putin's intentions or Iran's plans.

Too often, policymakers have a reflexive response. They are building more. Then we should build more. Mr. Speaker, this is so shortsighted. It is a dangerous reaction. It is very, very dangerous. We know firsthand the harm that such devastating weapons can have.

On the 80th anniversaries, people of many generations will gather at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Very few survivors of those atomic bombings remain with us, but their stories endure. The disturbing photos of the burns and the radiation sickness endure.

In those cities, those gathered will recommit to preserving the memory of the destruction, and to plead with current and future generations to work to ensure that such horrors never ever, ever happen again.

Mr. Speaker, I regret I cannot be with them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is why I have organized this Special Order on the House floor today so that Members can share their message from the floor of the House.

To our colleagues, to the President, and to the American people, this is a crucial moment in world history. We have a moral responsibility to speak out and to do more.

When we return to Washington after the anniversaries and after the August break, let us commit to raising more awareness. Let us commit to more congressional hearings and more debate on the floor. Let us commit to more encouragement for scientists, civil society, and regular citizens to raise their voices. Let us commit to legislation to contain the growth of nuclear weapons. Let us commit ourselves to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Foster).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Foster) for his thoughtful remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Ms. Tokuda).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Ms. Omar).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her remarks. We are living in a time when there is great polarization in our politics, but the issue that we are talking about here today is how to bring Democrats and Republicans together, because as Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives we do have a mutual interest in survival. If nuclear weapons are ever used in this current day, then nobody wins.

What we are talking about is the salvation or the destruction of our civilization from nuclear death. The stakes could not be higher, and yet what is shocking to many of us is the lack of urgency and the lack of attention to this subject.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Tlaib).

Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Tlaib and all of my colleagues who have been here today because this is the most important issue, quite frankly, facing our planet.

Mr. Speaker, we can never ignore the fact that behind the conference room discussions about the utility of nuclear weapons, behind the corporate lobbying for nuclear modernization spending, this is a story of human suffering.

The Nobel Committee awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the organization Nihon Hidankyo for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.

Nihon Hidankyo is a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors form Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 2 weeks, members of this organization along with activists and citizens from Japan and around the world will gather in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings. They will amplify this clear and existential message: that nuclear weapons must never ever be used again.

This organization keeps alive the testimony of the ``survivors''; ``Hibakusha'' of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are the witnesses to the indescribable, the unthinkable, the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons.

Nihon Hidankyo highlights the nuclear taboo, the concept that nuclear weapons should never be used, an idea that is under threat from the growth in nuclear arsenals around the world.

Among the organization's aims is an international treaty for nuclear disarmament. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, was adopted on July 7, 2017, and entered into force on January 22, 2021. It is the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal being their total elimination. Mr. Speaker, 73 nations are party to the treaty. The United States is not. Neither are the other eight nuclear powers.

We won't get there overnight, but we should not abandon the goal. My resolution, coauthored with the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Ms. Tokuda), H. Res. 317, calls for good faith negotiations with the other eight nuclear arms states to halt any further buildup of nuclear arsenals and to aggressively pursue a verifiable and irreversible agreement or agreements to verifiably reduce and eliminate their nuclear arsenals according to a negotiated timetable. I encourage my colleagues to support this resolution and join us in our efforts.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his eloquent remarks. There is so much more that needs to be said, yet our time is coming to a close.

Let me end by saying that when I was in college in the late 1970s, I interned for Senator George McGovern, no relation, but a leader on arms control issues. I was able to accompany him to a debate with William F. Buckley at Yale University titled ``Resolved: That the SALT Talks Are in the Interests of U.S. National Security.'' Of course, the SALT talks were the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.

George McGovern closed the debate--and I remember this like it was yesterday--I thought very powerfully. He said that he recalls that when he was a young Senator in 1963, they were debating the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and Senator Everett Dirksen, who was the Republican Senate minority leader at the time, ``took to the floor to close the debate. He said that he had just reread John Hersey's `Hiroshima,' the description of what happened to that great city, the morning after--the scene of one family sitting charred around the breakfast table; out in the yard, bits and pieces of children's clothing; the broken arm of a doll; toys and debris scattered over the landscape. And he said: `I thought about that scene, and I said that someday Everett Dirksen will be buried in Illinois, and when that happens, I don't want them to put on my gravestone: `He knew about this, and he didn't care.' ''

Mr. Speaker, we all know the realities of nuclear weapons and their devastation, and the fact that if they were ever used, it would result in the total annihilation of our planet.

The question for all of us is: Are we going to do anything about it?

I said earlier that one of the most troubling factors in this whole topic is the lack of urgency here in Congress. We don't talk about this. We are not pushing for arms control. We are not setting goals for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. Instead, we are, just out of habit, voting in favor of military budgets that contribute to the problem.

I think, at this moment, as we approach the 80th anniversaries of these horrible events, this is a time for us to step up and to do something before it is too late.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to commemorate and have moments of silence to remind their constituencies of the anniversaries of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I urge them to join with us in a bipartisan way in doing something about it.

George McGovern ended his debate with William Buckley at Yale by saying this: ``Many years ago, in ancient wisdom, it was said: I have set before thee two choices, life or death. Therefore, choose life that thee and thy seed may live.''

Mr. Speaker, that is the choice I want the United States to make at this moment. I hope that we are up to the task, and I hope that we don't just continue to ignore the perils of nuclear warfare.

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

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 the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern) for holding this Special Hour to discuss the dangers of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Speaker, when I first entered Congress, I was the third Ph.D. physicist elected to this body. We had at the time Vern Ehlers, a nuclear physicist and a conservative, religious Republican representing western Michigan.

We had Rush Holt, a plasma fusion physicist, a progressive Democrat representing Princeton.

We had me, a sort of garden-variety Democrat who spent the last 25 years smashing protons and antiprotons together to make particles that have not been around since the big bang.

Although our politics were quite different, we were united by a special responsibility to join the discussion about nuclear weapons and ask what we could do to strengthen global nuclear security and maintain U.S. leadership in trying to prevent nuclear war.

One area where we were always in violent agreement was to stop wasting money on Star Wars, which was then rebranded as the SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and has now been rebranded Golden Dome.

For more than 45 years, scientists have been patiently explaining to policymakers that this is never going to work. It is easy to overwhelm with a trivial response to it.

We have spent over $200 billion on it. We have never tested it once against the kind of countermeasures that we know any competent opponent would deploy. Even if we succeed at stopping ballistic missiles, there are, unfortunately, many other ways to deliver nuclear weapons that we can never stop.

This thing is deeply--I guess ``stupid'' is not too strong a word. We explain something to someone in a variety of terms again and again, and they don't want to hear it because they think it messages so well.

Wouldn't it be great if we had this magic Golden Dome, or whatever we want to call it, to stop nuclear weapons? Yeah, it would be great.

If it is an impossibility to do the fundamental physics of it, then we should stop talking about it, and we should certainly stop wasting money on it.

Another place where we were always in strong agreement was how we should be strengthening the nonproliferation efforts at our national laboratories.

Our national labs create an underlying foundation for all of our nuclear security efforts including the nonproliferation and national security priorities that we are talking about here today. In order to ensure that current and future arms control efforts are properly fulfilling their mission, we have to invest in our scientific workforce to maintain our leadership and verification efforts.

It is certainly not well-known among Members of Congress, but when the IAEA sends inspectors into Iran and into countries of concern, those have been largely trained by the national labs in the United States. When we gut the nonproliferation capacities of our national labs or simply allow them to retire, as has been happening, we risk putting aside one of the most powerful tools we have to actually enforce any deal that we may get.

The President is very fond of talking about this deal he is going to get on Iran nuclear. We listened to him talk about how he was going to get North Korea. I support efforts to try to do that.

If we ever succeed in getting one of these deals, for sure we are going to need to have experts we trust that can go in there and make sure nobody is cheating. Unfortunately, what we are seeing is the gutting of those budgets in that capacity. I guess it doesn't satisfy the MAGA worldview.

Over the years, I have focused my attention on a few specific areas to strengthen our nuclear security architecture. One of them is what is called nuclear--well, it has a number of names. If for some reason a nuclear weapon is detonated somewhere in the United States or anywhere around the world, the President will come under huge pressure to say: Who did that? Whose weapon was it?

There is a lot of very detailed knowledge that we have had in the past in our national labs to be able to go in there and do what is called nuclear forensics and find out whether that was a bomb from X, Y, or Z. That capacity has been under duress for a long time. It seems like it is every single time the appropriations budgets come up, we end up having to try to defend that.

That is something that is completely irrelevant until it is the most important question in the world. Who did that? Who let off this nuclear weapon? How do we make sure we don't retaliate against the wrong person or entity that did that?

There are a number of other things I have been working on. First and foremost is H. Res. 100. It is a resolution I introduced in the House with 19 other Members. It supports arms control and condemns Russia's purported suspension of its participation in the New START Treaty.

The current extension of the New START Treaty is set to expire in under a year, and anyone who remembers previous arms control negotiations will know that there is almost no time left to negotiate a subsequent treaty.

Additionally, any negotiations, whether with Russia, China, or any other country, will require partners who are willing to have discussions on arms control, which is something that is far easier said than done.

This is not something where the two great men leading great nations can come together and strike a deal. The details matter. We have to have technical experts that we trust to go deep down into the weeds to have an agreement so they can come back and say this is a solid agreement we can trust.

It is a time when traditional channels of dialogue on arms control and strategic stability have been closed or quiet, and we are going to rely more than ever on keeping alternative channels open and keeping the expertise in place. Then when the time comes for these agreements, we have people we trust who can carry them out.

Mr. Speaker, nongovernmental organizations, scientists, and research institutions have kept this dialogue open even during the worst parts of the Cold War, and we are going to need to rely on them to fulfill these roles again.

Another crucial institution that we must continue to support in these times is the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. We have already seen the incredibly hard work that Director General Grossi and his staff are putting in to responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with its many nuclear reactors and the myriad of other crises on their doorstep.

Mr. Speaker, that brings us to Iran. One of the proudest moments in my career was standing alongside Dr. Richard Garwin, who, as Representative McGovern mentioned, was often pointed to as the father of the hydrogen bomb and a strong advocate for nuclear nonproliferation. He stood by my side, along with Energy Secretary Dr. Ernest Moniz, as I announced my support for the Iran nuclear deal.

One of the tragedies of the recent past has been this President's abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, which has gotten us into a heck of a pickle, as predicted by the people who actually understood what our true options were in that negotiation.

After the U.S. bombing of Iran, there has been an immense amount of debate about whether or not Iran's nuclear program was set back by a certain amount of time, whether it is years or whatever. The level of technical ignorance that has been displayed by this administration is, frankly, frightening. They have access to the best weapons designers in the world, and they are either not listening to them or not asking questions.

When you hear Secretary Rubio, for example, saying not to worry about their 60 percent enriched uranium inventory because they are going to have to convert it to metal and that will take years, anyone with knowledge of the history of the Manhattan Project knows that is not a major activity. Iran has done it for a long time. They know how to do it.

If you are only interested in converting from uranium hexafluoride to metal, a few tens of kilograms, which is what you need for your first set of weapons, this happens in a laboratory. It can happen in a congressional office. You don't need a big space for this.

The conversion of the uranium hexafluoride to what is called green salt, and the green salt to metal, is something that happens in a small industrial building. It can happen anywhere in any city in Iran, and it will be really hard to tell. We have not prevented them from doing what they have to do.

The enrichment level is another thing where we are seeing, frankly, technically ignorant statements made. We have three levels of uranium. Less than 20 percent is generally regarded as relatively safe and can be used in reactors without a lot of safeguards. When you get about 90 percent enriched uranium, that is the good stuff for really high- performance weapons.

What about in between? They have 60 percent uranium. Guess what? That is not weapons-grade, but it is weapons-usable. For example, the Hiroshima bomb was made with a mixture of 50 percent enriched uranium and higher enriched uranium.

The 60 percent enriched uranium that Iran has a significant inventory of is perfectly usable even for a simple Hiroshima-style gun-type device. Our leadership speaks in apparent ignorance of that fact, beating their chest and saying we set them back by decades, when that is not the case.

Just to give a sense of the scale, the 400 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride that the IAEA watched them enrich to 60 percent is stored conventionally in the United States in about 25 scuba tank-sized pressurized containers. Any five of those containers have enough uranium to make a Hiroshima-style nuclear weapon.

These things are not hard to smuggle. We will have a hard time convincing ourselves, in fact, that the Iranians haven't already done it.

Pretending like Iran does not have a credible threat and has no leverage is a dangerous and ignorant position for our government to be taking and one of the scariest things about the many threats that we face right now.

Those who don't know should go look at the Wikipedia article on the Hiroshima Little Boy bomb and the references in it. It is, unfortunately, very well-documented over the years because it is not the best weapon you can make, by far. You can make much more complex and efficient weapons, but the Iranians don't have to do that.

If they simply want to replicate what was done, they would get an old 155-millimeter howitzer, replace the explosive shell with some enriched--60 percent enriched will work just fine--uranium, shoot it into the right-shaped target, and they have something that is as effective as the Hiroshima weapon.

This is not a trivial risk. The only answer to this is negotiations, and we have to get very serious about that.

It is not something that the Iranians even have to test. We did not test the Hiroshima weapon. It was obviously going to work. The physics hasn't changed in the 80 years since then, so we are at a very uncertain position on that, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

We have also recently been hearing a lot of calls about the resumption of nuclear testing. This is particularly worrying because the move away from nuclear testing has been really one of the cornerstone successes of nonproliferation and nuclear security.

Just think of all the attention Donald Trump could get by giving the order that he wants to blow up a nuclear weapon just to make sure it works, or whatever it is. Yes, he would get a lot of attention that way.

Our country has a tremendous amount to lose if everyone begins nuclear testing again. The U.S., during the Cold War, conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests, far more than any other country, and we had much better instrumentation, knowing exactly what happened in those explosions.

The knowledge that we gained has allowed our Nation to maintain the safety, security, and effectiveness of our nuclear stockpile without any further testing. If we were to resume testing, the rest of the world would resume testing. I am sure they all have bomb designers that are just champing at the bit to get more data on exactly what happens if they explode one of their untested weapons.

If we do this, we would be giving away the most significant strategic advantage that our country has, which is this huge database of exactly what works and what does not work in detailed and very technologically aggressive designs for our nuclear weapons.

If we open that Pandora's box, every country that is nuclear-capable will say this is their opportunity to become coequal with the United States in knowledge of nuclear weapons. That will be yet another disaster for the proliferation regime.

The next few years are going to be crucial to making sure that the world we live in remains safe from the threat of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative McGovern for bringing us together to discuss this.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the ranking member of the Rules Committee, Mr. McGovern, for yielding. I thank him and the CPC for organizing this very important Special Order hour.

Next month marks 80 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were the only times nuclear weapons have ever been used in war.

I have to say that this memorial, this memory, this 80th anniversary milestone is not just historical, it is somewhat personal and unexpectedly so, say, beginning in 2001, 2002 when at the age of 40, 41 I made my first visit to Japan.

I grew up as an American, a Japanese American. One of my grandparents, my only grandparent, my grandfather, Isao Takano, immigrated to the United States around 1916. He was born in 1898 in Japan, and he came from the environs of Hiroshima.

Growing up, we would go to his niece, my second cousin or I don't know how to kind of appropriate the right sort of familial designation of who is a cousin, a second cousin, but Kikue Takagi was my grandfather's niece who married an American and lived in Anaheim and worked at Disneyland.

We knew some facts, but we never in our times when we would get together for our family gatherings would we ever discuss what happened in Hiroshima. It wasn't until I was well into my adulthood on my first trip to Japan visiting Hiroshima and visiting Kikue, who was there taking care of her mother, that I learned that she was a ``survivor''; ``Hibakusha,'' that is the Japanese word for survivor, of the atom bomb.

She lived in the outskirts of Hiroshima. If you have been there, it is mountainous. It is a place, a delta, with five different rivers converging, and she lived in the outskirts. She was a middle school student. On the day that the bomb dropped, she was still ill, so much so that her mother said she didn't need to go into the city center to do her public service work. The middle schoolchildren were needed to clean up the debris of the area around the downtown of Hiroshima. They were doing an urban renewal project to widen the streets.

They knew, the people of Hiroshima, the political class knew that Hiroshima was a target because it was an industrial city. But little did they know that the teachers, the middle schoolteachers and the 13- year-olds who were there at the city center doing this public service work were all going to perish that day. My cousin survived because she stayed home at the behest of her mother.

She had not visited any of the memorials until I had arrived in the early 2000s. And I felt a tinge of guilt for asking her to do this because she had never really sort of delved into this history by visiting the memorial museum.

Riding over the bridge of one of the rivers to the museum the day that Kikue and I decided to go, she told me about how the river was not visible during the day that the bomb was dropped and the days afterward because of the number of bodies that just covered the surface of that water.

When you arrive at the memorial location, you can see bottles of water that many people who attend these memorials will leave for the thirsty souls of those who perished and those who were thirsty from the August heat.

I feel a deep obligation and responsibility to carry this memory forward. I remember as I crossed the bridge thinking to myself how I was personally connected by family to this historical event, that it was not something abstract. It was a moment that who I was, my identity, somewhat shifted and changed.

More than 200,000 people were killed, most of them civilians. Some died instantly. Others suffered for months or years from burns, radiation, and grief.

Mr. Speaker, 80 years after the erasure of two cities we have still not learned the lessons of these terrible bombings.

There are an estimated 13,400 nuclear warheads on Earth today. The United States and Russia hold more than 90 percent of them. Together, we control more than 12,000 warheads, and that is more than enough to end human civilization. While the United States and Russia maintain the largest stockpiles, China is rapidly building.

According to the Department of Defense, China's arsenal already has 500 operational warheads, and if current trends continue, it could surpass 1,000 by the year 2030.

This growth adds to global instability and makes the case for urgent diplomacy and arms control even stronger. Yet, the most important arms control treaty still in force between the United States and Russia is set to expire in less than 200 days.

If we let the New START Treaty expire, we will be left with no legal limits on the size of the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. At the same time, we are seeing headlines about strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.

These actions revive a dangerous question: Can we stop the spread of nuclear weapons through military force? I believe the answer is no. We cannot destroy knowledge with a bomb. We cannot erase a nuclear program by targeting one facility.

Strikes might delay a program, but they almost always provoke retaliation and harden resolve. They do nothing to build the kind of long-term trust and transparency that actually reduces nuclear risk.

That is why we need a strategy based on diplomacy, prevention, and protection. We know that this strategy can work because it did in the past. Iran's nuclear weapons program development ground to a halt under the Iran nuclear deal. It was only after President Trump ripped up the accord that Iran set itself on the pathway that it is on today.

The recent strikes reinforce the military theocracy's paranoia that the only pathway to secure the regime's long-term survival is through the development of a nuclear program. Like I said before, if a nation has enough willpower and know-how, they will develop a nuclear weapon. That means that the United States' national security cannot solely rest on deterrence. We should lead by example.

That means modernizing verification tools, supporting the international inspectors, and investing in the diplomatic capacity to negotiate real agreements. It also means rethinking how we can make decisions about the use of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Speaker, Congress has a role to play. We cannot stay silent while the risks grow and the guardrails fall away. The American people deserve transparency about how nuclear launch decisions are made and who is involved in making them. This is not just a matter of policy. It is a matter of survival.

Mr. Speaker, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not mere tragedies. They were warnings. The people who died there cannot speak for themselves, but we can speak for the future they were denied. We can choose a path that avoids repeating the worst mistake in human history.

Let us honor the lives lost not only with remembrance but with responsibility. Let's choose diplomacy over destruction, prevention over provocation, and peace over peril.

Let me return back to that scene of riding over that bridge over the river with my cousin Kikue and the thought that I had that every world leader who has some control over a nuclear arsenal should make a commitment to visit Hiroshima, to walk the grounds and understand what happened there and in Nagasaki. I think that is the only way that one has the moral stature and authority to be a leader of a country that has a nuclear arsenal.

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.