Lawmakers over the past week filed a pair of bills to prop up the U.S.-Russian New START arms-control treaty, one of which aims to unite Congress in support of the bilateral pact, the other aiming to bind the U.S. to the treaty’s nuclear weapons limits even if Washington and Moscow do not extend the deal past 2021.
The more recent of the two bills came Wednesday from Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chair and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The measure would, if signed by President Donald Trump, make it the sense of Congress that the U.S. and Russia should extend New START. Sense of Congress declarations are not legally binding.
Engel and McCaul’s bipartisan proposal followed a stricter bill introduced in the Senate May 3 by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) without a Republican co-sponsor. Markey’s proposal would codify New START limits primarily by prohibiting funding for nuclear deployments above treaty limits. That provision of the notedly anti-nuclear Markey’s bill would apply only if Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin do not extend New START into 2026.
New START took effect in 2011 during the Barack Obama administration and will expire Feb. 5, 2021, unless the U.S. and Russian presidents exercise the treaty’s five-year extension. The pact limits each nation to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on 700 fielded intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines, and heavy bomber aircraft.
The recent New START measures would require the Trump administration to certify that letting the treaty lapse is in the U.S. national interest, and require the director of national intelligence to provide an unclassified explanation of how a treaty vacuum would affect the U.S.’ ability to gather intelligence about Russian nuclear weapons. The bills would also make the administration explain why no treaty is better than five more years of New START.
Both pieces of legislation also would require the Defense and State departments to regularly brief Congress on the White House’s nuclear-arms negotiations with Russia. The House bill, no more than 60 days after it is signed, would require briefings every 180 days until New START expires or is extended. The Markey bill would require briefings every 180 days until treaty extension or expiration, starting no more than 90 days after the proposal becomes law.
The Engel-McCaul bill does not mention Department of Energy, but the Markey legislation would put the the U.S. civilian nuclear-weapon steward on the hook to provide, no more than 90 days after the bill becomes law, a 10-year cost estimate for a “a nuclear sustainment and modernization plan that does and does not anticipate the continued existence of the New START Treaty, including uploading warheads previously withdrawn from service.”
House and Senate lawmakers from both parties have praised New START this year, but Congress has no formal role in extending the treaty. If lawmakers want New START extended, they will have to convince Trump to do it through either negotiations or legislative pressure.
Even in the face of questioning last year by the leadership of the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees, the Trump administration has been non-committal about sustaining New START.
Trump himself said last week that he favors a trilateral nuclear-arms-control agreement binding the U.S., Russia, and China over a bilateral agreement with Moscow. The Chinese Foreign Ministry quickly said it would not negotiate such a treaty, prompting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week to declare that a three-way accord might be “too ambitious in the short term.”
The two New START bills appeared within days of the passing of former Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and former U.S. Representative and State Department negotiator Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.): arms-control advocates who were born a generation apart, died within days of one another, and in between helped make New START the law of the land.
The Engel-McCaul bill pays homage to the pair with its short title, the “Richard G. Lugar and Ellen O. Tauscher Act to Maintain Limits on Russian Nuclear Forces.”
