The U.S. Congress would be officially in favor of extending the New START nuclear-arms-control treaty, if bipartisan legislation introduced Wednesday in the House becomes law.
The bill from Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chair and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, 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, and in any case Congress has no further legal role to play in New START. Only the White House and the Kremlin can decide whether to enact the five-year extension allowed by the treaty past its current expiration in February 2021.
Like a Senate bill introduced last week, the Engel-McCaul bill would require the director of national intelligence to give Congress an unclassified report on the national security consequences of withdrawing from New START. The report, due 180 days after the bill becomes law, would have to contain the intelligence community’s strategy for estimating the size of Russian nuclear forces if New START’s inspection regime becomes unavailable.
Engel and McCaul called their bill the “Richard G. Lugar and Ellen O. Tauscher Act to Maintain Limits on Russian Nuclear Forces.” Lugar, a former senator, and Tauscher, a former congresswoman and State Department arms control negotiator, died last week. Both helped shepherd New START through the U.S. bureaucracy.
New START took effect in 2011 during the Barack Obama administration and limits the U.S. and Russia to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on a total of 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines, and heavy bomber aircraft.
The Engel-McCaul proposal is less strict than a similar bill Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) introduced last week. Markey’s bill, which has no Republican co-sponsor, would make New START arms control limits the de facto law of the land if the U.S. and Russia do not renew the pact.
