The ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday added his voice to the chorus urging President Donald Trump to extend the New START nuclear-arms-control treaty with Russia into early 2026.
While “New START is not perfect,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said during a hearing on the treaty, with testimony from former government officials and an issue expert, “[w]e need to ensure that New START is extended in a responsible matter.”
McCaul’s opening remarks came after President Donald Trump this week reiterated his desire, during a summit of NATO member states in London, that New START be amended to include limits on China’s nuclear arsenal, or replaced with a treaty that does.
Signed by then-Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, New START limits the United States and Russia to deploying no more than 1,550 warheads across 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers. The countries can possess no more than 800 strategic delivery systems.
New START will expire in February 2021, unless the presidents of the U.S. and Russia agree to extend the agreement for another five years, into 2026.
The Trump administration has criticized the Obama-era treaty for not limiting Russia’s use of tactical and so-called exotic nuclear weapons. The former refers to weapons intended mainly for battlefield use, the latter to devices such as the nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed autonomous undersea vehicle and the nuclear-powered cruise missile Russia has said it is developing.
McCaul, who handily won re-election in 2018 and whose congressional district Trump carried by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016, nodded at these concerns during Wednesday’s hearing, saying he appreciated concerns about New START’s limitations. However, the lawmaker also said he valued the insight the treaty gives the U.S. into Russia’s deployed strategic nuclear forces.
McCaul hailed New START’s mandatory inspections and verification measures, with which the U.S. State Department has said Moscow has complied, and without which the department has warned the United States would know less about the only nuclear arsenal that rivals its own in destructive power.
“I find that very instructive here today,” McCaul said.
