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For decades, Sen. Ed Markey has been the most prominent leader on behalf of nuclear arms control and non-proliferation in Congress. Council for a Livable World has been proud to support him throughout his career, including in each of his Senate races to date.

Sen. Markey first emerged as a national figure on nuclear issues in the early 1980s during the Cold War. As a young member of the House of Representatives, he became one of the leading congressional champions of the Nuclear Freeze movement. In 1982, Markey introduced the House Nuclear Freeze Resolution, helping transform a grassroots peace movement into a major national political force. He also addressed the massive Nuclear Freeze rally in New York’s Central Park attended by a million people. Historians and arms-control advocates have credited the movement with helping shift U.S. politics from accepting perpetual nuclear buildup toward negotiated reductions between Washington and Moscow.

Throughout his career, Markey has argued that nuclear weapons policy should prioritize diplomacy, reductions and verification rather than arms racing and modernization. After joining the Senate in 2013, he became a leading critic of expensive U.S. nuclear modernization plans and repeatedly introduced legislation to reduce nuclear weapons spending. He proposed legislation to cut $100 billion from planned nuclear spending over a decade while redirecting resources toward domestic priorities.

Markey has also been a central advocate for limiting presidential authority to launch nuclear weapons. He introduced legislation to prohibit the president from initiating a nuclear first strike without explicit congressional authorization. He argued that giving any president unilateral authority to begin nuclear war creates unacceptable risks of miscalculation and accidental escalation.

When the Trump administration withdrew from several major agreements and questioned the future of the New START Treaty, Markey became one of Congress’s most vocal defenders of the treaty. He introduced legislation designed to preserve New START and prevent the United States from increasing its deployed strategic nuclear arsenal beyond treaty limits. He argued that New START provided essential transparency, verification and predictability between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

Markey has also worked extensively to prevent the resumption of explosive nuclear testing. After reports that the Trump administration considered restarting U.S. nuclear tests, he introduced a bill to prohibit federal funds from being used for such tests. He warned that renewed testing would likely trigger reciprocal testing by Russia and China and could ignite a new global arms race. He continued that effort in 2025 with new legislation opposing any return to nuclear testing.

In recent years, Markey has attempted to revive the spirit of the Nuclear Freeze movement through legislation that calls for a verifiable international freeze on the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons while pushing for renewed arms control negotiations and stronger verification measures.

Markey has also been active on nuclear non-proliferation. He has sponsored legislation to restrict the transfer of sensitive nuclear technologies to countries like Saudi Arabia absent strong nonproliferation safeguards. He has consistently argued that preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is essential to global security and regional stability.

Institutionally, Markey has helped lead congressional efforts through the Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, which he co-chairs. In that role, he has pushed for policies emphasizing diplomacy, treaty verification, reduced nuclear risks, and eventual movement toward disarmament.

Across decades of work, Markey’s core argument has remained consistent: nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to humanity, arms races increase rather than decrease insecurity, and the United States is safest when it is leading global arms control efforts rather than abandoning them.