1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Hastening Arms Limitations Talks Act of 2023 or the HALT Act of 2023 . 2. Findings Congress makes the following findings: (1) The use of nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to humanity, a fact that led President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to declare in a joint statement in 1987 that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought , a sentiment affirmed by the People’s Republic of China, the French Republic, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America in January 2022. (2) On June 12, 1982, an estimated 1,000,000 people attended the largest peace rally in United States history, in support of a movement to freeze and reverse the nuclear arms race, a movement that helped to create the political will necessary for the negotiation of several bilateral arms control treaties between the United States and former Soviet Union, and then the Russian Federation. Those treaties contributed to strategic stability through mutual and verifiable reciprocal nuclear weapons reductions. (3) Since the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, millions of people around the world have stood up to demand meaningful, immediate international action to halt, reduce, and eliminate the threats posed by nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear war, to humankind and the planet. (4) In 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons done at Washington, London, and Moscow July 1, 1968 (21 UST 483) (commonly referred to as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or the NPT ), entered into force, which includes a binding obligation on the 5 nuclear-weapon states (commonly referred to as the P5 ), among other things, to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race … and to nuclear disarmament . (5) Bipartisan United States global leadership has curbed the growth in the number of countries possessing nuclear weapons and has