The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
From the 1950s until the beginning of the 1990s, Europe was the site of a perilous, nuclear-armed confrontation between US-led NATO forces and Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces, which in time came to involve many thousands of nuclear weapons. With all of Europe seen as the potential battlefield, these nuclear weapons were intended to be used to support conventional forces, and at various times included nuclear artillery; nuclear land-mines; nuclear-armed short, medium, and long-range ballistic missiles; cruise missiles; and bombs to be dropped by aircraft. This presentation explores the growth and eventual removal of almost all these nuclear weapons in Europe, with only about 100 US weapons now remaining on the continent. It also investigates the ethical and moral challenges presented by such weapons, and the insanity of the strategic claims that smaller yield nuclear weapons had military value on a battlefield and their use would not lead to an escalating nuclear war.
About the speaker: Robert Latiff is a retired US Air Force Major General. His early career was in the US Army, where he served in Europe, first in the Infantry and then as a nuclear weapons maintenance officer and commander of a nuclear weapons depot and storage site. Latiff's subsequent USAF career was spent in research and development of space and intelligence systems. He commanded the NORAD Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center and was the Director of Advanced Systems at the National Reconnaissance Office. Latiff holds a Ph.D. in materials science. He is the author of Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield and Future Peace: Technology, Aggression, and the Rush to War.