The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
A central element of European defense planning during and since the Cold War has been extended nuclear deterrence—the threat of U.S. nuclear weapon use in support of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. Today, in the context of Russo-Ukrainian War, some observers advocate Ukraine becoming a NATO member as a way to address future threats to its sovereignty. Its choice holds implications for broader European security. This presentation draws on lessons of the Cold War in Europe to argue nuclear deterrence was never put to the test in Cold War Europe, and today extended nuclear deterrence is an unreliable and risky approach to Russian aggression. It will offer nonnuclear alternatives for Ukrainian and European security threatened by Russian expansion.
About the speaker: Matthew Evangelista is President White Professor of History and Political Science Emeritus in the Department of Government at Cornell University. He has served as director of Cornell’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies from 2002 to 2008 and from 2015 to 2018, and as chair of the Department of Government from 2008 to 2011. Among other works, he is the author of : Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies (1988); Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (1999), and Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945: Bombing among Friends (2023). He is the editor of Peace Studies: Critical Concepts in Political Science, 4 vols. (2005).