Please join the Latin America & Caribbean Working Group (LACWG), DCRS, for our last seminar of the winter semester.
The Origin of the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict, the Negotiation Process, and the Cuban Missiles Crisis with Dr. Joseph Gerson, who has recently participated in Track II discussions about possible diplomatic solutions to prevent and end this conflict. Dr. Gerson has briefed Congressional staff, written articles, organized webinars, and given numerous talks and interviews related to this war.
This seminar will take place on Friday, April 15 from 12 – 1:30 pm EST via Zoom https://nova.zoom.us/j/99568861853
Meeting ID: 99568861853
After referencing the devastating consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some of its global ramifications, and courageous Russian opposition to the invasion, Dr. Gerson will begin with an overview of Ukrainian/Russian history. This will include its early Russian and Western influences, the emergence of the modern Ukrainian state, and tensions within Ukraine and between Ukraine and Russia. He will review the post-Cold War history of 1990s commitments to Common Security European-Russian relations, the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, and the development of Putin’s neo-Tsarist rule. He will then describe President Putin’s nuclear threats, placing them in the contexts of U.S. nuclear weapons history and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to which analogies were made in the first weeks of the Ukraine War. This will allow him to conclude by describing the proliferation dangers resulting from the Ukraine War and an emerging international consensus about the essential elements of a negotiated settlement to end the conflict.
Dr. Gerson is President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security (CPDCS), Vice-President of the International Peace Bureau, Co-chair of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy, Co-Convener of the International Peace and Planet Network and a member of the No to War/No to NATO Steering Committee. He educates and organizes at local, national, and international levels for peaceful and just alternatives to U.S. foreign and military policies, concentrating on great power tensions, nuclear weapons, the impacts of U.S. foreign military bases, and Pentagon spending. He was a 1960s Civil Rights movement activist, a Vietnam War-era draft resister, Director of Arizonans for Peace (1969-73), Southwest field organizer for Clergy and Laity Against the Vietnam War (1971-73), Director of the War Resisters International in London and Brussels (1973-75) Peace Secretary and Director of Programs for the American Friends Service Committee’s New England Regional Office (1976-2020) and launched CPDCS in 2017.
Dr. Gerson did his undergraduate work at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and received his PhD in politics and international security studies from the Union Institute and College. He has taught at Tufts University and Holy Cross and Regis Colleges. His books include Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World, The Sun Never Sets…Confronting the Network of U.S. Foreign Military Bases, The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Foreign Military Intervention and With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination. His articles have appeared in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Boston Globe, Eurasia Review, Common Dreams, Truthout and other publications.
