July 16, 3pm – by Serhii Plokhii, Harvard University
Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis.
Harvard Professor Serhii Plokhii will talk about these lessons and the new pages of the Cuban Missile Crisis history that he has recreated using a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes.
Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. A leading authority on Eastern Europe and Russia, he has published extensively on the international history of Cold War. His books won numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best English-language book on the international relations for The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014), Taras Shevchenko National Prize (Ukraine) for The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015), and Ballie Gifford Prize and Pushkin House Book Prize, UK for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, (2018). His latest book, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis was released in April 2021.
