Join us for a screening of the documentary Bombshell (2026) on Wednesday, September 16, at 6:00 p.m. 

In the acclaimed 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, an American president calls a drunken Soviet Premier with bad news: “…Dimitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...” The “something” is a deranged commander who has launched a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, which leads to nuclear apocalypse. While a global apocalypse has yet to materialize, the history of nuclear weapons is full of other things going wrong. Indigenous lands have been destroyed, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have died of cancer, and trillions of dollars have been spent on weapons that one U.S. Defense Secretary ultimately concluded were “useless.”

Today the majority of the world’s nations have joined the Treaty for the Prohibition on Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and surveys suggest strong public support for the TPNW, even in nations that possess nuclear weapons. However, the nine nations in the world that have nuclear weapons are continuing a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race which endangers all life on earth. In this full-day symposium, distinguished experts from diverse disciplines—including physics, political science, history, feminist studies, and peace and conflict studies—will discuss contemporary dangers of nuclear weapons, how we got here, and how we can work for a more secure and peaceful future.

This symposium is cosponsored by the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Department of Government at Cornell University, on the occasion of Professor Matthew Evangelista’s retirement from Cornell. Professor Evangelista’s scholarship makes groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the nuclear arms race and means of ending it, and we are pleased to honor his distinguished career in peace and conflict studies.

Panels:

10:00 AM to 11:30 AM: Nuclear Arms Races and How to Stop Them
Ray Acheson (Princeton), David Cortright (Cornell), Lisbeth Gronlund (MIT)

11:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Lunch Break

12:00 PM to 1:15 PM: Keynote: Benoît Pelopidas, Sciences Po, Paris

1:15 PM to 1:30 PM: Coffee Break

1:30 PM to 2:45 PM: New Perspectives on Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control
"Banning or Facilitating the Test? Reconsidering the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty"
Ruoyu Li (Colgate)

“Atmospheric Absorption: Nuclear Weapons and the Science of Climate Doomsday in the 1970s”
Benjamin Wilson (Harvard)

2:45 PM to 3:45 PM: Coffee Break
Guest appearance by Frank von Hippel and David Holloway via Zoom 

3:45 PM to 5:15 PM: Panel: Nuclear War and Climate Catastrophe
Neta Crawford (St. Andrews), Zia Mian (Princeton), and Benoît Pelopidas (Sciences Po)

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-sponsor
Department of Government