Nuclear Education in the Post-Cold War Era

Is it time for nuclear age educators to put their nuclear concerns in abeyance and to begin focusing on global issues, particularly on what is now being called "environmental security"? Even though the end of the Cold War would seem to be a sufficiently compelling reason to stop worrying about the bomb, I believe this admittedly tempting strategy might be premature. Rather than abruptly shifting our attention from nuclear war to global warming, tropical (and Pacific Northwest) deforestation, and sustainable agriculture, perhaps we can serve our students better by helping them to discover the manifold connections between various (past and possible future) holocausts and our most pressing social problems. For example, if young people who are genuinely concerned about the environment can be shown the enormous damage caused by more than four decades of nuclear weapons production and the military's war on the environment, it is quite possible that they will appreciate the continuing necessity to denuclearize and demilitarize the planet if the environment itself is to be salvaged.¹ It also might be worth exploring with our students why this additional cost of global militarism has only recently come to light and why so little is being done about it.

Nuclear Education and its Critics

Even with the hands of the "doomsday clock" on the cover of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists turned all the way back to an unprecedented seventeen minutes before midnight, and even with the sharp reductions in nuclear warheads mandated by the Start II treaty, what we call the nuclear predicament is still very much with us. Moreover—even under the most optimistic scenario—it will not be resolved expeditiously or easily. Because young people will continue to live out their lives in a nuclear world, it behooves educators to provide them with at least a rudimentary understanding of the origins of this unprecedented age, its present perils, and what might be done to prevent new nuclear dangers, particularly the ominous problem of nuclear proliferation.

It is instructive to recall that even when the possibility of nuclear war appeared to be much greater than it is today, nuclear war education was highly controversial and attempts to introduce it into the nation's schools were often met with fierce resistance. In a July 1983 speech to the American Federation of Teachers, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that the National Educational Association's initial curriculum, Choices, "aimed more at frightening and brainwashing American schoolchildren than at fostering learning" (qtd. in Loeb 127). Similarly, in a 1985 article, Joseph Adelson and Chester E. Finn, Jr., warn that the introduction of nuclear education into the schools would result in "the serious abuse of children." "To judge by the curricula so far developed," they admonish, "what lies before us will be perversely iatrogenic, a treatment producing the very disease it is designed to cure, and a course of instruction generating or increasing the anxiety it is allegedly trying to allay" (34). Two years later, in an essay contending that the freeze movement was thriving in America's schools, Jill Coleman and Keith B. Payne inveigh against nuclear education for "implicitly or explicitly encourag[ing] students to become anti-nuclear activists." Payne and Coleman do concede that "students should be encouraged to become responsible participants in the democratic process," but argue that "to promote activism in support of a political agenda, as these materials attempt to do, is an intolerable abuse of public education" (62).²

However misguided, distorted or unfair we might find many of the attacks on nuclear-age education, it is very possible that they will reappear—with even greater vehemence—if educators continue to insist that young people should have at least some understanding of the radical break in human history inaugurated by the splitting of the atom. Thus those who believe that nuclear education continues to merit a place in the curriculum must be prepared to address forthrightly, and successfully rebut, such criticisms. If we are to be successful in this endeavor, however, the scope of nuclear education must be broadened to encompass a number of additional issues that are not only closely related...