Teaching about the arms race
If progress is to be made toward peace, public education on arms‐race issues is crucial both in the short run and for the long term. Because technical information is invariably essential to an understanding of issues, physicists can make a major contribution. However, educational efforts on the arms race face great difficulties, which we must first recognize if we are to overcome them:• Teaching about the arms race has in the past been a cyclical activity, rising and falling in parallel with public concern. These cycles are not all bad; the arms race is a real problem, not just an academic one, and hence it must be addressed whenever it surfaces in the political arena. But cycles tend to inject an aura of crisis into discussions, providing short‐term motivation at the cost of credibility and efficiency in the long run. The longer‐term approach has more educational implications. It means that arms‐race education must be general enough to be useful for analyzing unknown future issues. The danger with short‐...