Disarmament and Peace Education

Abstract

As selections for this collection were being made in the winter of 2014, the issue of disarmament was reintroduced into the peace discourse by some who did not fear breaking the taboo of speaking the unspeakable, of actually speaking truth to power in the conference rooms of the United Nations. When the International Peace Bureau and some other NGO’s called for the essential necessity of reducing military expenditures to the achievement of the “Sustainability Goals” being proposed to carry forward the unfinished agenda of the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015), they unsettled the “gentlemen’s agreement” of the member states to sideline the issue as most continued to increase military expenditures and build greater arsenals. So I find the re-reading of this article to be timely and sad. The sadness comes from the foiled hopes that the late 70s the early 80s exhibited for disarmament, reflected in the UN Special Sessions on the issue, held in 1978 and 1982, the latter being the occasion of the most massive peace demonstration in the history of New York, demanding an end to the nuclear arms race, as the Second Special Session on Disarmament was about to convene. The event was a high point in the anti-nuclear movement that had some effect on education, but even the many educators who through the early 80s advocated teaching about the dangers of nuclear weapons did not address the possibilities for peace integral to general and complete disarmament (the demilitarization of the international system) envisioned by many in the years immediately following World War II as a means “to bring an end to war.”