Description

These are powerpoint slides to support a lecture on the Israeli and US bombing of Iran's nuclear sites in June 2025, including a short analysis of Iran's options for retaliation. All imagery used under fair use and sourced where possible. Source for cover image: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Learning Objectives

• Develop informed opinions about the ongoing conflict over Iran's nuclear program
• Understand the basic features of uranium enrichment, its role in the conflict, and relation to the nuclear nonproliferation regime
• Identify the strategic impact of the US decision to bomb Iran's nuclear sites

Description

Brief your boss is an employability-related role-playing activity that places students into the role of policy advisors to the Foreign Ministers of the UK, Japan, South Africa and Brazil who are preparing to speak at a side event at the NPT Review Conference. Students work in four groups, and are given just 20-minutes to prepare a 2-minute oral briefing which they then give in class.

Learning Objectives

• Advance your understanding of nuclear politics within the framework of the NPT
• Develop your understanding of the diversity of national positions concerning nuclear deterrence and disarmament issues
• Work effectively with others and under-time constraint
• Develop your core communication skills by presenting clear, supported, recommendation for further action

Description

Brief your boss is an employability-related role-playing activity that places students into the role of policy advisors to the Foreign Ministers of the UK, Japan, South Africa and Brazil who are preparing to speak at a side event at the NPT Review Conference. Students work in four groups, and are given just 20-minutes to prepare a 2-minute oral briefing which they then give in class.

Learning Objectives

• Advance your understanding of nuclear politics within the framework of the NPT
• Develop your understanding of the diversity of national positions concerning nuclear deterrence and disarmament issues
• Work effectively with others and under-time constraint
• Develop your core communication skills by presenting clear, supported, recommendation for further action

Description

These are condensed essential readings for understanding radiation, radioactive materials, and the threats they pose to human health.

Learning Objectives

• Understand what radiation is and how it enters the environment in relation to the nuclear weapons lifecycle.
• Identify populations may be at an increased health risk than the general population (such as but not limited to people assigned female at birth, children, and Indigenous sovereign nations).
• Describe health risks associated with high or low doses of radiation; inherently also being able to define low vs high dose radiation.
• Become familiar with the gold standard studies and research on nuclear weapons exposure and safety.
• Get an introduction to toxicological mechanisms and how environmental exposures move through the human body.
• Understand the difference between biological and epidemiological research.
• Define key introductory terms for nuclear toxicology and public health data.

Description

An atomic bomb survivor shares her story of triumph in the face of tragedy.

Learning Objectives

• • Students will experience how personal narratives can affect us emotionally and deepen our investment in learning about this period of history. • Students will explore how personal narratives and documentary films help them understand historical events differently

Description

You are the Military Legislative Assistant to a Democratic Senator from New York. It is 2014, and President Obama is engaged in negotiations with Iran about limiting Iran’s nuclear capability. The U.S. Constitution grants the President the authority to negotiate agreements and the Senate the power to ratify treaties. However, President Obama lacked the necessary votes to ratify a treaty with Iran, so he pursued a Presidential Agreement instead. These agreements are easier to conclude since they do not require Senate ratification but are also more vulnerable to being overturned by subsequent administrations.

Congress, seeking a voice in the negotiations, began circulating letters to build political consensus around various opinions. The Senator needs to decide which letter to support. Which letter would you recommend the Senator to sign?

Considerations:

• What do you need to know about Iran and its capabilities?
• What do you need to know about the Senator's constituents in New York?
• What do you need to know about the International Atomic Agency?
• What do you need to know about the UN?
• What are the key points about Iran and its policy and concerns regarding national security?
• What information do you need to collect to make an informed decision?

Based on the gathered information and analysis, recommend a letter for the Senator to support. Your recommendation should reflect a thorough understanding of the complexities surrounding the Iran nuclear negotiations and the potential implications for U.S. and global security.

Learning Objectives

Description

This exercise is designed for 5 to 50 participants and can be used as a stand-alone activity. It is based on Nick Ritchie's exercise "Bandung, the Global South and Nuclear Disarmament," which can be found at https://highlynriched.com/downloads/bandung-the-global-south-and-nuclear-disarmament/.

The exercise uses Vincent Intondi's article, "The Dream of Bandung and the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons." You can watch our interview with Vincent at https://youtu.be/nI_lEaj1L30 and view Vincent's profile at https://highlynriched.com/vendor/vintondi/.

The questions in this exercise are intentionally organized from the most descriptive to the most abstract. This structure aims to establish a common understanding of the text by initially focusing on factual and descriptive elements of the assigned text. By prompting students to identify key points, main actors, and basic concepts, these questions ensure that everyone begins with a shared foundation of knowledge. The questions then progress to transitional ones that encourage concrete connections through more analytical thinking. Finally, the exercise concludes with questions that foster abstract thinking and critical engagement, prompting students to explore the broader significance of nuclear colonialism.

Learning Objectives

Description

On October 14, 1962, U-2 surveillance photos revealed that the Soviet Union had located nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba. While shocking, the Soviet deployment was not truly surprising. US President Kennedy had been concerned that the deployment of fifteen nuclear-armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) to Turkey would trigger a Soviet response in Cuba. Nevertheless, this development brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.
Your job is to brief (advise) the president and leadership team about potential actions that need to be taken in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the Cold War and historical context of nuclear weapons
• Understand of the power and capabilities of nuclear weapons
• Determine an equidistant location for a safe house
• Analyze area and distance to make an argument for safety
• Demonstrate visual communication skills
• Demonstrate persuasive argument skills

Description

This exercise is meant to help students digest and retain information while developing collaboration and communication skills. It exposes students to a variety of perspectives and themes related to non-proliferation in a dynamic setting.

The exercise is flexible and can be scaled up and down to accommodate shorter/longer class times, larger/smaller class sizes, etc.

Learning Objectives

Description

You are a journalist for TIME magazine.

You have noticed the lack of human- or victim-centred perspectives on nuclear weapons. So often you are encountering strategic military positions, state-centred frames, or the expert opinion of scientists, diplomats and officers.

You want to design a magazine cover that draws the reader's attention to the people affected by nuclear weapons. These people can be living or dead, they may be from past or present, and they may be from near or far. Perhaps they were victims of Hiroshima or Nagaskai. Perhaps they were impacted by radiation as a result of mining, production, or testing.

You must decide how you will represent this issue:

What will you include? What will you exclude? What will you highlight? What will you background?

Be ready to present:

(1) a central image or illustration (you may find this online or create your own)

(2) an accompanying headline

(3) a justification for your choices

Learning Objectives

• Throughout this module you will encounter a range of feminist voices and experience the nuclear world as embodied and sensory, intimate and everyday. By the end of the module you will understand how gender intersects with other power relations to shape the nuclear world. You will critically evaluate different feminist approaches and come to your own conclusions.

Description

How might your role in the family or household influence your interaction with the nuclear world? Feminists have drawn attention to how these roles are often stratified by gender, linked to gender segregation and inequality in the workplace and sustained by powerful cultural norms around motherhood. The writing activities that follow aim to help you analyse critically how women’s association with homemaking and mothering shapes their entry into nuclear industries or anti-nuclear activism.

There are four writing tasks associated with this activity. The first asks you to unpack the role of gender in women’s anti-government activism, and reactions to it, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. The second task is a critical analysis of ‘maternalist’ motivations at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK. The third task asks for short answers in response to questions about the variety of roles women played at Oak Ridge, as part of the Manhattan Project. Finally, you will assess how ideas and imagery have been mobilised by the organisation 'Mothers for Nuclear'.

Learning Objectives

• recognise the range of subject positions women have occupied in relation to nuclear technologies
• recognise the intersection of gender with racialised and other hierarchies in the production of these different subject positions
• identify how motherhood tropes have been mobilised both for and against those technologies, and both by women and against them
• evaluate the impact of motherhood tropes on nuclear industries and on women's lives

Description

The objective of this activity is to help students understand and problematize the concept of nuclear hegemony by examining the cases of Israel and Iran, while critically analyzing the responses of the United States and the European Union to both countries' nuclear programs.

The time allocation for each section can be adjusted based on the available class time and the pace of the discussion. The activity can also be modified to include additional research or multimedia resources, depending on the teacher's preferences and the students' level of engagement.

Learning Objectives

• Gain an understanding of nuclear hegemony.
• Learn about Israel’s nuclear program.
• Learn about Iran’s nuclear program.
• Engage in critical analysis of the US and EU responses to the nuclear programs of both countries.

Description

Nuclear studies tend to centre on nuclear weapons technologies and doctrines, the theory and practice of nuclear deterrence, strategic stability and arms control, nuclear non-proliferation and counter-proliferation, East-West strategic competition, extended deterrence and alliance dynamics. 

The historiography of the nuclear age is generally one of the Manhattan Project and WWII leading into the Cold War, threats of nuclear use associated with proxy wars such as Korea and Vietnam, the NPT and periods of detente and arms control negotiations, through to the post-Cold War period of ‘rogue’ states, nuclear terrorism, and now the geopolitics of nuclear multipolarity. 

What tends to get left out are the experiences, perspectives and agency of states, organisations and people that are not part of the central cast of the Northern nuclear Cold War story, notably women and people, and the states and organisations of the global South.

The purpose of this section is to introduce you to the central connections between anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-nuclearism, the idea of non-alignment as a political force in world politics, especially in the Cold War, and what  its champions had to say about nuclear weapons and disarmament.  

Learning Objectives

Description

Through this case study of the representations of Pakistan’s nuclear programs, students will:

• Acquire knowledge and understanding of Orientalism, and more specifically, Nuclear Orientalism in relation to the case of Pakistan. 
• Develop the skills to critically analyse discourse and identify Orientalist stereotypes in nuclear discourse.  

Learning Objectives

• Acquire knowledge and understanding of Orientalism, and more specifically, Nuclear Orientalism in relation to the case of Pakistan.
• Develop the skills to critically analyse discourse and identify Orientalist stereotypes in nuclear discourse.

Description

What do we learn about nuclear politics if we take families and homes as our starting point? Feminists argue that the personal and the political are intertwined. Thus families and homes shape nuclear politics and are shaped by it - with some families and homes much more affected than others. The aim of these picture-based activities is to help you to critical reflect on how the domestic sphere and our intimate and family relationships are entangled with the nuclear world.

This learning activity consists of two main tasks. For the first, you will be asked to study images of Cold War-era fallout shelters and of mock-up homes from the Nevada test site. You will critically analyse these images before drawing your own family’s fallout shelter, and reflecting on what it reveals about your family life and about your conceptions of nuclear disaster.

For the second task, you will be asked to investigate images of the town of Oak Ridge in Tennessee, which produced uranium for the Manhattan Project; of housing in the adjacent Pacific islands of Ebeye and Kwajalein; and of refugee camps for those displaced by the nuclear accident in in Fukushima prefecture in Japan. After discussing a series of questions about these images, you will produce a collage to illustrate the real-world impact of nuclear technologies on homes and families.

Learning Objectives

• identify the disparities between dominant cultural imaginaries of nuclear harms on households and the actual harms
• evaluate the potential impact of nuclear harm on your own home and wider community
• recognise the particular impacts on different communities' homes
• evaluate whose homes and families have been most affected, how and why

Description

In this first task, imagine you are an investigative journalist and you have been asked to interview a nuclear expert.

These people can be living or dead, they may be from the past or present, and they may be from near or far. You may want military expertise, lived experience, scientific insight, academic contribution or an activist’s voice. Think about the people you encountered in the core readings and spend some time researching online before you come to your decision.

You must consider:

Who will you choose and why? What do you want to learn, understand, or highlight?

Be ready to present:

(1) three to five questions that you would ask your chosen interviewee

(2) justification for your choice of interviewee

(3) justification for your chosen questions

Discuss as a group: are there any patterns that have emerged in terms of the people you have chosen or the questions you will ask?

Learning Objectives

• The aim of these activities is to encounter and evaluate different forms of nuclear expertise. Feminism tells us that knowledge is not neutral but political, shaped by gender, race, and class. Some forms of knowledge are valued over others and some people are heard whilst others are silenced. These tasks will help you to identify and challenge the knowledge hierarchies in the nuclear field.