Teaching about physics and the nuclear arms race Available to Purchase

The arms race has an important scientific and technological component; but it inevitably also involves political problems. In thinking about the arms race, physicists tend to emphasize the quantitative aspects, while policy makers and society as a whole focus on the political choices. A personal experience of teaching a course on the nuclear arms race to non‐science students is described to show how teaching quantative aspects in an order‐of‐magnitude fashion can help non‐scientists decide when numbers are important, and when they may be irrelevant or misleading to policy considerations.