Yes, and good afternoon and good morning and good evening or whatever time you may be joining us from.
I'm delighted to be able to chair this closing panel on the important question of prospects for greater public education and understanding.
I'm a member of Senate Steering Committee and also the Oxford Peace Research Trust.
And I know that my colleagues always bring a very rich dimension to these questions.
I couldn't help but think that everything we have heard today from our distinguished
experts really underscores the importance of public understanding and public opinion.
And it also occurred to me that the content and the context of these questions of peace and nuclear weapons is shifting in a very,
very dramatic fashion right now.
And so what I'm hoping this panel can also do is maybe pick up on some of those understandings, but in particular, think about how they.
Culture and the content and the context of peace that nuclear weapons is shifting.
So with that, what we will be doing today will be beginning with Jeremy Cunningham.
We will have three panellists speaking consecutively.
We'll have a few minutes at the end for Q&A, and then we will go straight to Liz Carmichael with a few concluding remarks.
And thanks. And then just to give you a little bit of advance warning,
we've had so much interest in so many questions coming through that we're actually going to run about 15 minutes over the scheduled
closing time to entertain questions from throughout the whole day and have a chance to engage in further dialogue about these questions.
So just to let you know we will be running over just a few minutes after the conclusion of the formal programme?
So let me begin by introducing Dr. Jeremy Cunningham,
who is a public expert in education and the school curriculum and its role in peace, and a former headmaster of secondary schools.
And I have to just say that those amazing skill sets come into the fore with our work at Oxford,
and Jeremy has been invaluable as a colleague and helping us organise for the in-person conferences that we've had over the years.
And of course, when I see Jeremy, I always think about the next conference and hopefully we will all be able to gather
in-person and have a chance to continue our conversation in a more personal way.
So, Jeremy, please, you're going to be giving us some sense of public awareness of nuclear weapons through your own work and research.
Thanks very much, Isabella. Good enough. Good afternoon, everyone. It's been a most fascinating day so far.
I'm my talk is called. How well-informed is the British public about nuclear weapons?
I'm interested in the relationship between schooling, democracy and peace.
And one assumption behind successful democracies is that the public opinion should be based on reasonable knowledge.
Of course, it's not a neutral platform. An opinion formers compete to influence voters.
But I wonder how well informed the voters are in the nuclear democracies.
And I thought I'd better start with my own. I'm going to focus on our schools first and then the media.
So let's start with public knowledge, I'm going to mention attitudes a little bit at the end, but this is not largely about attitudes.
So this is a. This is a YouGov poll from January 2020 asking, as far as you are aware,
does the UK have nuclear weapons and you can see the percentage results below 25 percent of
the people answering this poll didn't know or or got the wrong answer on this question.
And I was quite surprised by this. I started to think about how do people actually build up their knowledge of such an important subject.
I actually imagined if I was going to do some full scale research on this to try and get a good sense of what people would know,
whether they were uninformed, little informed, somewhat informed, the well-informed.
And I came up with this list.
Simple physics when when they were first used, the impact on a city, the delivery, the warheads, nuclear states, military doctrine treaties,
U.N. ban terrorism and all subjects, which we've mentioned today, perhaps also the issue of space and new technology.
Now let us try and imagine how young people will begin to learn any of this.
Supposing my seven year old granddaughter asked me about nuclear weapons, what would I?
What would I say? I think in primary schools, it's very unlikely that they'd be taught about it at all.
I mean, they do deal with world issues to a certain extent. Covid's, I'm sure.
And climate change. But I'm going to start with lower secondary, which is aged about 14.
Education in the UK is decentralised, and this data is from England and Wales,
and the first kind of treatment of this subject would be in the third year of secondary school.
That's children aged 13 to 14.
They spend about a year studying the history of the world and particularly Britain and Europe, from 19 101 to the present day.
The only compulsory topic in this year is the Holocaust.
History typically has about two hours a week, maybe three lessons and one hour of homework.
And if you look at a typical history textbook for this age group published here in Oxford, you can see there are about two lessons on the Holocaust.
One lesson on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a maximum of two lessons on the Civil War.
The BBC produces very good revision pages, and that has several pages on the atomic bomb and its development and its effects and aftermath.
And also, it has some good stuff on the ethics of it.
And there are also one or two pages on the Cold War, but this is the last moment in England in which all students would study history.
And this is the last moment where all students have a good chance to learn anything at all about nuclear weapons,
let alone this list that I have posted.
Most history teachers wouldn't have time to bring students up to date.
The pace is so relentless to even get through the programme is extremely difficult.
So to sum up, the most likely scenario is a maximum of three forty five minute lessons.
So let's go on to the middle secondary years.
Students prepare for public examinations at age 16 called the General Certificate of Secondary Education, known popularly here as GCSE.
Most students here take eight or 10 subjects, and almost everyone takes English.
In 2019, nearly three quarters of a million students sat in English GCSE,
so we consider that the size of the what we call the cohort the group of students going through the system.
Almost all the students in that cohort would study one humanities subject either history or geography or religious studies,
about one third of the cohort for each. Some students may study two of these, but that's minority.
And although climate change and nuclear power are taught in geography,
one would not expect to find anything on weapons and there might be a little bit about it in physics, but I haven't.
I haven't checked, actually. So in history itself, there is a wide range of topics and periods which options.
So you're only going to study about nuclear weapons if you study one particular option, and that is the topic that they call the Cold War.
So in 2019, about 37 percent of students took history, and of these, 40 percent studied the Cold War.
In other words, 15 percent of the student population studied it.
And here again, it would be very difficult to have enough time to study any of these issues of nuclear weapons today.
Another tranche of students study religious studies, and this is surprisingly large group,
34 percent considering in many countries, you're not allowed to teach religion in schools.
Students doing this will study two major world religions and that including a compulsory thematic study on religion, peace and conflict.
Topics include religion, politics and terrorism. Just war.
Holy war, drones, surgical strikes and attitudes to weapons of mass destruction, pacifism and non-violence.
So to clarify, in England and Wales in 2019,
about half the age cohort at 60 and studied something about nuclear weapons 15 percent in the context of
the Cold War in history and 34 in the context of religious studies and the ethics of nuclear weapons,
in other words, just under half. Let's move on to upper secondary level aged 16 to 18 in England and Wales.
Many people would argue that this is a much more suitable age to introduce this topic, and in fact,
this is the age which students really ought to learn about the great challenges facing humans on this planet.
But the situation is quite extreme.
Most students aiming for university study advanced level exams called GCSE A-levels advanced level,
but the English system has a high degree of specialism and choice. Most students take between two and four subjects only,
and the only subjects where they could be taught about nuclear weapons in detail are likely to be history, religious studies or politics.
In history, it's forty seven thousand students took A-level history.
That was 16 percent of all the A-level students, and all these history subjects have optional sections,
which are therefore only taken by a proportion of the total history candidates.
And the main topic again, was students would learn about nuclear weapons is not.
Challenges facing the world today, it is history again, the Cold War 1945 to 1991, and in 2019, about 4000 students took this topic.
Admittedly, it is quite detailed.
They would start in Naito, the Warsaw Pact, the development of atomic weapons, the Cold War right the way through from 1956 to the to the 1989,
the space race detente sought talks of politic and so on, and a good history teacher would definitely find time to bring the information up to date.
A very small number less than a thousand took an interesting looking course called The Changing Nature of Warfare 1859 to 1991.
This course includes the development of aerial warfare bombs, countermeasures, missiles,
nuclear weapons that influence on strategic planning, the terror bombing of Germany and Japan in 1945.
But there's no mention of submarines. Nuclear war theory, proliferation treaties, attempts to limit nuclear weapons, the test ban treaty.
And it's very war focussed. So about 10 percent of all the history candidates studied the Cold War and a proportion of all the candidates.
This is just 1.5 percent. About 1600 students took religious studies, advanced level,
that's four percent of all the entrance two of the three exams offered had specific
reference to weapons of mass destruction in relation again to religion and ethics.
So you have to study at least one major religion in terms of issues of war and peace.
And once again, the just war theory and contemporary conflicts are mentioned, and so is pacifism.
Each religion studied has references to weapons of mass destruction, good conduct and key moral principles.
I'll give you the example from Hinduism.
It says here you should study the virtue of Ahimsa Hindu views on issues concerning the treatment of animals and war,
including the use of weapons of mass destruction and Gandhi's use of non-violence.
So the total for religious studies students then who took courses with specific reference to nuclear weapons and ethics,
was about 1.5 percent of the candidates who took this exam at 18.
I looked at A-level politics as well, the syllabus is largely constitutional and comparative.
There is not little international relations and almost no reference to global political issues.
So this is the summary for advanced level courses.
You can see the percentage of students of this age group in England who are likely to study anything about nuclear weapons,
and it comes to three percent. And you can see the percentage of students who wouldn't study anything about this in their exam subjects, at least.
And it comes to ninety seven percent. This is obviously a matter of interest and concern.
And my my own personal view is they are students in this country are not well
prepared for facing a lot of the major issues that face us in the world today.
I then went on to look at the contribution of NGOs,
and I looked at the contribution of CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its Peace Education Programme.
This programme is based on a discussion of controversial issues, backing opinions with evidence.
And it's not a campaigning or one sided approach.
Speaker's visit primary and secondary schools and the most likely curriculum slot for this is citizenship studies, which usually is not examined.
In 2018 19, the Sandy Peace Education Programme gave about 200 workshops or talks in 70 schools, reaching 7500 students with excellent feedback.
I looked at the teaching park and looked at the online materials,
and there's a very comprehensive lesson plans wealth of supporting material, including U.S. and North Korea.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Greenham Common.
The Hibakusha, uranium mining and Aboriginal Communities in Australia.
Gender and nuclear weapons. These these are well reviewed in teaching magazines, and I think they're excellent,
but it must be said that they would reach a very small proportion of our population.
Only those teachers are particularly interested in the subject.
Only those schools have made a special point of ensuring that students study these these matters.
So let's summarise where we are with the percentage of the cohort taught about nuclear weapons.
Ninety five percent at age 14 probably learn something.
What a nuclear bomb is that it could destroy a whole city. It was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with devastating consequences and so on.
At age 16, about half and at age 18, just three percent.
As a matter of interest, I started enquiring about a similar situation in France, India and Pakistan.
There seems to be very little in the formal curriculum in France or India.
And I did find a very good exam in Pakistan,
studies an international GCSE with a very thorough analysis of the situation and Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
But I think this exam is taken by a tiny number of Pakistani students.
I then went on and had a brief look at universities.
I imagined that I was an 18 year old with an interest in the subject and found out of the top UK universities.
Five undergraduate international relations or politics courses specifically mentioning nuclear weapons,
including one called the Global Politics of Nuclear Weapons, taught by one Dr Nick Ritchie, who spoke earlier today.
So if you were a student with an interest in this subject, you could definitely find somewhere to study about it in an university.
I then went on to have a look at media, and I looked at the proportion of the public who access news in various ways.
And you can see that in this chart here. It's very difficult to work out precisely how much news people get from different
sources because often people use several different sources for their news.
But if we think of the electorate of Britain,
England and Wales being 43 million and 67 percent voted in the last election, that gives about 30 million active voters.
How many of them are picking up a general sense of this subject from news?
So I started to look at the statistics for when most people get their news online,
and the largest online news provider in the UK appears to be the BBC,
and it's supposedly has 15 million weekly readers and I think about two million daily readers.
Then there's the Guardian and the Mail Online that each have round about a million million plus daily readers and the I also looked at the Sun online.
Sun has a very large number of print readers more than a million, and their online readers also claims to be more than a million.
I then decided I would have a look at how often these online sites were posting information about nuclear weapons.
Sometimes it was just opinion, but often it was information as well as opinion.
And I look back to the beginning of 2017 with Trump's inauguration, when, as you know,
there was a dramatic change in global international relations as a result of his announcements, behaviour and threats.
And the question I asked was whether a daily reader would gradually build up some knowledge.
So I wanted to count the number of posts per month from the different news outlets, and I found the following The BBC,
which is the most trusted and has the largest number of daily readers, doesn't have the largest number of posts about one a week.
But the posts are very well constructed and largely free from unattributed opinions.
They also have a very good item produced for younger viewers under the Newsbeat label,
saying which countries have nuclear weapons and how many are the. The Mail Online is a very interesting case.
I can't quite tell how many posts are being done a day, a week or a month, but they when I,
they have a search box on their main online news page and inserting nuclear weapons into that search
box brings up a massive 10000 relevant posts dating back to to 2017 between six and seven a day.
And I couldn't figure out why this was. And then I realised that they are being fed by Reuters, AP and AFP and a range of other agencies.
So someone with a real interest in this subject, reading them all would build up a lot of information, I think.
I looked down at the Sun online rob about a million readers a day, but it didn't appear in the original owner survey I saw.
They have about one post every three days or 11 a month, and a regular reader of the Sun would build up a fair degree of knowledge.
But this is full of rather. Emotional stuff about Kim Jong UN and what they're doing in North Korea, it's not only knowledge based.
I should have a quick word about Facebook, because Ofcom reported that 35 percent of adults get their news through Facebook,
but I don't think it would be useful for building up general knowledge because
it's fed according to the interest that you've shown in previous articles.
So The Guardian has about one million daily readers, and this produced about 13 posts a month or about one post every few days.
These are kind of the pose that you get in in the Guardian. I'll go through them fairly quickly.
And you can read them fuel cells, but you can see that actually they would cover quite a lot of the topics that have been brought up today.
They have not only information, but they have editorials discussing North Korea, Iran, Russia and USA modernisation nuclear arsenals.
But very interestingly, there's almost no information at all about India, Pakistan, Israel or Saudi Arabia.
I thought you might be interested to see the kind of pattern of postings on an online site.
This is a pattern dating back to 2018 with the largest number of articles a month,
and you could see the big spikes of the Singapore summit between Trump and Kim on the summit aftermath.
Then there's another quite a big spike the Vietnam Summit, then another big spike as Russia and the US started to modernise their arsenals.
And there was the threat to the renewal of Start.
Then they nearly always report the Doomsday Clock and then spikes with the US plan to invest in replacing its land based ICBMs.
So it's pretty thorough story if you are reading this online news nearly every day.
Now this is an exploratory study, and I have to admit this is a little more than a hypothesis,
but my guess is that TV and radio news contribute relatively little to a general understanding of the subject compared to online and print sources,
which include maps, diagrams and can be re-read. If the print papers are printing what the online printing,
then I think about five million print readers may be getting a gradual drip feed
online readers if I try and imagine that a few people are looking at them.
So three times a week and others are looking at them every day, wouldn't they be about 10 million readers?
So what does this leave us with the. My guess and this I have to is only a guess, but my guess is this about 25 percent?
One could say, are informed. If if I had a test on my 10 points, they would, I think they would do quite well.
I think 25 percent are uninformed.
These are the people who didn't know Britain had nuclear weapons, and I think maybe about 50 percent somewhat informed.
I just I said I would say very little about attitudes,
but I'll put up this slide for you so you can see what what the there is known about attitudes, attitudes.
One of the interesting put up because it's a fascinating presentation, but I I'm very mindful of time.
I think you're getting close to the end of it. Yeah, I'm there. I'm just at the end.
Perfect. Thank you. I'm I should be concluding. I just want to show people that seventy seven percent are in.
A poll carried out for CND means you support a global ban on nuclear weapons,
and fifty nine percent supposedly support the UK signing the U.N. ban treaty.
OK, so 77 percent global bound 60 percent or so.
Think Britain should sign a U.N. treaty?
Then look at this figure should the British prime minister retaliate if we're attacked by nuclear weapons, 68 percent of the respondents said yes.
That's very interesting contrast between the people, the percentage who want to get rid of nuclear weapons,
but the percentage who say if we're attacked, should we retaliate?
And I invite you to consider the reasons for that.
Just to conclude then I don't think we can say the British public are very well informed about this.
I think some will be OK if they have been following online news regularly.
But there is a big gap to fill and unfortunately,
the British school curriculum of the English one would have to be significantly reformed if this was ever to be rectified.
Thank you.