“The United States… have tested 1,032 nuclear weapons in the past, most of those being the same or bigger than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Hayley Gendron, a fourth-year international relations student at UBC. “There’s a lot that has happened that people don’t really know about… We want to bring that kind of thing to the front and have people actually be aware of things like that.”
This is the inspiration behind the Ban the Bomb project three UBC undergraduate students will be presenting to the UN-sponsored CTBTO Science & Technology Conference in Vienna this week.
The group is promoting their project through their website, as well as on Twitter and Instagram.
"So through all those, the campaign has the goal of spreading knowledge and raising awareness and providing accessible education for younger generations as well as just the general public to be able to raise concern over the effects of nuclear testing, both for human health, for environmental reasons, and hopefully the end goal is to be able to pressure global leaders that have yet to sign and ratify the CTBT [Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty] to actually ratify,” said Gendron.
“The ultimate goals overarching [of the campaign] would be to actually implement the CTBT,” said campaign member Bridgitte Taylor. “We figure the best way to do that is to get people on board with pressuring political leaders, so there’s where accessing public attitudes comes in.”
Originally the project was created as part of the coursework in POLI 377: Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control, with the goal of creating a way to strengthen the CTBT framework. Gendron, along with her classmates Sebastian Cooper and Bridgitte Taylor, chose to formulate a social media campaign that would spread awareness and educate the younger generations about the dangers of nuclear testing, as well as the necessity for stricter regulation and restrictions in this area.
“We had a very basic sort of outline of the types of things that we’d like to do -- using the hashtag to connect with people, developing a website that had really easy accessible information, and then developing online curricula that could be easily exported to classrooms,” said Cooper, a third-year international relations student and part of the team heading to Vienna this week.
Professors Matt Yedlin, from the department of electrical and computer engineering and Allen Sens, in the department of political science, liked the project so much they offered the students the opportunity first to accompany them to Vienna, and then to present at the conference themselves.
“From our perspective, their project showed a potentially effective application: a multifaceted web-based platform to engage the public and marshal public opinion to encourage support for treaty ratification,” Sens wrote in an email.
The course which spawned Ban the Bomb Campaign is unique on several counts: it is taught through Flexible Learning, a method of teaching which combines video lectures with in-class discussions and allows for more back-and-forth between the professor and students. As well as this, the course blends together both engineering and political aspects of the topic.
“The subject matter (nuclear weapons) really requires an interdisciplinary approach,” said Sens. “So we designed a course that engages physical and life sciences and social sciences and humanities.”
The team hopes that they will eventually be able to expand Ban the Bomb into a multifaceted tool that can be used by a variety of audiences by increasing their social media presence, developing more educational videos and eventually an interactive map which would help illustrate the widespread effects of nuclear testing.
In the highly charged discourse surrounding nuclear testing politics, has the group experienced negative reactions to the campaign?
“Pushback?” Taylor shakes her head. “Not yet.”
“Not yet,” Cooper agrees. “There will eventually be some…. But I think the fact that we acknowledge that and are prepared to deal with that is fine.”
For now, they’re just excited to see the last eight months’ of work come to fruition on such a world-class stage. “We’re undergrads, and that’s happening -- that doesn’t happen very often, these kind of opportunities,” said Gendron.