Danny O'Connor

Nuclear Arms Proliferation entailed a curriculum about as dense as its name implies. Enticed by the description of the course, as well as the fact that it was being offered by my home department, I figured I would try it out. While the class was a bit more difficult than I anticipated, I am confident in saying that I learned more in it than I have in many others taken at UC.

 

The class taught anything and everything related to the nuclear arms and nuclear weapons. We learned about the history of nuclear arsenals, from the dropping of the Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the controversial Iran Nuclear Deal that is still unfolding as I write this reflection. Additionally, we learned many of the technical aspects and terminologies associated with nuclear arms, such as what fissile materials are, what sorts of deployment mechanisms are employed to launch nuclear weapons, and the techniques through which nuclear arms are procured. Besides the interesting trivial facts, the class also provided a great deal of insight into larger concepts pertaining to international relations. I came to realize that while nuclear arms are often thought of as a colossal event of World War II and a driver of the Cold War, their existence has fundamentally changed the foreign policy strategies of nearly every nation in the world, and to this day provide a fundamental foundation upon which states form their own security strategies.

The class also helped my writing tremendously. While I already fancied myself to be a decent writer going into the course, the amount of research-style papers we did

 

provided great practice for more formal uses of APA, which seems to be taught much less often despite the fact that it is probably actually used more often than its MLA counterpart.

 

Attached as my artifact is my final paper assignment. It describes a hypothetical research proposal in which I would undertake a research project on biological weapons, another taboo class of weapons of mass destruction.