Courses on international relations, U.S. foreign policy, Soviet foreign policy, and national security policy spend a great deal of time exploring the question of the Soviet or U.S. strategic threat. For all of its centrality to these courses, students often have, difficulty dealing with the issue in anything other than a gut feeling manner. In part, this is due to the highly technical and complex nature of the subject matter, but it is also due to the passive manner in which students are exposed to the subject. This essay presents one way of actively engaging students in the learning process, forcing them to formulate and defend their own view in the form of an individually or collectively produced intelligence estimate.Understanding why U.S. (Soviet) policy makers see a Soviet (U.S.) threat requires an understanding of the process by which threats are established. The most formal and authoritative U.S. government statements on the dimensions of the Soviet strategic threat are found in national intelligence estimates (NIE's). Typically, the intelligence estimating process is broken down into six functional steps: 1) requirement setting, 2) collection, 3) processing, 4) analysis, 5) reporting, and 6) receipt and evaluation by the consumer (Ransom 1970). NIE's are only one kind of finished intelligence produced by the intelligence community. There is no fixed length or format for an intelligence estimate to follow. The Senator Mike Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers (1971) presents a number of estimates on Vietnam that can be used by students as models. Ransom (1970) presents a handy checklist of questions that students as consumers can use to evaluate estimates.
