The orbital instability of standing waves for the Klein-Gordon-Zakharov system has been established in two and three space dimensions under radially symmetric condition by Ohta-Todorova in 2007. In the one space dimensional case, for the nondegenerate situation, we first check that the Klein-Gordon-Zakharov system satisfies Grillakis-Shatah-Strauss' assumptions on the stability and instability theorems for abstract Hamiltonian systems; see Grillakis-Shatah-Strauss (J. Funct. Anal. 1987). As to the degenerate case that the frequency jωj ¼ 1= ffiffi ffi 2 p , we follow the recent splendid work of Wu (2017) to prove the instability of the standing waves for the Klein-Gordon-Zakharov system, by using the modulation argument combining with the virial identity. For this purpose, we establish a modified virial identity to overcome several troublesome terms left in the traditional virial identity.