Reducing U.S. Public Support for Using Nuclear Weapons

• In Event: Rethinking the Strategy, Law, and Ethics of Nuclear Weapons

Abstract

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the majority of Americans are willing to support the use of nuclear weapons today in conditions that are similar to the strategic conditions of 1945, to end a war and avoid large scale American military casualties (Sagan and Valentino 2017). But does the public really understand the physical effects and political ramifications of nuclear weapons use? We provide evidence from a survey experiment that measures how “priming” subjects about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, the gender and age of victims, the legality or illegality of nuclear attacks, and the gruesome nature of nuclear deaths influence U.S. public support for nuclear weapons use in realistic wartime scenarios.

Authors

• Scott D. Sagan, Stanford University

• Benjamin A. Valentino, Dartmouth College