The Nuclear Taboo

LGM Emerita Charli Carpenter has some thoughts on the nuclear taboo:

Survey data from Human Security Lab, the research lab that I run at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, shows that the percentage of Americans who consider the use of nuclear weapons to be a violation of international law has held steady at 83 percent since 2017, even as nuclear brinkmanship has returned and the NPT has wavered. And in survey experiments where civilians are given information on international law or reminded of the inhumane effects of nuclear weapons (as the media has been focused on recently), their willingness to support the use of nuclear weapons and indiscriminate attacks—even in scenarios designed to incentivize that use—decreases.

But perhaps the best indicator that the nuclear non-use norm is stronger than it may appear, at least in the United States, is the fact that significant numbers of military-trained Americans now see nuclear weapons use—especially if the United States has not first absorbed a nuclear strike—as a war crime. New polling data from my lab, published in July in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, shows U.S. troops and veterans view nuclear weapons use against populated areas as unlawful in roughly equal proportions to the general U.S. population.

Moreover, military-trained Americans trust the president’s sole nuclear launch authority and wide-ranging discretion over nuclear weapons even less than the general population: Only 31 percent believe the commander in chief should be able to launch a nuclear weapon whenever they decide it’s necessary. The trust that exists plummets in times of actual nuclear security crises, as our data showed during the recent 12-day war between Israel and Iran: The number of active-duty military and veterans who said nuclear weapons should be used not at the president’s discretion but only in “extreme and limited circumstances” rose from 48 to 61 percent during the crisis. A steady 21 percent said nuclear weapons should never be used at all. Furthermore, the number who support specific kinds of limitations (such as oversight over the president or a no-first-use norm) has increased across the board since Trump took office. This dovetails with renewed domestic efforts to introduce currently nonexistent limitations on U.S. nuclear use.

She brings additional work on public opinion in the US and in other countries, and paints a relatively optimistic picture of how the world thinks about nuclear weapons, the gist being that “unthinkable” remains the norm. I largely agree- I think we have to take seriously the fact that Russia could bring its war against Ukraine to a rapid end if it decided to engage in a limited nuclear campaign, and yet it has decided against this path- but of course we have seen a great number of unthinkable things become thinkable in the 21st century. So we’ll see.