Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants

Abstract

Numerous polls demonstrate that U.S. public approval of President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has declined significantly since 1945. Many scholars and political figures argue that this decline constitutes compelling evidence of the emergence of a “nuclear taboo” or that the principle of noncombatant immunity has become a deeply held norm. An original survey experiment, recreating the situation that the United States faced in 1945 using a hypothetical U.S. war with Iran today, provides little support for the nuclear taboo thesis. In addition, it suggests that the U.S. public's support for the principle of noncombatant immunity is shallow and easily overcome by the pressures of war. When considering the use of nuclear weapons, the majority of Americans prioritize protecting U.S. troops and achieving American war aims, even when doing so would result in the deliberate killing of millions of foreign noncombatants. A number of individual-level traits—Republican Party identification, older age, and approval of the death penalty for convicted murderers—significantly increase support for using nuclear weapons against Iran. Women are no less willing (and, in some scenarios, more willing) than men to support nuclear weapons use. These findings highlight the limited extent to which the U.S. public has accepted the principles of just war doctrine and suggest that public opinion is unlikely to be a serious constraint on any president contemplating the use of nuclear weapons in the crucible of war.

Virtuous violence from the war room to death row

“…Across all respondents, approval for the nuclear strike against Iranian civilians was 34.2%. This was lower than in the Sagan and Valentino study (9), although still substantial. But, as will be demonstrated below, overall support may be higher or lower depending on the nature of the sample, specific wording of questions, and the real-world conditions at the time of the survey.…”

“…Vengeful tendencies have been found to predict support for wars and assassinations (10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16) and to be prevalent in the desire to punish transgressors in everyday life as well (17). The strongest attitudinal predictor of vengefulness in warfare has been the degree to which an individual supports the death penalty for persons convicted of murder (16,18), a finding replicated in the Sagan and Valentino study (9).…”

“…Our first survey attempted to replicate the study by Sagan and Valentino (9). We sought to determine whether the relationships between political identity, attitudes toward the death penalty, and support for the use of nuclear weapons were reliable findings.…”

From Just War to Nuclear Pacifism: The Evolution of U.S. Christian Thinking about War in the Nuclear Age, 1946–1989

“…Second, as Alexander Downes has shown, during the pre-nuclear era governments and militaries often ignored the moral proscription against deliberately targeting civilian populations, usually when their military positions became precarious or in order to achieve victory at the lowest possible cost to themselves (Downes 2008). A recent study by Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino found that "The majority of the U.S. public has not internalized either a belief in the nuclear taboo or a strong noncombatant immunity norm" (Sagan and Valentino 2017). These findings call into question the assumption of the just war thinkers that a nuclear war could and would be fought with limited, counterforce strikes.…”

Why nuclear weapon ban treaty is unlikely to fulfil its promise

“…Domestic structures matternational security decision-making in different countries is to a different extent responsive to the public opinion. Furthermore, public opinion is not universally opposed to the nuclear weaponsin fact, the nuclear weapon taboo is quite weakly represented in public opinion (Press, Sagan, & Valentino, 2013;Sagan & Valentino, 2017). This is not to say that norm against the use of nuclear weapons does not exist -Western nuclear weapons states continue to explain the need to keep nuclear weapons, underlining their awareness of the existing norm against their use.…”