In the summer of 2023, as Russia threatened nuclear strikes against Ukraine, we conducted the most comprehensive academic survey of global attitudes toward nuclear weapons ever undertaken. Across 24 countries on six continents—from nuclear powers like France, the United Kingdom, and the United States to non-nuclear-armed states like Brazil, Nigeria, and Poland—we asked more than 27,000 people what they thought of the bomb.
Our research challenges decades of assumptions about nuclear politics. Contrary to conventional wisdom that views possessing and abolishing nuclear weapons as irreconcilable, our data reveal something far more complex: Many people around the world embrace both views simultaneously. They support maintaining nuclear arsenals for deterrence, but they also desire their complete elimination. They endorse the taboo against using nuclear weapons, but they also approve of nuclear strikes under certain circumstances.
These apparent inconsistencies are not reflective of some small, confused minority. Instead, the majority of individuals we surveyed have at least some views on nuclear weapons that seem contradictory. Understanding what drives this paradox and how it plays out is essential for formulating policy to navigate an increasingly complex and dangerous nuclear landscape.
Our scholarship shows that public opinion about deterrence and disarmament is more flexible than many policymakers may think. Publics may be open to solutions that pursue multiple objectives at once, including squaring short-term security interests with long-term disarmament aspirations. As a result, public opinion may be less constraining than previously imagined, with the public’s preferences instead creating space for creative diplomacy on arms control and risk reduction.
The deterrence-disarmament divide. The tension between nuclear deterrence and disarmament is as old as the atomic age itself. Since the end of World War II, nuclear strategists have argued that secure second-strike capabilities prevent great power wars. This so-called “nuclear revolution” is credited with saving countless lives by making the costs of great power conflict unacceptably high. The Cold War remained cold, they note, precisely because Washington and Moscow could annihilate each other. Even as arsenals have shrunk from Cold War peaks, the nine nuclear-armed states maintain that deterrence, with their approximately 12,200 warheads, remains essential for security.
Disarmament advocates, however, counter that deterrence means playing Russian roulette with humanity. They warn of accidents, miscalculations, and unauthorized nuclear use. They point to close calls like the 1983 Able Archer incident, when a NATO wargame may have been perceived by Soviet officials as preparation for a nuclear attack. And they note the catastrophic consequences of even a limited nuclear war. For instance, recent climate modeling suggests that a regional conflict between India and Pakistan could prompt devastating global nuclear winter conditions.
Disarmament proponents also argue that the very concept of a limited nuclear exchange is flawed. They explain that there is no guarantee that nuclear powers would refrain from unleashing their full destructive power once the nuclear threshold has been crossed.
These perspectives ostensibly offer radically different and seemingly irreconcilable views. Discussions of deterrence often emphasize rational calculation and military-strategic logic, whereas disarmament approaches usually focus on morality, norms, and activism. In academic, think tank, and nongovernmental organization circles, the two camps rarely engage productively. In government, they are often institutionalized in different bureaucratic circles. Deterrence work tends to sit in defense and military establishments, while arms control and multilateral nuclear governance are more often handled by foreign ministries. This is not a neat bureaucratic split, but rather a division of labor that can reinforce ideational divisions—although many individual officials and analysts, of course, straddle both worlds.
Yet both pro-deterrence and pro-disarmament positions often coexist in practice. US presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, while remaining committed to deterrence as the commander in chief of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, also expressed deep antipathy toward nuclear weapons. Reagan dreamed of rendering nuclear weapons obsolete even as he oversaw a massive nuclear buildup. President Barack Obama pledged to seek a world without nuclear weapons in his 2009 Prague speech, while concurrently modernizing the US arsenal. Donald Trump said there is no reason for the United States to build more nuclear weapons and even spoke of the need for “denuclearization,” all the while making nuclear threats against US adversaries.
The contradiction extends beyond Western leaders. In the 1960s, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser initially explored the acquisition of nuclear weapons to counter Israel. But after failing to obtain them, he became a champion of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), using it as a tool to stigmatize Israel. South African leaders developed a nuclear arsenal that they then voluntarily dismantled. These cases suggest that political actors may be able to embrace sharply opposed political positions or at least shift between them. The boundary between deterrence and disarmament views may be more permeable, and more contingent, than the conventional wisdom suggests.
Measuring the paradox. To investigate whether the global public shares this complexity of views about nuclear weapons, we fielded a large survey in June 2023. Our sample included people living in democracies and autocracies, nuclear-armed states and non-nuclear states, countries under the protection of the US nuclear umbrella, and those friendly with rival powers. We surveyed publics in 24 countries—Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We asked fewer questions in China, raising comparability challenges, but further details about Chinese public opinion can be found in our scholarly work.
We measured nuclear attitudes across multiple dimensions. First, we inquired about whether respondents supported a decrease in the size of the US nuclear arsenal. Second, we measured support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW, the 2017 international agreement that bans nuclear weapons and that no nuclear-armed state has joined so far). Third, we asked if survey respondents would want their own country to acquire (more) nuclear weapons. Fourth, we measured attitudes toward the nuclear taboo. And finally, two survey items asked respondents about the legitimacy of US nuclear weapons use in response to either nuclear or conventional attacks on US allies.
Select any two variables in this visualizer to see public preferences across countries. Pay attention to the overlap; in many cases, substantial numbers of people hold positions that seem incompatible—like supporting the nuclear ban treaty and, at the same time, supporting their country’s indigenous nuclear proliferation.
In , how do people who and those who overlap?
TPNW = Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
All surveyed countries
Sorted by the share supporting both views
Reading the circles. Each circle’s area is the share of respondents supporting that view, and the overlap is the share supporting both, drawn to scale. People supporting neither sit outside both circles, so that share is given as a number rather than drawn. (Figures may not add up to 100 because of rounding.)
The data are from an original survey conducted by the authors in June 2023 using Cint Marketplace. This visualisation represents 26,230 respondents across 23 countries. More details on the survey methodology—including the questionnaire and replication data—are available at doi.org/10.1017/S1537592725103666 and doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VPJUA8.
The results of our survey show that many individuals hold contradictory preferences, expressing both pro-deterrence and pro-disarmament views at once. We find evidence of these seemingly contradictory preferences across regions, political systems, and levels of economic development. From Jakarta to Stockholm, from São Paulo to Warsaw, many people navigated our questions about their attitudes toward the bomb with pragmatic complexity rather than ideological purity.
Consider some specific findings.
Solid majorities across nearly every country—in total, 73 percent of our sample—endorsed the taboo against using nuclear weapons that has held since 1945. But when asked, “Would you approve or disapprove of the United States using nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack on an ally?,” 47 percent of those we surveyed approved of nuclear retaliation. For example, in the United States, 68 percent of respondents supported Washington joining the TPNW, but 51 percent also approved of using nuclear weapons to defend a US ally against a nuclear attack, with 35 percent holding both views. In France, 69 percent supported the ban treaty, while 48 percent said they would approve of a US nuclear attack in an extended deterrence scenario, with 33 percent holding both views. (The full survey instrument is available online as an appendix to our published academic article.)
Even in countries without a nuclear arsenal, this tension was present. In Taiwan, 80 percent of the public supported the ban treaty, while 54 percent approved nuclear use, with 43 percent holding both views. In Sweden, 75 percent supported the ban treaty, which contrasts with the 47 percent approval of circumstantial US nuclear use, with 37 percent of the public on board with both.
This persistent mismatch does not point to cognitive dissonance so much as context-dependent reasoning. The same person could believe both that nuclear weapons should ideally never be used and that, in some extreme cases, they should be used.
Making sense of contradiction. How can people hold seemingly incompatible views about nuclear weapons?
For some, deterrence and disarmament may be sequential rather than mutually exclusive. In this view, one can support maintaining nuclear arsenals now while hoping for their eventual elimination in the future. This accommodates immediate security concerns while preserving long-term aspirations. It likewise mirrors the stated positions of many nuclear-armed states as well as the compromise embedded in the NPT, which recognizes the security interests of nuclear powers but commits them to eventual disarmament.
In other cases, people may distinguish between nuclear weapons as instruments of deterrence and nuclear weapons as instruments of warfighting. Being willing to support the use of nuclear weapons as a last resort doesn’t necessarily mean individuals think that they should be used. It may mean precisely the opposite. After all, deterrence is supposed to prevent war from happening in the first place by the threat of unleashing the unspeakable horrors of nuclear weapons.
That is, rather than viewing nuclear weapons policy through a single lens—strategic or moral—people might apply different frameworks to different questions. They might think strategically about deterrence, morally about proliferation, and contextually about nuclear weapon use. Far from representing confusion, this flexibility may well reflect adaptive thinking in the face of nuclear dilemmas.
Interestingly, knowledge about nuclear weapons doesn’t eliminate contradiction—and may even enhance it. Respondents with graduate degrees, military veterans, and those working in law, government, international organizations, and national security showed similar or higher levels of contradiction in their thinking compared to the general population. This suggests that contradictory preferences aren’t simply a function of ignorance or confusion. Instead, they likely reflect genuine tensions inherent to nuclear politics that even experts and national leaders struggle to resolve.
Implications for policy. The deterrence-disarmament paradox matters. Most clearly, it suggests that public opinion around the world may be more flexible and less constraining than policymakers usually assume.
Our survey data point to a far more complicated picture than publics in nuclear-armed countries strongly supporting deterrence and those in non-nuclear states favoring disarmament. Across the countries surveyed, 57 percent of respondents expressed at least some combination of deterrence- and disarmament-oriented views, rather than falling squarely into one camp.
This creates space for creative diplomacy and outreach. If deterrence and disarmament are means, not ends, then there may be political space for new options and coalitions to reduce nuclear risk. Unsurprisingly, people everywhere tend to seek peace and security for themselves, their loved ones, and their nations. This very human commonality may make it easier to progress toward overcoming seemingly insurmountable nuclear divides by reconciling short-term security interests with long-term disarmament aspirations.
Consider the ban treaty. Nuclear-armed states and their allies have dismissed the ban treaty as naïve and unworkable, largely refusing to participate in negotiations or join the treaty. Yet our survey reveals massive public support for the treaty even in countries under the US nuclear umbrella. In both South Korea and Japan, 76 percent of respondents back joining the TPNW. Even in the United States itself, 68 percent favor joining.
This doesn’t mean that these publics will actively pressure Seoul, Tokyo, or Washington to embrace the ban treaty. But it suggests that they aren’t as wedded to the nuclear status quo as their governments may assume. There may be much more domestic support than expected for nuclear risk reduction measures, arms control agreements, and nonproliferation initiatives, even if complete and verifiable disarmament remains a distant aspiration.
Similarly, there may be an opening for bridging initiatives. Rather than treating these options as binary choices, policymakers might explore ways to strengthen deterrence while simultaneously pursuing policies consistent with eventual nuclear weapons elimination. This could include verified warhead reductions that maintain strategic stability, no-first-use pledges that reinforce the nuclear taboo and reduce uncertainty, and investments in early warning systems that reduce the risks of accident and misperception.
Our global data also challenge Western-centric assumptions about nuclear attitudes.
Scholarly work so far has overwhelmingly focused on the US and European publics, with occasional studies in other countries. This has created a distorted picture of world opinion by projecting the views of publics living under nuclear umbrellas onto the global population. Our findings show that people in the Global South hold views just as complex and contradictory as those in the Global North. Brazilian attitudes toward nuclear weapons aren’t fundamentally different from German ones; Nigerian views aren’t alien to British perspectives. This matters because the Global South—often treated as a monolithic bloc in nuclear diplomacy—contains a significant diversity of opinion.
A noteworthy finding in our data is persistent support for the nuclear taboo, even among those individuals who approve of using nuclear arms in extreme situations. This suggests that anti-nuclear norms remain robust—something that will be encouraging to those analysts who worry that the taboo is eroding because of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The key finding of our study is not that publics welcome nuclear weapon use, but that some people would accept it if done conditionally and in exceptional cases. Policymakers should continue to work to strengthen the nuclear taboo through declaratory policy, military doctrine, and diplomatic engagement to ensure that nuclear use remains a remote, nearly inconceivable policy of last resort.
Embrace complexity of views. The nuclear landscape is growing more dangerous. Russia has continuously threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal. North Korea continues testing its nuclear delivery systems. Arms control agreements have collapsed, with the New START Treaty—the last agreement limiting the US and Russian arsenals—expiring in February with no replacement in sight. Meanwhile, new technologies like hypersonic missiles, cyber weapons, and artificial intelligence are complicating deterrence and increasing the risk of miscalculation.
Against this backdrop, the binary deterrence-versus-disarmament framework looks increasingly inadequate. The real challenge isn’t choosing either security through nuclear deterrence or security through nuclear abolition. It is about finding ways to reduce nuclear dangers, while accommodating the legitimate security concerns that drive nuclear-armed states to maintain these weapons and others to consider acquiring them.
Our research suggests that people worldwide understand this complexity intuitively. They don’t demand ideological purity on nuclear policy. Rather, they are comfortable with pragmatic approaches that pursue multiple objectives simultaneously: maintaining deterrence where necessary, pursuing reductions where possible, and strengthening norms against nuclear use.
Policymakers should take note. Citizens worldwide supporting both deterrence and disarmament are not rare outliers. Instead, contradictory views in global public opinion are a notable feature of nuclear politics. This is because nuclear weapons present genuine dilemmas without definite solutions. They promise security to some by threatening catastrophe to many. People believe they prevent wars precisely because they risk an apocalypse.
That many people worldwide recognize this complexity and hold seemingly contradictory views reflects pragmatism, not confusion. The question is not whether people are consistent but whether policymakers can navigate the genuine strategic, moral, and contextual tensions that these weapons create.