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.
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.
By Lauren Sukin, Luis Rodriguez, Stephen Herzog | Analysis | October 6, 2026
