From Moscow With a Mushroom Cloud? Russian Public Attitudes to the Use of Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict With NATO

• Author: Michal Smetana,Michal Onderco
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221118815
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2023, Vol. 67(2-3) 183–209

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027221118815

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From Moscow With a

Mushroom Cloud? Russian

Public Attitudes to the Use of

Nuclear Weapons in a Conf‌lict

With NATO

Michal Smetana

1

and Michal Onderco

2

Abstract

This article presents f‌indings of an original survey experiment on public attitudes

toward nuclear use conducted on a representative sample of Russian citizens. We

randomly assigned our participants to experimental treatments with vignettes de-

scribing a military conf‌lict between Russia and NATO in the Baltics, where Moscow

considered a limited nuclear “escalate-to-deescalate”strike to avert defeat. Our

f‌indings show that Russians are signif‌icantly more averse to nuclear strikes than to the

corresponding use of conventional missiles. The participants disapproved similarly of a

demonstrative nuclear explosion in an unpopulated area and of nuclear strikes in a

more escalated scenario. We also found associations between the moral values of

individuals and strike support corresponding to earlier studies in the United States.

Finally, our participants reported similar concerns about both nuclear and conventional

strikes, with the worry about civilian casualties and the suffering of victims at the top of

the list across experimental treatments.

1

Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

2

Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The

Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Michal Smetana, Faculty of Social Sciences (Institute of Political Studies / Peace Research Center Prague),

Charles University, Smetanovo nabrezi 6, Prague 11000, Czech Republic.

Email: smetana@fsv.cuni.cz

Keywords

Russia, nuclear weapons, nuclear taboo, survey experiment, public attitudes, NATO,

moral foundations theory

Introduction

A decade ago, Press, Sagan, and Valentino (2013) made a splash in our f‌ield with an

original survey experiment on public attitudes toward nuclear strikes. Their f‌indings

demonstrated that American citizens were signif‌icantly less averse to the military use of

nuclear weapons than previously thought, setting off a new wave of research into the

nuclear nonuse norm, or the “nuclear taboo.”Unlike earlier historical accounts of high-

level decision-making (Tannenwald 2007;Paul 2009;Sauer 2015), this new wave has

been f‌ielding large-N surveys to examine public attitudes toward the use of nuclear

weapons under different experimental conditions (Sagan and Valentino 2017;Haworth,

Sagan, and Valentino 2019;Rathbun and Stein 2020;Koch and Wells 2020;

Montgomery and Carpenter 2020;Smetana and Vranka 2021;Bowen, Goldf‌ien, and

Graham 2022; see Smetana and Wunderlich 2021 for a review). However, most of these

studies have mainly focused on the United States; only recently have scholars started to

conduct these experiments to investigate (non)use attitudes in other nuclear-armed

countries (Sukin 2020;Egel and Hines 2021;Dill, Sagan, and Valentino 2022;

Horschig 2022;Allison, Herzog, and Ko 2022).

Arguably, the key nuclear-armed country for which we currently lack this kind of

experimental evidence is the Russian Federation. Russia possesses by far the largest

nuclear arsenal among non-Western countries, and it is the only actor that can compete

with the United States in the number of nuclear warheads and their delivery systems

(Kristensen and Korda 2022). Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 led to the

dramatic deterioration of East-West relations, and great power competition has returned

as the main strategic concern in the “third nuclear age”(Smetana 2018;Cooper 2021;

Futter and Zala 2021). Since February 2022, Russia has been involved in full-scale war

in Ukraine, during which Moscow made both explicit and implicit nuclear threats (for a

chronology, see Arndt and Horovitz 2022). This war further highlights the signif‌icance

of the Russian case and underlines the need to gain new insights into Russian views on

the use of nuclear weapons.

To address the lack of such studies in the Russian context, we conducted a survey

experiment on public attitudes toward nuclear use on a representative sample of

1,507 Russian citizens. Rather than merely replicating earlier experimental work in a

different national setting, our aim was to design an original survey revolving around

f‌ictional but realistic scenarios that ref‌lect the urgent geopolitical concerns in the

contemporary international security environment. Our participants received vignettes

describing a military conf‌lict between Russia and NATO countries in the Baltics. Many

Western analysts argue that this is where the threat of Russian nuclear use primarily lies

nowadays: facing conventionally superior NATO armies, Moscow could conduct a

184 Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution 67(2-3)