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)
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