With U.S.-North Korea tensions heightened after weeks of fiery and furious rhetoric from President Trump and Kim Jong-un—pushing the world closer to nuclear conflict than it has been in decades—it’s worth taking a breath to consider what forces have kept the world’s nuclear-armed states from irradiating and annihilating each other in a shower of bombs.

Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino conducted a clever survey experiment to test Americans’ attitudes on the use of nuclear weapons. They summarize their findings in the current issue of International Security.

Americans are disturbingly unbothered by the idea of striking first with nuclear weapons.

According to a study published last week in International Security, a preeminent academic journal of international affairs, the strength of the nuclear taboo in America has been wildly overestimated. 

Since the 1945 nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have Americans developed moral taboos against using nuclear weapons and killing noncombatants?

Will the growth of nuclear power lead to increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism? Will the nonproliferation regime be adequate to ensure safety and security in a world more widely and heavily invested in nuclear power? The authors in this two-volume (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010) special issue of Dædalus have one simple and clear answer to these questions: It depends.

Recently declassified documents reveal that in October 1969, President Richard Nixon ordered the U.S. military to go on nuclear alert. Nixon’s decision to test his “madman theory” was meant to signal to leaders in Moscow and Hanoi his willingness to do whatever was necessary to end the war in Vietnam.

Susan Martin counters Scott Sagan’s proposition in “The Commitment Trap” (Spring 2000) that U.S. policy of “calculated ambiguity” is flawed. Sagan responds.

The author examines Washington's "calculated ambiguity doctrine," which holds that the United States does not rule out the use of nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological weapons attack. The author argues that the risks associated with this doctrine outweigh the benefits.