Rethinking the Deterrence-Disarmament Dichotomy: The Complex Landscape of Global Nuclear Weapons Preferences

Backers of nuclear deterrence are thought to use strategic logic, while nuclear disarmament advocates are believed to embrace moral reasoning. Yet policy makers and diverse publics may hold both—ostensibly contradictory—preferences. Recent studies find that publics in Western democratic countries support the nuclear strikes underpinning long-standing conceptions of deterrence policy. But other scholarship indicates that these very same publics want to abolish nuclear arsenals. A lack of comparative analyses across the Global North and the Global South limits the generalizability of these claims. Does a categorical dichotomy between nuclear deterrence and disarmament really reflect global public views on the bomb? What explains a multitude of seemingly inconsistent scholarly results? 

In this reflection essay, we argue that deterrence and disarmament are not necessarily incompatible tools for reducing nuclear dangers. We point to several ways that individuals might simultaneously accommodate both pro- and antinuclear weapons policy positions. To investigate this proposition, we offer a new observational dataset on global nuclear attitudes from a survey we conducted in 24 countries on six continents (N = 27,250). Unlike isolated studies of these phenomena, our data strongly confirm that publics do not subscribe to categorical views of nuclear weapons. This headline finding and novel dataset open new possibilities for studying nuclear politics.