The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
Recent polling has suggested public opinion in the US and some Western European countries might support the use of nuclear weapons in some circumstances, while other studies show broad agreement in these populations with the goal of abolishing nuclear arsenals. This presentation will introduce the findings of a survey of over 25,000 people in 24 countries including the global north and the global south that aimed to evaluate public views on nuclear weapon use, deterrence, proliferation, and disarmament. It will offer evidence for widespread public accommodation of policy positions seen by scholars and policy experts as being incongruous, in opposition, or inconsistent, as well as strongly held minority views, and a segment that is undecided or swayable in either direction. Rather than a simple deterrence-disarmament binary, there appears to be strong support for banning the acquisition and possession of nuclear arms (including strong majority support for the TPNW) and moral opposition to nuclear weapon use, as well as a contingent willingness to support nuclear weapons use in some cases. The results show important disconnects between state positions and policies and nuclear thinking and feelings among the respective publics and support for the idea that many individuals seem to make contextual or conditional judgments about nuclear weapons rather than categorical distinctions based on deterrence or disarmament. The presentation draws on a recent article.
About the speaker: Stephen Herzog is Professor of the Practice at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where he previously co-chaired the Beyond Nuclear Deterrence Working Group. Herzog holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale University and was a Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich, an arms control official at the U.S. Department of Energy, and a researcher at the Federation of American Scientists. He is co-editor of Atomic Backfires: When Nuclear Policies Fail (2025).