Would the U.S. Drop the Bomb Again? 59% of Americans would if similarly provoked

[jimmy olsen]

I'm not surprised. People haven't changed at all, and its folly to think so.

The scenario in this poll was quite simplistic though. And doesn't quite warrant using the bomb in reprisal, in my opinion, but I can think of plenty situations that would warrant it.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/would-the-u-s-drop-the-bomb-again-1463682867

Would the U.S. Drop the Bomb Again?

Public opinion supported the strike on Hiroshima—and if provoked, many Americans might well back nuclear attacks on foes like Iran and al Qaeda


By Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino

May 19, 2016 2:34 p.m. ET

330 COMMENTS   
 
The White House's recent announcement that President  Barack Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima has sparked an intense debate among politicians and pundits over what he should or should not say there. The president's advisers insist that he "will not revisit the decision" to use nuclear weapons on that city in August 1945.

But the controversy has focused too narrowly on historical questions. We might instead ask whether the U.S., in similar circumstances today, would drop the bomb again. Our own research has found that the American public is surprisingly open to that prospect.

In the immediate wake of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan's surrender, the American public was firmly behind President  Harry Truman's decision to use atomic weapons. In September 1945, 53% of respondents in a nationwide Roper poll agreed that the U.S. "should have used two bombs on two cities, just as we did." Some 14% thought that "we should have dropped one on some unpopulated region, to show the Japanese its power" first. Just 4% of the public felt that "we should not have used any atomic bombs at all." And 23% of respondents agreed that "we should have quickly used many more of them before Japan had a chance to surrender."

In the decades since World War II, U.S. public approval of Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons has declined significantly. In July 2015, just before the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings, we asked YouGov, a leading survey firm, to replicate the 1945 Roper poll, using a representative sample of 840 U.S. citizens.

This time, only 28% of respondents agreed that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been the right choice, while 32% indicated support for a nuclear demonstration strike. More than three times as many Americans—almost 15% in 2015 compared with 4% in 1945—now said that the U.S. shouldn't have dropped any nuclear weapons on Japan. And just 3% regretted that the U.S. hadn't dropped "many more" atomic bombs before Japan surrendered.

Many observers have pointed to such numbers as evidence of a durable postwar public aversion to using nuclear weapons. In his 2011 book "The Better Angels of Our Nature," the Harvard psychologist  Steven Pinker wrote of a "nuclear taboo": After World War II, he argued, "it began to sink in that [nuclear] weapons' destructive capacity was a different order from anything in history." More recently, Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote that  John Hersey's harrowing 1946 book "Hiroshima" had single-handedly created "a powerful moral taboo" that "made the future use of nuclear weapons unthinkable." This taboo has been reinforced, some claim, by ongoing international efforts to ban deliberate attacks on civilians in wartime, a doctrine enshrined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

But public-opinion polls looking back at the atomic bombings cannot tell us whether the American public has turned against the use of such weapons or has simply changed its views of Japan, a wartime adversary turned peacetime ally. And they cannot assess the depth of any present-day taboo against using nuclear weapons. Traditional polls do not force the public to contemplate the kind of trade-off that President Truman faced in 1945: between using nuclear weapons on enemy cities, with high civilian casualties, and launching an all-out invasion that could mean the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops.

To explore how the U.S. public might react today to such choices, we asked YouGov last July to survey a representative sample of 620 Americans about a scenario evoking a 21st-century Pearl Harbor. To echo the dilemma the U.S. faced in August 1945, participants read a mock news article in which the U.S. places severe sanctions on Iran over allegations that Tehran has been caught violating the 2015 nuclear deal. In response, Iran attacks a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, killing 2,403 military personnel (the same number killed by Japan at Pearl Harbor in 1941).

Congress then declares war on Iran, and the president demands that Iran's leadership accept "unconditional surrender." U.S. generals give the president two options: mount a land invasion to reach Tehran and force the Iranian government to capitulate (at an estimated cost of 20,000 American fatalities), or shock Iran into unconditional surrender by dropping a single nuclear weapon on a major city near Tehran, killing an estimated 100,000 Iranian civilians (similar to the immediate death toll in Hiroshima). The poll's participants were reminded that Iran doesn't yet have an atomic weapon of its own.

The results were startling: Under our scenario, 59% of respondents backed using a nuclear bomb on an Iranian city. Republicans were much more likely to support such an attack, with more than 81% approving, but 47% of Democrats approved the nuclear strike as well. Even when we increased the number of expected Iranian civilian fatalities 20 fold to two million, 59% of respondents—the same percentage supporting the nuclear attack with the lower death toll—still approved of dropping the bomb.

To further echo Truman's choice, we ran a second version of the survey that offered respondents the option of ending the war by allowing Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah  Ali Khamenei, to stay on as a spiritual figurehead with no political authority. We hoped to mimic an option facing Truman and his advisers, who wrestled with softening the Allies' demand for an unconditional surrender by allowing  Emperor Hirohito to retain his throne as a symbolic head of state. Some 41% of our respondents preferred this diplomatic option to either dropping the bomb or marching on Tehran. But virtually the same number (40%) still preferred dropping the bomb and killing 100,000 Iranian civilians to accepting this sort of negotiated peace.

This readiness seems to hold for other present-day adversaries as well. In an earlier survey that we conducted, published in 2013 in the American Political Science Review, we found that about 19% of respondents preferred a nuclear attack on an al Qaeda target even when told that conventional weapons would be just as effective. This number is close to the roughly 23% of Americans who had wanted to drop more atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. When facing our worst foes, a sizable segment of the American public feels an attraction to our most destructive weapons, not an aversion.

Would we drop the bomb again? Our surveys can't say how future presidents and their top advisers would weigh their options. But they do reveal something unsettling about the instincts of the U.S. public: When provoked, we don't seem to consider the use of nuclear weapons a taboo, and our commitment to the immunity of civilians from deliberate attack in wartime, even with vast casualties, is shallow. Today, as in 1945, the U.S. public is unlikely to hold back a president who might consider using nuclear weapons in the crucible of war.

Dr. Sagan is professor of political science and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Dr. Valentino is associate professor of government at Dartmouth College.

[The Brain]

You don't choose to nuke one city. You choose to nuke as many as it takes for the regime to surrender unconditionally. Hopefully it's just one but that cannot be the basis of your decision. If you drop the nuke and the Iranians go "fuck you you mass murdering asshole, we won't quit and we'll raise hell in world opinion!", do you just stop and go "ahem, what now?". The question posed is misleading IMHO.

[CountDeMoney]

Luckily public poll results aren't used during the development of the US Nuclear Posture Review.

[Martinus]

So is it "if similarly provoked" or "to save lives of 20,000 soldiers"? Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives of way more than 20,000 soldiers.

As usual, Tim is an idiot.

[Grinning_Colossus]

Wasn't the projection something like 500k US casualties? And if the invasion of the Home Islands was anything like Okinawa, millions of armed civilians would have perished as well.

[Martinus]

Yup. Now waiting for Tyr to come in to say it is racist to kill the enemy citizens to protect your own citizens from dying in a war.

[jimmy olsen]

So is it "if similarly provoked" or "to save lives of 20,000 soldiers"? Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives of way more than 20,000 soldiers.

As usual, Tim is an idiot.

The attack that kills 2403 American sailors is the provocation.

[Maladict]

So is it "if similarly provoked" or "to save lives of 20,000 soldiers"? Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives of way more than 20,000 soldiers.

As usual, Tim is an idiot.

The attack that kills 2403 American sailors is the provocation.

Didn't you guys recently have an attack that killed 2000 Americans?
And then decide two invade two countries with the loss of many more as well as countless civilians?
I don't recall nukes ever having been considered by anyone apart from the usual trolls on this board.

[Martinus]

So is it "if similarly provoked" or "to save lives of 20,000 soldiers"? Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives of way more than 20,000 soldiers.

As usual, Tim is an idiot.

The attack that kills 2403 American sailors is the provocation.

Are you talking about Pearl Harbour? That surely wasn't the reason that made the US decide to drop the nukes.

[jimmy olsen]

So is it "if similarly provoked" or "to save lives of 20,000 soldiers"? Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives of way more than 20,000 soldiers.

As usual, Tim is an idiot.

The attack that kills 2403 American sailors is the provocation.

Didn't you guys recently have an attack that killed 2000 Americans?
And then decide two invade two countries with the loss of many more as well as countless civilians?
I don't recall nukes ever having been considered by anyone apart from the usual trolls on this board.

The nations we invaded were not capable of any significant conventional resistance. Even their insurgencies were not that impressive compared to Vietnam.

War with Iran would be the most serious conflict that the US has been involved in since the Korean War.

[Razgovory]

So is it "if similarly provoked" or "to save lives of 20,000 soldiers"? Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives of way more than 20,000 soldiers.

As usual, Tim is an idiot.

The attack that kills 2403 American sailors is the provocation.

Didn't you guys recently have an attack that killed 2000 Americans?
And then decide two invade two countries with the loss of many more as well as countless civilians?
I don't recall nukes ever having been considered by anyone apart from the usual trolls on this board.

There was some talk about "bunker busting" nukes floated by the administration back in 2004 I think.  Didn't go anywhere though.

[grumbler]

The attack that kills 2403 American sailors is the provocation.

No. The belief that Hitler was building his own bomb was the provocation.

The rationale for using the bombs on japan was that it would end the war more surely and with less total loss of life than an extended blockade or an invasion.

[grumbler]

Didn't you guys recently have an attack that killed 2000 Americans?

Nope.  That was Paris, and involved a lot less than 2,000 killed.  In fact, it was one American killed, if you only think Americans should be counted.

[Maladict]

Didn't you guys recently have an attack that killed 2000 Americans?

Nope.  That was Paris, and involved a lot less than 2,000 killed.  In fact, it was one American killed, if you only think Americans should be counted.

The context of that post wasn't clear enough as to which event I was referring to? *rushing movement and sound*

[grumbler]

The context of that post wasn't clear enough as to which event I was referring to? 

You were being very opaque about everything except "recent."  If you mean something that happened 15 years ago, then "recent" doesn't mean what you think it does.

*rushing movement and sound*

I am sure that this made sense in your mind, but it makes no sense when typed out.  "Rushing" is a verb or gerund, neither of of which can be used like this.   Are you practicing being opaque again?