Poll: Leaders out of touch on nukes
While George Bush and Vladimir Putin squabble about the location of missile defense sites and ramp up the rhetoric about a new cold war, a new poll indicates that the public in both countries broadly support measures to reduce their countries’ nuclear arsenals. According to the poll, conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org and the Center for International ...
While George Bush and Vladimir Putin squabble about the location of missile defense sites and ramp up the rhetoric about a new cold war, a new poll indicates that the public in both countries broadly support measures to reduce their countries' nuclear arsenals.
While George Bush and Vladimir Putin squabble about the location of missile defense sites and ramp up the rhetoric about a new cold war, a new poll indicates that the public in both countries broadly support measures to reduce their countries’ nuclear arsenals.
According to the poll, conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org and the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Maryland, healthy majorities in both countries support taking nuclear weapons off of high alert, participating in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, sharing information on weapons stocks, and using nuclear weapons only if attacked first. Remarkably, 73 percent of Americans and 63 percent of Russians believe that all nuclear weapons should be eliminated, assuming that a proper verification procedure were in place.
The poll results indicate that the public is broadly in favor of the kind of deep arsenal cuts outlined by elder statesmen George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn in a Wall Street Journal editorial (pdf) earlier this year, which partly inspired the poll. The issue of nuclear disarmament has fallen from the public eye since the end of the Cold War.
World Security Institute Director Bruce Blair, who spoke at the poll’s unveiling, believes this is because the public understands neither the scale of the United States’ and Russia’s nuclear programs nor how short a fuse they are on. According to this and previous polls, most Americans and Russians vastly underestimate the size of their countries’ nuclear arsenals and are unaware of how many are on high alert, meaning they can be deployed in a matter of minutes in response to a perceived threat. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara laid out many of the risks in an FP cover story in 2005.
Blair feels that the political moment may soon arrive when leaders will be forced to recognize the public’s desire to reduce the nuclear threat. “What this poll shows is that the public’s view is poles apart from the actions of their government,” he said.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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