Wednesday, September 17, 2025, 1:00 – 3:00 pm PT

Backers of nuclear deterrence are thought to use strategic logic, while nuclear disarmament advocates are believed to embrace moral reasoning. Yet, policymakers and diverse publics may hold both—ostensibly contradictory—preferences. Recent studies find that publics in Western, democratic countries support the nuclear strikes underpinning deterrence policy. But other scholarship indicates that these 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 deterrence and disarmament really reflect global public views on the bomb? What explains a multitude of inconsistent scholarly results? We argue that deterrence and disarmament are not necessarily incompatible tools for reducing nuclear dangers and point to several ways individuals might simultaneously hold space for both pro- and anti-nuclear policy positions. We provide observational evidence on global nuclear attitudes from a novel survey in 24 countries on 6 continents (N=27,250), including many publics that are rarely surveyed on nuclear issues. Unlike isolated studies of these phenomena, our analysis strongly confirms that publics do not subscribe to categorical views of nuclear weapons.