THE FOUNDATIONS OF NUCLEAR ORDER
Norms, Attitudes, and International Institutions
Michal Smetana, Ph.D.
HABILITATION THESIS
Masaryk University
Faculty of Social Studies
2021
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Smetana, Michal. The Foundations of Nuclear Order: Norms, Attitudes, and International Institutions.
Habilitation thesis. Masaryk University, Faculty of Social Studies. August 2021.
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Contents
Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................................4
Introduction and Author’s Commentary.................................................................................................6
Part 1: Nuclear Order and Public Attitudes
1. Nuclear Taboo 3.0: Research Gaps and New Avenues in the Study of Nuclear Weapons
Nonuse…………………………………………………………………………………………………32
2. How Moral Foundations Shape Public Approval of Nuclear, Chemical, and Conventional Strikes:
New Evidence from Experimental Surveys............................................................................................38
3. The Lesser Evil? Experimental Evidence on Nuclear and Chemical Weapon “Taboos”.................51
4. From Moscow with a Mushroom Cloud? Russian Attitudes towards the Use of Nuclear Weapons in
a Conflict with NATO ...........................................................................................................................73
5. German Views on U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe: Public and Elite Perspectives .......................97
6. Elite-Public Gaps in Attitudes to Nuclear Weapons: New Evidence From a Survey of German
Citizens And Parliamentarians.............................................................................................................117
7. Disarming Arguments: How to Get the Public to Support Nuclear Abolition................................138
8. Do Germany and the Netherlands Want to Say Goodbye to US Nuclear Weapons?....................151
Part 2: Nuclear Order and International Institutions
9. Nuclear Weapons and Peaceful Change..........................................................................................161
10. NPT as an Antifragile System: How Contestation Improves the Nonproliferation Regime.........178
11. Stuck on Disarmament: The European Union and the 2015 NPT Review Conference..............197
12. Nuclear Infrastructure, Strategic Hedging, and the Implications for Disarmament .....................213
13. The More the Merrier: Time for a Multilateral Turn in Nuclear Disarmament..........................228
14. Weapons of Mass Protection? Rogue Asteroids, Nuclear Explosions in Space, and the Norms of
Global Nuclear Order..........................................................................................................................235
15. A Nuclear Posture Review for the Third Nuclear Age..................................................................249
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Acknowledgements
This habilitation thesis is the result of six years-long research endeavor. As always, there were
ups and downs along the way, but the destination was certainly worth it. And I am indebted to
a number of people and institutions who helped me to get to the place where are I am now.
Firstly, I would like to thank Masaryk University and particularly professor Jan Holzer
for giving me the opportunity to defend my habilitation thesis at this respectable academic
institution. I greatly appreciate the administrative support of my application, particularly the
kind help of Katerina Majdanova and Martina Nedomova, who guided me through the maze
of formal requirements. Being born in Brno and having most of my family from this area, the
decision to go through the habilitation process here carries a special symbolic significance for
me, and I do hope this is merely the first step of our mutual collaboration.
Secondly, I am indebted to my alma mater, Charles University, and particularly the Peace
Research Center Prague (PRCP), a university Center of Excellence that I have coordinated at
the Faculty of Social Sciences since 2018. I am proud of how our small center has grown
dynamically grown a respectable research institution and I am indebted to all my amazing
colleagues who helped to make this dream a reality: Harald Müller, Michal Parizek, Marek
Vranka, Carmen Wunderlich, Michal Onderco, Ondrej Rosendorf, Jan Ludvik, Vojtech
Bahensky, Tomas Weiss, Irena Kalhousova, Kamil Klosek, Jan Hornat, Barbora Fuksova, Nina
Spitalnikova, Barbara Dufkova, Michal Tomasek, Tomas Bruner, Nikola Kurkova Klimova,
Jakub Tesar, Marie Nemeckova, and Krystof Kucmas.
Thirdly, I am grateful to Stanford University in California and particularly its Center
for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), where I had an opportunity to spend six
months as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. I am particularly grateful to professor Scott Sagan, who
was my mentor during that time and had a tremendous impact on my work.
Fourthly, I would like to thank my co-authors, who teamed up with me and worked on
several articles that are included as a part of this thesis. Some have already been mentioned
above – Carmen Wunderlich, Marek Vranka, Ondrej Rosendorf, Michal Onderco – others are
Joseph O’Mahoney, Ondrej Ditrych, and Tom Etienne.
In addition, I would also like to highlight individuals who gave me valuable feedback on
some of the papers included in this collection, in particular Nina Tannenwald, Benjamin
Valentino, Maria Rublee, Janina Dill, Charli Carpenter, Brian Rathbun, Anne Harrington,
Jeffrey Knopf, Benoit Pelopidas, Alex Montgomery, Matthew Kroenig, Alexander Lanoszka,
Steven Pifer, Reid Pauly, Jacquelyn Schneider, Michelle Bentley, Wolfgang M. Wagner,
Lauren Sukin, Stephen Herzog, Rebecca Davis Gibbons, Lisa Koch, Doreen Horschig, Wyn
Bowen, Matthew Moran, Dan Kaszeta, Jacques Hymans, Oliver Meier, Falk Ostermann, Liviu
Horovitz, Debra Lieberman, Tyler Bowen, Kristin Ven Bruusgaard, Nikolai Sokov, Hanna
Notte, Asfandyar Mir, Colin Garvey, Fabricio Fialho, Joel Marks, Tariq Rauf, and many
anonymous reviewers, as well as the editors of International Affairs, International Studies Review, World
Politics, The Washington Quarterly, International Interactions, European Security, Contemporary Security
Policy, Survival, and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I am also indebted to the editors of books where
I published two of my papers as chapters: T.V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson, Harold A.
Trinkunas, Anders Wivel, Ralf Emmers, and Nikola Schmidt.
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Over the years, I have also deeply appreciated the support and friendship of a number
of young Czech scholars whom I met during my Ph.D. studies, especially Dagmar Rychnovska,
Jan Daniel, Jakub Zahora, Hana Kubatova, Anna Durnova, Jakub Eberle, and Sarah
Komasova.
For continuous inspiration, I am idebted to all my students over the years. Teaching is
an aspect of academic work I have loved since the very beginning and also something I want to
carry on with in the future. I am thankful to Tomas Karasek (Department of Security Studies),
Jan Karlas (Department of International Relations), and Michel Perottino (Department of
Political Science) for giving me the opportunity to teach my courses at their respective
departments at our faculty.
I also gratefully acknowledge funding from the Charles University Research Centre
program UNCE/HUM/028 (Peace Research Center Prague/Faculty of Social Sciences) and
the Fulbright Program.
To conclude, I would like to thank my close friends and family for their love and support:
Eva Faltusova, Maxmilian Novy, Michaela Hubalkova, Tereza Svobodova, Ivo Graca, David
Klimovic, Nina Spitalnikova, Olga Mincicova, Bohdan Klocurek, Daniel Petkevic, Jan
Stiborek, Marek Schilla, my parents, Ruzenka, Piskot, and most importantly my beloved
girlfriend Karolina. Love you all.
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Introduction and author’s commentary
The invention of nuclear weapons and their use against Japan in the final weeks of the Second
World War fundamentally changed the course of international politics (cf. Brodie 1946; Paul,
Harknett, and Wirtz 1998). However, only a handful of nuclear-capable states have acquired
these weapons (see Fuhrmann and Tkach 2015) and they have never been used in warfare since
August 1945 (Tannenwald 2007). Arguably, one of the key factors explaining this unusual
pattern of restraint is the emergence and gradual establishment of the nuclear order: a complex
structure of international institutions, norms, rules, and practices that regulate the global
governance of nuclear technology (Walker 2000; Müller and Wunderlich 2013; Tannenwald
2018b; Smetana 2020b).
For the past six years, I have been exploring the foundations of the global nuclear order
in my academic research. In particular, I have studied how the main pillars of the nuclear order
–	non-proliferation, arms control, disarmament, deterrence, and non-use – shape and are
shaped by norms, rules, practices, and ideas about appropriate conduct in nuclear affairs. This
habilitation thesis represents a collection of fifteen of my papers on this subject, divided into two
thematic sections. The first section draws mainly on large-N data and statistical methods, with
a focus on the study of individuals’ attitudes towards nuclear weapons. The second section
approaches the problem from a more macro perspective, exploring the dynamics of
international institutions in global nuclear politics using qualitative methods such as in-depth
interviews or historical case studies. In this introductory commentary, I identify my selection
criteria for the inclusion of individual papers, present a detailed outline of the thesis and its
individual chapters, discuss some summary conclusions from this body of scholarly work, and
sketch promising avenues for further research.
Selection criteria
After numerous consultations with senior colleagues and much consideration, I have decided to
apply several criteria for the inclusion of individual papers into this habilitation corpus. First, I
strive for thematic homogeneity; that is, I have only included the papers that explicitly deal with
some aspects of the global nuclear order and nuclear weapons politics. This led me to remove
from consideration my academic work in other areas – for example, my research on frozen
conflicts (Smetana and Ludvík 2019a; Ganguly et al. 2019; Klosek et al. 2021), strategic
coercion (Smetana and Ludvík 2019b), or the Chemical Weapons Convention (Martínková and
Smetana 2020). It is, nevertheless, worth mentioning that there are important linkages between
these topics and issues in global nuclear politics, which are certainly worth further academic
inquiry in the future.
Second, I seek epistemological and methodological heterogeneity; that is, my aim was to put
together a selection of papers that demonstrate a diversity of methodological approaches under
different epistemological traditions. The first section of this dissertation thesis primarily builds
on survey (chapters 5–8) and experimental survey (chapters 2–4) methodology, and the use of
statistical methods to analyze large-N data. In contrast to these quantitative approaches, the
second section of the thesis uses diverse qualitative approaches and data collection methods. For
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example, chapter 10 introduces a novel conceptual framework and applies it to two historical
cases of nuclear proliferation, chapter 11 examines the institutional bargaining dynamics
drawing on in-depth interviews with diplomatic representatives, chapter 12 employs
counterfactuals and scenarios, and chapter 15 analyzes archival as well as contemporary policy
documents on U.S. nuclear weapons doctrine.
Third, I include both single-authored and collaborative articles, as I believe that scholars
at this stage of their career should be able to demonstrate the ability to work on both solo
endeavors and to collaborate with other academics on joint research projects. As such, onethird
of the papers in the habilitation corpus are written solely by me. For the remainder, I am
always the first author with a majority contribution to all aspects of the writing process (except
for chapter 5, which is based on a collaborative article where I am listed as a second author with
a 50% contribution).
Fourth, I have excluded two papers that are essentially re-worked versions of chapters
from my Ph.D. dissertation (Smetana 2020a; Smetana and Onderco 2018). Although they are
both relevant to my postdoctoral research concerning the global nuclear order, they have been
significantly revised since their original dissertation version, and they have been published in
high-impacted scientific journals. I believe that it would be inappropriate to include papers that
mostly use the same data and conceptual framework as the thesis that led to the completion of
my doctoral studies.
Fifth, while bibliometric indicators are certainly not the (only) guarantees of quality of
academic research, I have only included articles in academic journals with an impact factor that
is indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science database (Jimp). Many of these journals are
also highly-ranked (Q1–Q2) in the Journal Citation Reports, with International Affairs (chapter
11) currently ranked no. 1 in International Relations with a 2020 impact factor of 7.91. Out of
twelve journal articles, seven have been published (chapters 1, 2, 5, 8, 11, 13, and 15), two
accepted for publication (7 and 10), and three are currently being reviewed by the journal (3, 4,
and 6). The remaining three papers (9, 12, and 14) have been published as chapters in edited
volumes by respectable international publishing houses: Oxford University Press, Routledge,
and Springer.1
By applying these criteria, I have selected fifteen papers written between 2015 and 2021.
In Table 1, I provide the full list together with detailed information concerning the authorship,
respective academic journals or publishing houses, and the publication status as of August 2021.
1 To allow the possibility of the thesis review by scholars from abroad, I have also excluded my scholarly
publications written in the Czech language (e.g., Smetana 2013; 2014).
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Table 1. List of academic papers included in the habilitation corpus.
Chapter Title Author(s) Journal / publisher Status
1
Nuclear Taboo 3.0: Research Gaps and
New Avenues in the Study of Nuclear
Weapons Nonuse
Smetana,
Wunderlich
International Studies
Review
Published
2
How Moral Foundations Shape Public
Approval of Nuclear, Chemical, and
Conventional Strikes: New Evidence
from Experimental Surveys
Smetana, Vranka
International
Interactions
Published
3
The Lesser Evil? Experimental
Evidence on Nuclear and Chemical
Weapon “Taboos”
Smetana, Vranka,
Rosendorf
World Politics Under Review
4
From Moscow with a Mushroom
Cloud? Russian Attitudes towards the
Use of Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict
with NATO
Smetana, Onderco
Journal of Conflict
Resolution
Under Review
5
German Views on U.S. Nuclear
Weapons in Europe: Public and Elite
Perspectives
Onderco, Smetana European Security Published
6
Elite-Public Gaps in Attitudes to
Nuclear Weapons: New Evidence from
a Survey of German Citizens and
Parliamentarians
Smetana, Onderco
International Studies
Quarterly
Under Review
7
Disarming Arguments: How to Get the
Public to Support Nuclear Abolition
Smetana, Vranka,
Rosendorf
Survival Accepted
8
Do Germany and the Netherlands
Want to Say Goodbye to US Nuclear
Weapons?
Smetana, Onderco,
Etienne
Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
Published
9 Nuclear Weapons and Peaceful Change Smetana
Oxford University
Press
Published
10
NPT as an Antifragile System: How
Contestation Improves the
Nonproliferation Regime
Smetana,
O’Mahoney
Contemporary
Security Policy
Accepted
11
Stuck on Disarmament: The European
Union and the 2015 NPT Review
Conference
Smetana International Affairs Published
12
Nuclear Infrastructure, Strategic
Hedging, and the Implications for
Disarmament
Smetana Routledge Published
13
The More the Merrier: Time for a
Multilateral Turn in Nuclear
Disarmament
Smetana, Ditrych
Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
Published
14
Weapons of Mass Protection? Rogue
Asteroids, Nuclear Explosions in Space,
and the Norms of Global Nuclear
Order
Smetana Springer Published
15
A Nuclear Posture Review for the
Third Nuclear Age
Smetana
The Washington
Quarterly
Published
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Outline of the thesis
The first part of this habilitation thesis is composed of eight papers that examine attitudes of
individuals towards the core institutions, norms, and practices of the global nuclear order. To a
large extent, I have followed up on the groundbreaking work of my Stanford University mentor,
professor Scott Sagan and his colleagues, who were the first in our field to use experimental
survey methods to study contemporary public attitudes towards the use of nuclear weapons
(Press, Sagan, and Valentino 2013; Sagan and Valentino 2017; Haworth, Sagan, and Valentino
2019; Sagan and Valentino 2021). Over the last few years, their studies have inspired a number
of scholars in our field who have subsequently used survey methodology to examine public views
on different aspects of nuclear weapons (e.g., Rathbun and Stein 2020; Montgomery and
Carpenter 2020; Koch and Wells 2020; Sukin 2020a; Egel and Hines 2021; Horschig 2021;
Baron and Herzog 2020; Herzog, Baron, and Gibbons 2020; Bowen, Goldfien, and Graham
2021).
Chapter 1 contains my contribution to the special forum on nuclear nonuse published
by the International Studies Review. In the forum, along with my co-author Carmen Wunderlich, I
had the opportunity to join several respected scholars from our field (Scott Sagan, Benjamin
Valentino, Nina Tannenwald, Maria R. Rublee, Charli Carpenter, and Alexander
Montgomery) and debate the achievements of and future prospects for scholarly literature on
the military nonuse of nuclear weapons. Our paper provides a critical review of the first and
second waves of nonuse scholarship, and lays down seven promising avenues for the “third
wave”. These recommendations for further research include: (1) employing a	cross-national and
cross-cultural perspective; (2) sharpening the public-elite distinction; (3) examining the role of
gender and race; (4) investigating the generational aspect; (5) considering (neuro-)psychological
factors; (6) studying interactive linkages; and (7) applying a comparative approach with respect
to other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Within this habilitation thesis, this paper serves
well as an introductory piece to the papers included in the first part; in all of them, I have
attempted to follow up on our own recommendations and address several gaps that we had
identified in existing research on nuclear attitudes.
In chapter 2, I include a paper co-authored with a behavioral psychologist, Marek
Vranka, which we published in a quantitatively oriented scholarly journal International Interactions.
In this paper, we present the findings of our two survey experiments on public support for
nuclear, chemical, and conventional strikes in the United States. In particular, we draw on the
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) from moral psychology (Graham et al. 2013; Haidt 2007) to
examine how moral values of individuals interact with the approval of different kinds of strikes
and with the effects of information about the in-group and out-group fatalities in our
hypothetical scenarios. The results of our experiments show that while the American public is
relatively more averse to the employment of chemical weapons than to the use of nuclear or
conventional strikes against a foreign terrorist base, the overall relationship between strike
approval and the individuals’ moral values does not differ significantly with respect to the
weapon type. In addition, we found that individuals’ scores in so-called “binding” moral values
affect the public sensitivity for in-group fatalities. Altogether, this paper follows up on two
research recommendations discussed in chapter 1, namely the consideration of psychological
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factors in nuclear nonuse research, and the application of the comparative perspective vis-à-vis
other WMDs.
In chapter 3, I include our latest paper co-authored with Marek Vranka and Ondrej
Rosendorf, which builds on the experimental work discussed in chapter 2 and is currently under
review in World Politics. In this new paper, we once again examine the strength and nature of
nuclear and chemical weapons “taboos” with respect to public attitudes – this time in the
context of a large-scale armed conflict. To this end, we conducted an original survey experiment
on a sample of 2,350 American and British citizens to examine their views on nuclear and
chemical strikes in a hypothetical scenario of a war with North Korea. Our findings suggest that
even though the public in both the United States and the United Kingdom accurately judges
nuclear weapons as inherently more destructive and indiscriminate towards civilians, it is still
more averse to the use of chemical than nuclear weapons. Moreover, we show that individuals
share many similar concerns when they consider the use of nuclear and chemical strikes, above
all the enemy victims’ suffering, number of civilian fatalities, and the setting of a dangerous
precedent, although they are relatively more concerned about both the moral and the legal
dimensions of the military employment of chemical weapons. A follow up study that we
conducted on a sample of adult citizens in the United States and the United Kingdom
demonstrated that it is primarily the issue of identity where the attitudes to nuclear and chemical
weapons clash: individuals in both countries are significantly more likely to associate chemical
weapons with “rogue states” and terrorists, whereas nuclear weapons are associated with
modern powers. The findings of this paper contribute to our understanding of transnational
norms against the use of nuclear and chemical weapons, in line with our earlier
recommendation in chapter 1 to employ a comparative WMD perspective in the new wave of
nuclear nonuse scholarship.
In chapter 4, I include a paper co-authored with Michal Onderco, which is currently
being reviewed by the Journal of Conflict Resolution. For this research article, we fielded a survey
experiment on a large (N = 1,500) representative sample of Russian citizens. In the survey, we
presented the participants with a hypothetical scenario of a military conflict between Russia and
NATO in the Baltics, in which Moscow considered a limited use of nuclear weapons as an
“escalate-to-deescalate” strategy. Our findings show a strong aversion of the Russian public
towards the use of nuclear weapons, with an overwhelming majority of our participants
preferring to risk a military defeat than to agree with a demonstrative nuclear explosion or a
“de-escalatory” strike against a NATO base in Poland. An escalation of the conflict involving
NATO missile strikes on Russian territory had only a small and statistically insignificant effect
on the approval of nuclear weapon use. Further statistical analyses showed that participants’
gender, moral values, and the in-group/out-group attitudes are among the key factors
explaining the relative (un-)willingness of Russian citizens to support nuclear strikes. With
respect to nuclear (non-)use scholarship, which has been so far mostly U.S./Western-centric,
our contribution is unique in the sense that we are the first in our field to experimentally
examine contemporary public attitudes towards nuclear weapon use in the Russian Federation
and one of the first to do so in a non-Western nuclear weapon state – in line with our earlier
recommendations in chapter 1 to employ a	cross-national and cross-cultural perspective in the
study of nuclear nonuse norms.
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In chapter 5, I include a study of public and elite attitudes towards U.S. nuclear weapons
stationed on German territory, which I co-authored with Michal Onderco and published in the
academic journal European Security. The so-called “nuclear sharing” practice has been a pillar of
NATO extended deterrence in Europe since early in the Cold War. Yet, despite the growing
contestation of this practice in several host countries, there has been little scholarly research on
contemporary attitudes of the local citizens and political elites to the continued stationing of
nuclear weapons in Europe. To address this gap, we conducted original surveys of over 2,000
adult German citizens and 101 members of the Bundestag, the lower house of the German
parliament. Our results show skepticism about both the military and political purpose of U.S.
nuclear weapons in Germany and strong aversion towards their use under any currently
conceivable scenario. At the same time, we found a majority support among both politicians
and citizens for the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from German territory as part of bilateral
nuclear arms control initiatives between the United States and Russia. With this study, we once
again extended the reach of research on nuclear attitudes beyond the American context,
examining them in a European and, importantly, a non-nuclear-weapon state.
In chapter 6, I include another paper co-written together with Michal Onderco, which
is currently under review in the journal International Studies Quarterly. For this study, we used our
earlier dataset from the survey of German citizens and parliamentarians (chapter 5), yet focused
on a different aspect: the gaps between attitudes of the public and political elites The key
motivation for this project was the current lack of elite surveys in nuclear weapons scholarship;
while the recent surge in survey-based studies has certainly shed new light on public attitudes
toward nuclear weapons, we still know little about how these attitudes differ from those of
political elites. In our study, we found empirical support for several of our hypotheses about the
differences between elite and public attitudes concerning nuclear weapon use. Views differed
regarding extended deterrence, prospective withdrawal of forward-deployed weapons, and the
feasibility of global nuclear disarmament. Perhaps most importantly, we demonstrated
empirically, in line with our theoretical expectations, that political elites are more averse to the
hypothetical use of nuclear weapons than ordinary citizens – at least in the German context.
Our findings underscore the argument that scholars should survey both elite decision-makers
and the general public to obtain a comprehensive picture of attitudes towards pertinent
questions in our field.
In chapter 7, I include a paper written together with Marek Vranka and Ondrej
Rosendorf, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Survival. In this paper, we
have moved beyond nuclear nonuse attitudes and examined the public’s views on nuclear
disarmament. Among scholars interested in nuclear disarmament, there have been some
previous attempts to disaggregate individual pro-disarmament arguments and discuss their pros
and cons (Harrington, Gheorghe, and Fink 2017; Nebel 2012; Mian 2009). However, we still
lack rigorous empirical studies that examine how the general public perceives these arguments
and which of them are viewed as persuasive. To fill this gap, we conducted a survey on a
representative sample of 1,000 American adult citizens and examined the persuasiveness of the
six main arguments that are commonly used in disarmament advocacy as reasons for nuclear
abolition: nuclear terrorism, “rogue states” with nuclear weapons, nuclear war, humanitarian
impact of nuclear use, inadvertent nuclear accidents, and economic costs of maintaining nuclear
arsenals. We found that arguments about nuclear-armed “rogue states” and nuclear accidents
12
are relatively the most persuasive and resonate strongly with American citizens irrespective of
their political orientation. As expected, the arguments about the humanitarian impact of
nuclear weapon use, which have been at the forefront of the “humanitarian initiative” to abolish
nuclear weapons, do resonate with more liberal Democratic voters yet do not seem particularly
convincing to more conservative Republicans. Finally, the costs of maintaining a nuclear
arsenal, which some earlier scholarship thought to be a promising way to frame disarmament
(e.g., Harrington, Gheorghe, and Fink 2017), actually appear to be relatively ineffective in
reaching out towards the general public. Given the need to invigorate public support for nuclear
disarmament in order to make the “global zero” more politically salient, our findings are not
merely intriguing from a scholarly perspective, but also provide research-based policy advice
for NGOs and other disarmament advocates.
As chapter 8, the last in the first part of my thesis, I include a paper co-authored with
Michal Onderco and Tom Etienne, which we published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a
prominent U.S. journal with a strong focus on nuclear weapons. Once again, we re-visited the
issue of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe and public attitudes towards NATO’s nuclear-sharing
practice. In this paper we focus on two prominent European host states, Germany and the
Netherlands, which are currently debating the possibility of the prospective withdrawal of these
weapons from their territory. Given the changing political landscape in these two countries,
public support for these policies is a pertinent aspect of the political decisions over the future of
U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe. To contribute to the debate with some novel empirical data,
we fielded an original survey, where German and the Dutch citizens expressed their views on
the prospective U.S. withdrawal. We found that while German citizens are, overall, more
enthusiastic about the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from their territory, a majority of
citizens in both countries would support this step if it is taken as a part of arms control
negotiations between the United States and Russia. Given the crumbling of Cold War arms
control architecture in the past few years, findings of popular support for one of the core
institutions of the nuclear order are an encouraging sign for both the order itself and the future
bilateral negotiations between Washington and Moscow alike.
Chapter 9 opens the second part of my habilitation thesis, which contains seven papers
that focus on the interplay between norms, practices, and institutions of the global nuclear order
from a broader, “macro” perspective. Chapter 9 itself is a paper that I recently published the
Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations from Oxford University Press. In this chapter,
I identify key aspects of the “nuclear revolution” (Mandelbaum 1981; Jervis 1989) that are
pertinent to the problem of power transition and peaceful change in international affairs. To
this end, I elaborate on five primary institutions of nuclear order: nuclear deterrence, nuclear
arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear nonuse, and nuclear disarmament. Here and
elsewhere, I do not use the term “institutions” in the sense of formalized international
organizations or regimes, but rather institutions as understood by the English school of
International Relations: a recognized set of fundamental practices that constitute actors’
identities and underpin the legitimacy of their interactions in a given social order (Buzan 2004;
Bull 1977). The chapter unpacks the conceptual logic behind these five institutions of nuclear
order and explores their operations, mutual linkages and conflicts. To a large extent, the chapter
itself serves as an introductory text to this second part of my habilitation thesis, as these five
13
institutions of nuclear order and their mutual linkages represent a theme that appears
throughout all the remaining chapters.
In chapter 10, I include my paper co-written with British scholar Joseph O’Mahoney,
which has been accepted for publication in the journal Contemporary Security Policy as a
contribution to the forthcoming special issue on the 50th anniversary of the Nuclear NonProliferation
Treaty “NPT after 50”. Among the five institutions of nuclear order identified in
the previous chapter, this paper is primarily concerned with nuclear non-proliferation in general
and the NPT regime in particular. As a conceptual innovation, we introduce the concept of
“antifragility” (Taleb 2012) as a framework to understand the impact of occasional violations
of regime norms on the health of respective international regimes. Contrary to the prevailing
understanding of norm violations as a strictly negative phenomenon that always leaves the
regime damaged, we show that normative deviance is, under certain conditions, a potentially
useful “stressor” that helps antifragile systems (including social orders such as international
regimes) learn from their environment, improve, and adapt. We apply this conceptual
framework to the case of the NPT regime and the past violations of its nonproliferation norms
by India (a non-member) in the 1970s and Iraq in the 1990s (a member). The findings of our
paper challenge the prevailing catastrophizing narrative about the strictly negative impact of
norm violations on regime stability and further contribute to scholarly debates about
international norm dynamics within the global nuclear order.
In chapter 11, I include my paper that was previously published in the scholarly journal
International Affairs. The focus of this paper is also on the NPT regime and its dynamics,
particularly the interplay between nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament that is
currently at the forefront of conflicts within the regime. From the relevant actors, I focus on the
European Union (EU) and its member states. Though not a party to the treaty itself, the EU
has made a consistent effort since the 1990s to coordinate the positions of its member states and
gain a more prominent role in the area of nuclear non-proliferation in general and the NPT
review process in particular. In this paper, I examine the performance of the EU within the
2015 NPT Review Conference deliberations. Drawing on on-site observation, working papers,
statements, and a number of in-depth research interviews, I argue that various institutional
changes notwithstanding, the influence of the EU as a distinct actor in the NPT context
continues to be very limited, and the EU’s common position on non-proliferation is in bigger
disarray than ever before. The 2015 event has demonstrated the widening rift between the
member states on the future steps in nuclear disarmament and its related issues. I discuss how
the inability to maintain a coherent common position limits the EU “actorness´” and impedes
its striving for relevance in the NPT forums. In more general terms, the dynamics outlined in
this paper further highlight the limits of the EU’s common policy in foreign and security matters,
in which the national positions of individual member states are as divergent as in the case of
nuclear disarmament. Given the recent adoption and entry into force of the Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), it is reasonable to expect that conflicts over nuclear
disarmament will also continue to have a negative impact on the common position of the EU
at the 2022 NPT review conference.
In chapter 12, I include a paper that was originally published as a chapter in an edited
volume Global Nuclear Disarmament: Strategic, Political, and Regional Perspectives by Routledge. From
the perspective of the global nuclear order, the paper explores the interplay between “virtual
14
nuclear arsenals” and nuclear disarmament, deterrence, nonproliferation, and nonuse, using a
counterfactual thought-experiment to portray the dynamics of a hypothetical post-nuclear
world. More specifically, I explore conceptually the problem of nuclear infrastructure and the
resulting nuclear reconstitution capability in the context of aims to achieve a nuclear-weaponfree
world. This paper primarily highlights the paradoxical double-edged nature of nuclear
infrastructure in relation to the attempts to achieve the “global zero”. On the one hand,
advanced nuclear infrastructure does give current nuclear weapon owners confidence in the
sensitive final stages of nuclear abolition, allows for an effective dismantlement of the remaining
stockpiles, and facilitates the political decision to engage in deep cuts. On the other hand, the
maintenance of a robust infrastructure beyond the “zero point” as a latent virtual nuclear
arsenal poses a serious challenge to the stability of the disarmament regime, both from the
perspective of military-strategic interaction and the conflicts over justice and fairness in the
global nuclear order.
In chapter 13, I include a paper that I wrote with Ondrej Ditrych, previously published
in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. From the institutions of the global nuclear order identified in
chapter 9, this paper deals with nuclear arms control, building on the argument that the
multilateralization of arms control practice beyond the U.S.-Russian relationship is a
challenging yet necessary step on the road to nuclear disarmament. To a large extent, the paper
draws on our expert workshop organized on this subject at one of the annual Prague Agenda
conferences, where we had the opportunity to debate the issue with prominent experts on the
subject, including Rose Gottemoeller, the U.S. Under Secretary of State and the chief
negotiator of the New START Treaty. After explaining the context of and existing obstacles to
a “multilateral turn”, we propose the key steps on the road to a comprehensive multilateral arms
control regime. First, the key stakeholders should initiate a debate on a reduction-cum-freeze
deal that would lead to deep arsenal cuts by the United States and Russia on the one hand, and
unilaterally declared moratoria on new nuclear-weapons production by smaller nuclear-armed
states on the other. Second, there should be new efforts to advance the institutional ground for
multilateral arrangement by moving forward with debates over arms control terminology, trustbuilding,
and development of verification measures, not only by the nuclear weapon states but
also non-nuclear weapon states and NGOs. I believe that even though the paper was written
more than six years ago, its conceptual logic and the core policy recommendations continue to
be highly relevant in the current state of global nuclear politics. The need to multilateralize the
Cold War practice of bilateral nuclear arms control today represents one of the major challenges
for the global nuclear order, particularly given the current expansion of Chinese nuclear forces
and its contentious relationship with the United States (Korda and Kristensen 2021).
In chapter 14, I include my paper that was originally published in an academic volume
Planetary Defense: Global Collaboration for Defending Earth from Asteroids and Comets by Springer. The
paper draws on the proposals to develop nuclear explosive devices (NED) as suitable tools for
deflection of life-threatening near-Earth objects, and situates them into the context of the
normative dynamics of global nuclear order. I argue that despite the convenient physical
characteristics of nuclear explosions, there are potentially negative implications of developing
any options in this direction for the nuclear non-proliferation regime and the nuclear order
as such. Moreover, I critically discuss the seemingly “objective” scientific rationality of these
proposals and show how support for the NED development de-stigmatizes the use of
15
technology that, similarly to the impact of large asteroids, also carries a non-zero probability
risk of destroying human civilization. I conclude the paper with a pragmatic attempt to
reconcile and find the middle ground between the NED advocates and critics. While this
subject that has not yet received much attention in nuclear scholarship, it will likely become
highly pertinent in the years to come.
In the last chapter,15, I include my paper that was originally published in the journal
The Washington Quarterly. In this paper, I systematically analyze the 2018 Nuclear Posture
Review (NPR) report and discuss its individual provisions in the broader context of the
development of these strategic documents under previous U.S. administrations. In particular, I
provide a comparative analysis of the main strategic narratives, goals, and principles, as well as
the (re-)formulation of U.S. declaratory policy, the guidance for maintenance and development
of U.S. strategic capabilities, and the strategy for arms control, disarmament, and nuclear
nonproliferation initiatives. In contrast to initial reactions in media, I highlight the strong
patterns of bureaucratic policy continuity in the document, in line with the general development
of U.S. post-Cold War nuclear posture. In the concluding part of the paper, I discuss the
potential implications of the document with respect to the key institutions of the global nuclear
order, including nuclear deterrence, arms control, and disarmament.
Summary conclusions and avenues for further research
In the paper in chapter 1 of this habilitation thesis, my colleague Carmen Wunderlich and I
have proposed seven promising avenues for research that previous nuclear weapons scholarship
has not yet satisfactorily engaged with: (1) employing a	cross-national and cross-cultural
perspective; (2) sharpening the public-elite distinction; (3) examining the role of gender and race;
(4) investigating the generational aspect; (5) considering (neuro-)psychological factors; (6)
applying a comparative approach with respect to other WMDs; and (7) studying interactive
linkages between the core norms and institutions of global nuclear order. While we originally
formulated them in order to inspire a new wave of scholarly research on nuclear weapons
nonuse, they are also relevant to the study of other foundations of nuclear order, including
nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, disarmament, and deterrence. In addition to these seven
areas, I add another that, at least implicitly, informs all my research on the role of nuclear
weapons in world politics: (8) studying the inherent contestedness of the nuclear order and the
real-world implications of this contestedness. In this section, I synthesize relevant findings across
the papers in this habilitation thesis and lay out some tentative conclusions concerning all of
these eight research aims.
Cross-national aspects
The calls to employ a	cross-national and cross-cultural perspective are primarily meant to
correct for the persistent U.S.-centric focus of the existing nuclear weapons scholarship (on
American bias in IR in general, see Colgan 2019). This problem has been particularly visible in
the scholarship on nuclear weapons nonuse, where the seminal historical accounts have
primarily studied the attitudes of U.S. decision-makers (e.g., Tannenwald 2007; Sauer 2015),
whereas the newer wave of experimental surveys have, so far, mostly examined attitudes of the
16
U.S. public (e.g., Press, Sagan, and Valentino 2013; Sagan and Valentino 2017; Haworth,
Sagan, and Valentino 2019; Rathbun and Stein 2020; Koch and Wells 2020; Montgomery and
Carpenter 2020; for notable exceptions, see Sukin 2020b; Egel and Hines 2021).
In chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8, my co-authors and I have contributed findings on attitudes
towards nuclear weapons from surveys and survey experiments conducted in other Western (the
United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands) and non-Western (Russia) countries. The
joint U.S.–U.K. study (chapter 3) offered a direct one-to-one comparability, demonstrating that
British citizens are, across all experimental conditions, more averse to the use of nuclear
weapons than American citizens. This finding is in line with the latest working paper by Dill,
Sagan, and Valentino (2021), who observed similar dynamics in the scenario of nuclear use
against a terrorist facility.
The “Russia study” (chapter 4) is, to the best of my knowledge, the first academic paper
in our field to use experimental methods to examine Russian attitudes towards the military use
of nuclear weapons. While there are serious limits to a direct comparison with similar U.S.
studies (e.g., Sagan and Valentino 2017; Haworth, Sagan, and Valentino 2019), the paper still
demonstrates that the “atomic aversion” will likely be, on average, somewhat stronger in Russia
than in the United States – most likely closer to the public attitudes that we have observed for
Germany in chapter 5.
Another unique contribution of our work is the study of public attitudes towards nuclear
weapons in Germany (chapters 5, 6, and 8) and the Netherlands (chapter 8), two non-nuclearweapon
states that nevertheless host scores of U.S. nuclear weapons on their territory under
NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangement. So far, studies of attitudes towards nuclear use in nonnuclear
countries have been rare (a rare exception in nonuse research being Avey 2015),
although they arguably provide important insights into the localized strength of transnational
nonuse norms. Our findings show a remarkably strong aversion of Germans to any use of U.S.
nuclear weapons in a military conflict with Russia, even when we described a demonstrative
explosion in response to the preceding Russian demonstrative “escalate–to–deescalate” strike.
All these findings strongly point to the possibility that the much-publicized willingness of a large
number of Americans to approve the use of nuclear weapons might not be replicated in other
national contexts. This would underscore our argument about the need to engage in further
cross-national and cross-cultural nuclear nonuse studies, particularly using experimental designs
that will allow the researchers to do one-to-one comparisons between samples across different
national contexts.
In addition to nuclear nonuse experiments, chapter 8 provides a comparison of the
German and Dutch publics’ views on the prospective withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from
their territory. In this paper, we highlight some common patterns (e.g., high support in both
countries for the removal of weapons as a part of the U.S.–Russian arms control process), as
well as important divergences (e.g., significantly higher support in Germany for unilateral,
unconditional withdrawal). In our future work, we expect to further expand these cross-national
studies by surveying the public in other European host countries, i.e., Belgium, Italy, and
Turkey.
17
Public-elite gaps
While the recent wave of survey-based studies on attitudes towards nuclear weapons has
indisputably shed new light on the contemporary views of ordinary citizens, there are voices
that question their real-world relevance. This is particularly due to the fact that actual decisions
concerning nuclear weapons are normally reserved to the highest echelons of elite decisionmakers.
Whereas some scholars in the field make assumptions about corresponding elite
attitudes through proxy indicators such as education or income (Press, Sagan, and Valentino
2013, 200), there is reason to believe that the gaps in public-elite attitudes cut deeper than that.
As such, we and other scholars have been calling for corresponding studies of elite attitudes
towards nuclear weapons to be conducted (see, for example, the debate in Smetana and
Wunderlich 2021).
Chapters 5 and 6 of my habilitation thesis draw on large-N data from our parallel
surveys of politicians and ordinary citizens in Germany, which we fielded in order to contribute
new empirical evidence on these public-elite gaps. The main takeaway from our surveys is that
there are indeed some important differences between public and elite attitudes towards nuclear
weapons. From the perspective of the “second wave” of nuclear nonuse scholarship, the key
finding is the empirical support for our hypothesis that political elites are, on average, more
averse to the potential use of nuclear weapons than the general public. We also found important
public-elite differences in beliefs in the effectiveness of extended nuclear deterrence, views on
the withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe, and opinions on the feasibility of global
nuclear disarmament.
Whereas Press, Sagan, and Valentino (2013, 200) theorized that “elites may not differ
dramatically from the general public in their views toward nuclear weapons,” we show that
there are noticeable differences between these groups that justify the costs and logistics of elite
surveys (cf. Dietrich, Hardt, and Swedlund 2020; Hafner-Burton, Hughes, and Victor 2013).
Admittedly, however, our surveys do not provide a clear answer to the question of why these
gaps exist. We hypothesized that they arise because political elites are more exposed to
transnational norms governing nuclear weapons, as well as diplomatic and NGO discourses
that promote these norms vis-à-vis political representations. Moreover, we believe that the level
of domain-specific knowledge is, on average, much higher among elite decision-makers than
ordinary citizens, which would also notably influence their attitudes towards different aspects of
the global nuclear order and its institutions. However, given our limited individual-level data in
the elite part of our survey, we cannot rule out the possibility that these gaps actually correspond
to basic socio-demographic differences between the samples – including age, gender, income,
and the level of education (see Kertzer 2020 for an elaboration of this argument). Our further
research should, therefore, explicitly control for these socio-demographic variations to find out
more about the actual sources of public-elite gaps in attitudes towards nuclear weapons.
Gender and Age
Admittedly, none of the papers in this habilitation corpus has gender-based or age-based
differences in attitudes towards nuclear weapons as the main research aim. Nevertheless, some
18
of our secondary findings from chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 can contribute at least some modest
empirical evidence in this regard.
Notably, existing scholarship has, so far, provided mixed results concerning the influence
of these factors on attitudes towards nuclear weapons. Although earlier studies have shown that
women are, on average, more averse to the use of military force (e.g., Eichenberg 2003; 2016),
this gender gap does not always appear significant in studies of attitudes towards the use of
nuclear weapons. For example, in Press, Sagan, and Valentino (2013, p. 200), the preference
for nuclear strikes was not associated with the participants’ gender. Similarly, Sagan and
Valentino (2017, p. 63) did not find statistically significant differences in attitudes between men
and women (in fact, in percentage counts, women were slightly less averse to nuclear weapon
use than men). Rathbun and Stein (2020, p. 15) even found that being male was negatively
associated with preference for and approval of nuclear strikes.
Our studies of American and British attitudes towards nuclear and chemical weapon use
also provided us with mixed findings. In chapter 2, we did not find a statistically significant
relationship between the participants’ gender and their view on the use of nuclear or chemical
weapons against a terrorist WMD facility. In chapter 3, we did find a significant association
between gender and strike approval in the expected direction: women were less likely to approve
the strikes than men. However, importantly, gender was associated with a general attitude
towards any military strikes, irrespective of the weapon type. When we tested the interaction
between gender and a specific type of weapon proposed in the experimental scenario, we did
not find any significant relationship, suggesting that these gender-based differences are related
to the use of military force as such, rather than anything intrinsic to nuclear weapons.
In chapter 4, the findings on gender gaps in Russian attitudes were even more
intriguing: while Russian women generally saw the use of a military strike less approvingly than
Russian men, the gap was particularly sizeable in the conventional domain. An analysis of
interaction terms has shown that in the nuclear domain, the attitudes become much more
similar, indicating that men differentiate more between the two types of strikes, whereas women
are simply more averse to the use of military force as such. Further research is needed to
investigate to what extent these gaps are culturally-specific and what the sources of this variation
are in the Russian context.
It is also worth mentioning that in our survey on American views on nuclear abolition,
women supported nuclear disarmament significantly more than men. This would be in line with
other contemporary studies that still identify the hypothesized gender gap in attitudes towards
possession of nuclear weapons (Clements and Thomson 2021), although this gap is not
necessarily always visible in nuclear use scenarios where other factors (e.g., care for compatriot
soldiers) could also play an important role in swaying these attitudes in different directions.
When it comes to age as a factor in attitudes towards nuclear weapons, existing
scholarship also fails to present us with clear-cut answers. Press, Sagan, and Valentino (2013, p.
200) found that participants’ age was not associated with their preference for conventional over
nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, a follow up study by Sagan and Valentino (2017, p. 63)
demonstrated that a higher age of participants was associated with higher preference for
conventional airstrikes over nuclear strikes. Rathbun and Stein (2020, p. 15) similarly found that
age was negatively associated with preference for nuclear strikes.
19
In chapter 2, our models did not show that age would be statistically significant for
approval of or preference for nuclear strikes. However, in chapter 3, we discovered an
interesting interaction between participants’ age and the type of strike proposed in the
experimental scenario: older participants were more likely to approve air bombing but less likely
to approve nuclear strikes. We found a similar aversion of older respondents to nuclear weapon
use in our surveys of German citizens (chapters 5 and 6), yet failed to see a similar relationship
in the case of the Russian public (chapter 4). In our survey on views on nuclear disarmament in
the United States (chapter 7), age played little role. Further studies are needed to investigate
these age-based differences and their sources; it is conceivable that in different national contexts,
different historical experiences with arms races, conflicts, and wars may have contributed to the
variation in attitudes towards nuclear weapons between older and younger citizens.
Moral psychology
The (neuro-)psychological foundations of attitudes towards nuclear weapons represent an
intriguing area of scholarly research, in line with the recent “behavioral turn” in political science
and IR (Hafner-Burton et al. 2017; Davis and McDermott 2020). A particular sub-set of this
scholarship has been directly influenced by advances in moral psychology research, particularly
the moral foundations theory (Haidt 2007; Graham et al. 2013) and other approaches based on
the adaptive logic of the emergence of morality in human society (see Price and Sikkink 2021;
Rathbun and Pomeroy 2021 for a comprehensive review of the IR application of these theories).
Chapters 2 and 4 of this habilitation corpus have used the aforementioned moral
foundations theory (MFT) to explain the differences in attitudes of American and Russian
citizens towards nuclear weapon use. Our work in this direction coincided with a very similar
research aim of Brian Rathbun, who I met on a joint presentation at Sciences Po Paris, where
we also had an opportunity to discuss our findings. Rathbun eventually published his paper with
Janice Gross Stein in the Journal of Conflict Resolution (Rathbun and Stein 2020) and we followed
up with our own publication in International Interactions (Smetana and Vranka 2021; here, chapter
2) and the follow-up study of Russian attitudes (chapter 4). Importantly, our studies replicated
some of each other’s key findings, which gives us additional confidence in the robustness of our
results and the possibility of replicating them across different experimental scenarios – and, in
fact, even across different national and cultural settings.
The key empirical test dealt with our hypotheses about the relationship between
“individualizing” and “binding” moral foundations and attitudes towards the use of nuclear
weapons. Whereas the individualizing foundations (care/harm and fairness/cheating) concern
the well-being of individual persons, the binding foundations concern the interests of larger
groups and communities (Haidt and Joseph 2004). We hypothesized that individuals who score
high on individualizing foundations will be more averse to the use of nuclear strikes because of
their indiscriminate impact and the resulting civilian casualties. Conversely, we expected that
individuals who score high on binding foundations will be less averse to the use of nuclear strikes
because of their desire to protect one’s in-group against the enemy and the stronger retributive
tendencies that go well with the use of nuclear weapons as the ultimate punishment. In both of
our studies, we found that individual and binding foundations are statistically significant
20
predictors of nuclear (non-)use attitudes, and their inclusion in the regression models improved
these models significantly.
Our research also shows that these associations can hold cross-nationally. To the best of
our knowledge, we are the first to apply the MFT to examine public attitudes towards the use
of military force in both the United States and the Russian Federation. This is particularly
important given the theoretical reasoning behind MFT, which suggests that while moral
foundations are universal and present in all cultures in the world, their relative importance
varies both within and across different cultural domains (Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009;
Graham et al. 2011). Generally, individualizing foundations correspond to the liberal
understanding of morality in the West, whereas non-Western cultures tend to rely more strongly
on the binding foundations (Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009). This is exactly what we have
found in chapters 2 and 4: while U.S. and Russian citizens do differ in average scores of their
individualizing and binding foundations,1 the overall relationship between the participants’
non-use attitudes and their moral foundations holds in both samples.
Another, possibly very important, finding that appeared in both of our studies concerns
the specific relationship between moral foundations and particular weapon type described in
our experiments. We originally expected that there would be an interaction between the
weapon system and moral foundations: given the intuitive perception of nuclear weapons as a
distinctively indiscriminate method of warfare with a particularly horrifying impact on
individuals, we hypothesized that participants with highly developed individualizing
foundations would be particularly averse to their employment, at least when compared to
conventional weapons, which do not carry such a moral stigma. Conversely, compared to
conventional weapons, nuclear weapons can be seen as a particularly ultimate and retributive
form of combat, which could appeal to those individuals with highly developed binding
foundations. Our models in both studies nevertheless show that there were no interactions
between the weapon type used in the scenario and the moral foundations of an individual. As
such, it appears that moral foundations do play a significant role in these decisions but the
association is primarily tied to the willingness to approve the use of military force in world
politics in general (cf. Kertzer et al. 2014), rather than to any specific moral opprobrium tied to
nuclear weapons.
One important area for further research would also be the unpacking of the relationship
between moral foundations and individuals’ political ideology. Previous studies (including Press,
Sagan, and Valentino 2013; Sagan and Valentino 2017; or Koch and Wells 2020) have
discovered a significant effect of partisanship on nuclear attitudes, with Republican voters being
much more likely to approve or prefer the use of nuclear weapons than self-identified
Democrats. The very same association was found in the statistical models in chapter 2 of this
thesis. Our study of American and British attitudes similarly found that identifying as
conservative is associated with higher support for military strikes (chapter 3), as is being a
supporter of the current Russian leadership in our study of Russian public attitudes (chapter 4).
1 On a 1 to 6 scale of importance of individual items in the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), the average
score of individualizing foundations in the U.S. study was 4.47, of binding foundations 3.45, and in the Russia
study 4.5 and 3.99, respectively.
21
While studies demonstrate a strong relationship between political orientation and moral
foundations (Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009), the direction of the causal arrow between
individuals’ partisanship and their moral values is still unclear (Smith et al. 2017; Hatemi,
Crabtree, and Smith 2019; Ciuk 2018). Further investigation of this relationship in nuclear
nonuse attitudes is needed, possibly also with respect to the measure of retribution, which does
seem to play a significant role (see chapters 2 and 3), but is also likely to be closely related to
both the morality and political ideology of our respondents.
Comparison with chemical weapons
In the history of military innovation, nuclear weapons are unique in terms of the effects of their
use, as well as their impact on world politics (cf. Brodie 1946; Jervis 1989; Paul, Harknett, and
Wirtz 1998). Their unique features notwithstanding, they have been discursively clustered
together with chemical and biological weapons as illegitimate and particularly abhorrent
“weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) that deserve special moral opprobrium (Shamai 2015;
Hashmi and Lee 2004; Bentley 2013). The discursive association between these classes of
weapons has been an important feature of world politics (Price and Tannenwald 1996; Price
2018) ; however, many scholars and experts have criticized the WMD label as inaccurate,
politicized, and potentially even counterproductive in terms of global non-proliferation
strategies (Enemark 2011; Panofsky 1998; Archer 2004; Bentley 2012).
Given the discursive linkages between these types of weapons, as well as important
differences in terms of their actual real-world effects, we have been interested in examining
attitudes towards their use from a comparative perspective. Sadly, we believe that the study of
chemical-weapon attitudes has only increased in relevance in the last couple of years, given their
repeated use in the Syrian war (Koblentz 2019; Price 2019; Tezcür and Horschig 2020). In
chapters 2 and 3, we provide a comprehensive discussion of reasons why some people could be
more averse to the use of nuclear and chemical weapons, and report findings from our three
survey experiments on this subject.
The findings of our three experimental studies have been, for both us and many of our
colleagues, surprising. Although nuclear weapons are indisputably more destructive than
chemical weapons, we have found systematic evidence that individuals, at least in the United
States and the United Kingdom, have even stronger aversion to the use of chemical weapons
than nuclear weapons. These findings hold in both counter-terrorism scenarios where these
weapons are used against an Al Qaeda base (chapter 2) and in a large military campaign against
North Korea (chapter 3).
After conducting our first experiment on this subject, we engaged in long discussion as
to why the public is more averse to chemical than to nuclear weapons. I have brainstormed the
possible explanations during different academic conference panels and presentations of my
research at universities abroad. The common suggestions were: the fact that there is a stronger
legal prohibition on chemical use than nuclear use; the fact that the use of nuclear weapons is a
thing of the past, but people have been seeing the (terrible) consequences of chemical use on
their TV news quite recently; or that the death by asphyxiation that results from the use of
chemical nerve agents feels more terrifying, painful, and degrading than a potentially quick
22
death from nuclear explosions (indeed, many people tend to discount the horrific effects of
nuclear weapons that would result from radiation poisoning).
Our findings, nevertheless, provide intriguing evidence that there may be another factor
at the forefront of these attitudes. A follow-up study, reported in chapter 3, found that
individuals are predominantly associate nuclear weapons with modern, developed countries,
and chemical weapons with “rogue states” and terrorists. As such, our research suggests that it
may be primarily an issue of identity that influences views of individuals on the military use of
these weapons. Put simply, we feel that “countries like us” do not use chemical weapons as this
belongs to the domain of “inferior others”. While individuals in the United States and United
Kingdom may be comparatively more averse to the use of nuclear than conventional weapons,
they still feel that the military employment of nuclear strikes is more fitting to their country’s
identity than using chemical agents against their enemies.
In our future studies, we should delve more into these issues of identity, and see whether
we can replicate our results on nuclear and chemical weapon use differences in other national
contexts. This would apply particularly to non-Western countries, where we can reasonably
expect than the respondents have different ideas about the “appropriate” behavior of their
country in international affairs. Moreover, notwithstanding the difficulties in designing credible
real-world scenarios, scholars should add the hypothetical use of biological weapons as another
experimental condition. In the aftermath of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it appears timely
to examine the sensitivity of individuals to biological threats and see whether they can
distinguish between the use of chemical and biological weapons in their attitudes.
Interactive linkages
In chapter 9, I devote an ample amount of attention to the linkages between five primary
institutions of global nuclear order: nuclear deterrence, nuclear arms control, nuclear
nonproliferation, nuclear nonuse, and nuclear disarmament. By “linkages”, I mean that
attitudes, behaviors, practices, or rules that apply to one of these institutions do not exist in a
vacuum but often influence (and are influenced by) other pillars of the global nuclear order.
How have these interactions and tensions manifested throughout my research?
One such linkage, which I discuss in more detail in chapter 9, is that between nuclear
deterrence and nuclear nonproliferation. Scholarly literature sees this relationship as a doubleedged
sword. On the one hand, extended deterrence via the “nuclear umbrella” provided by
the United States can restrain allies from acquiring their own nuclear weapon arsenals (see, for
example, Freedman 2013, 97). On the other hand, as Sagan (1996, 86) persuasively argues in
his classic account, nonproliferation strategies based on decreasing the value of nuclear weapons
in world politics are weakened when major powers continue to stress the importance of
extended nuclear deterrence as one of the main pillars of allied security. Similar
incompatibilities are visible in the logics of deterrence and disarmament: whereas deterrence
strategies rely on the perception of nuclear weapons as a valuable tool of security management,
contemporary disarmament strategies are built on the attempt to de-value nuclear weapons in
world politics (Ritchie 2014).
These tensions are clearly visible across all my papers that unpack the logic of nuclear
deterrence in relation to other institutions of the global nuclear order, perhaps most prominently
23
in our studies of German public and elite attitudes towards the practice of nuclear sharing
(chapters 5 and 6). During the Cold War, it was particularly the concern about potential
German nuclear breakout that led to the establishment of this NATO practice (Freedman and
Michaels 2019, pp. 361–377). Nevertheless, while this extended deterrence–cum–
nonproliferation strategy has been advocated by practically all U.S. administrations to date (cf.
U.S. Department of Defense 2010; 2018), our research shows that the German public is
relatively skeptical about its effectiveness and largely supports the withdrawal of U.S. weapons
from German territory. Even more importantly, the strong aversion of both German elites and
citizens towards any conceivable military use of these weapons necessarily decreases the
credibility of deterrence threats and thereby undermines the effectiveness of extended
deterrence as such (cf. Powell 1990; Danilovic 2001).
I discuss similarly shaped tensions in the study of U.S. nuclear doctrine in chapter 15.
Among other things, I highlight the dilemmas that are inherent in the development of all postCold-War
Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) reports: the need to maintain (or, possibly,
strengthen) U.S. nuclear deterrence capability, while simultaneously advancing U.S. goals with
respect to nuclear non-proliferation. I show how many ambitious ideas for advancing the latter
goal were undermined by the focus on the former. In the most recent 2018 NPR, this
relationship has become even more complicated as a result of a significantly muted arms control
agenda and a generally dismissive attitude towards nuclear disarmament.
From a more theoretical perspective, I discuss the tensions between the logic of (virtual)
nuclear deterrence and nuclear disarmament in chapter 12. I highlight one of the pertinent
paradoxes that advocates for nuclear abolition will eventually need to grapple with. On the one
hand, maintaining sufficient reconstitution capability to hedge against the collapse of the
hypothetical disarmament regime could be a crucial element to convince nuclear-armed states
to engage in deep reductions of their arsenals, possibly leading towards “zero”. On the other
hand, I show that the very existence of reconstitution capabilities as “virtual arsenals” would
contribute to the instability of the disarmament regime, as well as the creation of a new form of
principally unjust nuclear governance. While the paper is based on a conceptual debate and
counterfactual thinking rather than an actual historical case study, similar challenges based on
the partial incompatibility of different institutions of the global nuclear order can already be
observed in nuclear politics today, as demonstrated by the work of Tannenwald (2013), Müller
and Wunderlich (2013), and others.
Future research of linkages between the core institutions of nuclear order should
arguably place the institution of nuclear nonuse at the forefront of scholarly inquiry. As I briefly
mention in chapter 1, the embeddedness of the nuclear nonuse norm in the global nuclear order
makes it susceptible to change as a result of normative developments in other relevant
institutions. For example, Tannenwald (2018a) argues persuasively that the current
developments in the area of nuclear arms control and disarmament have significantly weakened
the “nuclear taboo” in the United States and elsewhere. The perception and impact of these
linkages on public and elite attitudes towards nuclear use can possibly be subjected to empirical
testing through the use of elaborate experimental designs and scenarios combining the
developments across different institutions of the global nuclear order.
24
Contestedness of nuclear order
The final discussion of the findings across individual chapters of my habilitation thesis concerns
the claim that has already appeared in my recent monograph that the global nuclear order is
built on inherently contestable and perpetually contested normative structures (Smetana 2020b,
111–13). The norms, rules, and institutions that make up this order are contested in terms of
their validity and mutual hierarchy, as well as their meaning in practice (Smetana and Onderco
2018). The latter is particularly important as the core pillars of nuclear order are (to some extent
purposefully) largely vague and open to different interpretations, which makes the study of their
“meaning-in-use” (Wiener 2004) ever more important (see also O’Mahoney 2013; Wiener
2009; Lantis 2011).
The dynamic contestation of institutions of nuclear order plays a distinct role in a
number of chapters of this habilitation corpus, particularly those in the second part. In chapter
10, we examine how India’s 1974 “peaceful nuclear explosion” (PNE) led to a new
understanding of what constitutes an “appropriate” peaceful use of nuclear technology. As a
result of the test and a re-definition of the meaning of the peaceful-use norm in the global
nuclear order, the NPT Article V. on the conduct of PNEs has become obsolete and the rules
of nuclear trade significantly more restrictive than before the explosion. In the same chapter,
we observe a similar dynamic in the case of Iraq, where the discovery of Baghdad’s clandestine
nuclear program in the 1990s led to the adoption of new IAEA monitoring rules, particularly
the (significantly more intrusive) Additional Protocol.
I return to the problem of peaceful nuclear use in chapter 14, where I study a
phenomenon that has so far received only scant attention in nuclear weapons scholarship: the
idea of using nuclear explosions to deflect asteroids and other near-earth objects. In comparison
with Cold War debates on PNEs, the problem of nuclear deflection is normatively more
complex: unlike building canals or dams, the capability to address the threat of near-earth
objects may one day be critical for the survival of the human race. Yet, at the same time, such
legitimization of nuclear explosions would represent a serious contestation to the current
normative structure of nuclear order – particularly the idea that all nuclear explosions should
be prohibited and nuclear weapons progressively stigmatized and eventually abolished
altogether to prevent nuclear catastrophe. While I propose some ideas for temporary
reconciliation, it is likely that experts and policy makers will face the daunting task of addressing
these incompatibilities and the contestation that nuclear deflection presents to the stability of
the global nuclear order.
Finally, the recurring contestation of the meaning of the nuclear disarmament norm is
at the forefront of contemporary debates within the NPT and, therefore, also in my chapter 11,
which unpacks the debates at the 2015 NPT Review Conference. The NPT Article VI. has
been subject to intense contestation since the very inception of the nuclear nonproliferation
regime. However, the slow pace of post-Cold War disarmament by the nuclear weapon states
and the resulting success of the Humanitarian Initiative (that has eventually led to the adoption
of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons) has made the diverging positions
on disarmament ever more difficult to reconcile. My paper, which drew on in-depth interviews
with diplomats and statements of various countries, shows how even the EU states, which have
25
long strived for a common voice in global nuclear politics, struggle to find a basic consensus
about what the disarmament norm currently requires from the relevant stakeholders.
My analysis of these irreconcilable stances would hardly result in a more positive
assessment today, with the 2022 NPT Review Conference slowly approaching. Still, as I have
demonstrated throughout the papers in this habilitation thesis, contestation of norms and rules
has been an integral – and, to some extent, necessary – part of the development of the global
nuclear order. Despite occasional setbacks, the contestation has also helped to adapt the
institutions of nuclear order to new developments, both external and internal. While the return
of nuclear saber-rattling and the deconstruction of several important arms control initiatives in
recent years do not provide much ground for optimism, it is always important to remind oneself
that the system of nuclear restraint that has emerged since the end of the Second World War is,
in fact, an incredible success story. That, however, should not lead to complacency but rather
to the realization of the importance of the institutions, norms, rules, and practices that have
helped us to prevent unrestricted nuclear arms races and, possibly, nuclear war. In the era of
dramatic power shifts in world politics, the need to care for the global nuclear order and its
foundations arguably remains one of the most important tasks in the area of international
security.
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