Abstract

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, experts have expressed concerns that Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling may have eroded the “nuclear taboo” and led to increased support for the use of nuclear weapons in Russian society. To investigate public attitudes toward nuclear use in Russia, we conducted a preregistered survey experiment on a representative sample of the Russian population. Our results show that despite significant shifts in the regional security environment, the Kremlin’s belligerent rhetoric, and calls for nuclear strikes from politicians, experts, and journalists, public support for using nuclear weapons against NATO has remained virtually unchanged post-invasion. We suggest that this remarkable stability of the “atomic aversion” may stem from two countervailing factors: normalization of the idea of nuclear use in Russian society and deterrence through heightened concerns about NATO’s retaliation. Our findings also demonstrate that Russian citizens disapprove of nuclear weapon use similarly in scenarios involving a conflict over Crimea with Ukraine and a Russia–NATO conflict in the Baltics. However, we observed a somewhat stronger public approval of a demonstrative nuclear explosion, a policy option recently proposed by Russian military experts. Our findings contribute to the scholarly literature on the strength of the nuclear nonuse norm in non-Western countries and to ongoing policy debates regarding domestic constraints on the Kremlin’s decision to use nuclear weapons to achieve foreign policy objectives.