Description
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, experts and journalists expressed concerns that Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling could weaken the international norm against nuclear weapon use: the “nuclear taboo.” However, we still lack empirical evidence on whether the nuclear non-use norm has, in fact, been eroded during the Russo-Ukrainian war. To address this critical gap in existing scholarship, we reproduced selected pre-invasion survey experiments on the nuclear taboo (N = 13,200). In turn, we conducted a cross-temporal meta-analysis to investigate the shifts in attitudes toward the military use of nuclear weapons across various realistic scenarios. Paired experiments fielded in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Israel, and India subsequently allowed us to assess the cross-national generalizability of our results. Our findings contribute to the study of the microfoundations of the nuclear taboo and the broader scholarly debates about the dynamics of international norms in contemporary world politics.
