A new article by Lauren Sukin and her colleague Samuel Seitz for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, titled “Nuclear Deterrence Needs to Account for Domestic Politics”, shows that the credibility of nuclear threats depends not only on capability and resolve, but also on domestic politics. When outsiders judge whether a leader would follow through, they look at the leader’s personality and at what the public thinks.
Using an experimental survey of nearly 8,000 respondents, the authors found that in democracies like the US and UK, a public supportive of nuclear use made threats seem more credible, while an opposed public made them seem less so. For autocratic Russia, this effect was weak, and the leader’s personality mattered more.
The authors conclude that nuclear policy can no longer be left only to small circles of officials and experts. At a time of growing nuclear rhetoric, personalist leaders and political polarization, policymakers need to engage their publics on nuclear policy, especially in polarized democracies.