In a new article “Too Brutal for War: Comparing Rationales for Weapon Taboos,” David Allison, Stephen Herzog and Lauren Sukin assess how the U.S. public evaluates different weapons when judging military strikes.
Using a conjoint survey experiment, the authors isolate the effects of three key attributes:
Expected civilian casualties;
Operational effectiveness;
Weapon type.
Three key findings stand out:
Firstly, the authors find an aversion to civilian casualties. Respondents favoured lower-casualty strikes, even when doing so reduced the probability of mission success.
Second, they show that weapon type matters. Even with casualties and effectiveness held constant, respondents relied on categorical judgments about weapons to assess strikes.
Third, the study allows authors to compare norms across weapon systems and beyond the existing scholarship on weapons of mass destruction. They find a hierarchy of which weapons respondents prefer: cyber attacks were most favored, followed by conventional strikes, then cluster munitions over chemical, biological, and finally nuclear weapons.
Together, these findings show public attitudes toward military strikes are shaped not only by instrumental reasoning but also by normative intuitions about the legitimacy, brutality, and indiscriminate nature of different weapon categories.