Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power? A Debate

Our 2015 survey experiment—reported in the 2017 International Security article “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran”—asked a representative sample of Americans to choose between continuing a ground invasion of Iran that would kill an estimated 20,000 U.S. soldiers or launching a nuclear attack on an Iranian city that would kill an estimated 100,000 civilians.1 Fifty-six percent of the respondents preferred the nuclear strike. When a different set of subjects instead read that the air strike would use conventional weapons, but still kill 100,000 Iranians, 67 percent preferred it over the ground invasion. These andings led us to conclude that “when provoked, and in conditions where saving U.S. soldiers is at stake, the majority of Americans do not consider the arst use of nuclear weapons a taboo and their commitment to noncombatant immunity is shallow.”2 By 2015, we had been researching American public opinion on the use of nuclear weapons and the ethics of war for several years. Many of our previous andings about the U.S. public’s hawkish attitudes had been unsettling. Nevertheless, the levels of public support we found in this study for a strike that so clearly violated ethical and legal principles on the use of force were deeply troubling. We proposed, therefore, that future research on the nuclear taboo and the noncombatant immunity norm focus on interventions that might blunt