Public support for arms control in the third nuclear age: cross-national survey and elite cues experiment in NATO countries

Scholars argue that the world has entered the “third nuclear age,” defined by profound technological change, destabilizing arms races among great powers, and the unraveling of existing arms control structures. In this paper, we introduce a new theory of the sources and strength of public attitudes toward nuclear arms control in this new era of global nuclear politics. We propose that, due to the complex and overly technicist nature of arms control practices, the public generally exhibits low levels of awareness and domain-specific knowledge. As a result, (1) the general public relies on simplified heuristic frames to build an internally consistent attitude toward individual arms control treaties, and (2) public opinion on arms control tends to be elastic and susceptible to “elite cues” from experts and politicians who build on these heuristic frames in their messaging to shape mass attitudes in this domain. We test our theoretical expectations empirically through two studies: a cross-national survey of public attitudes toward arms control in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland, and a follow-up survey experiment investigating the impact of elite cues on public opinion in the United States and the United Kingdom. Our findings contribute to the scholarly literature on public opinion on foreign policy and inform the current debates on the feasibility and desirability of strategic arms control in the third nuclear age.