More than 1 in 3 Americans Would Support a Preemptive Nuclear Attack on North Korea

According to a poll that was conducted online in February, made by YouGov and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, more than 1 in 3 Americans would support a preemptive nuclear attack on North Korea if they test a missile that can reach the United States as somewhere around 3,000 U.S. citizens were polled, with the majority not supporting a strike like that.

“For many of these hawks, support for an attack, even in a preventive war, does not significantly decrease when the story says that the United States would use nuclear weapons that are expected to kill 1 million Nort Korean civilians,’’ the researchers wrote.

Only 33 percent of the people in the poll would prefer a nuclear strike that can kill nearly 15,000 civilians with half of the respondents would approve if the attack actually happened, according to the same poll.

The researchers also said that the respondents would only approve such a strike if it only had a 50-50 chance of preventing retaliation which should remind Washington decision-makers that the public support for any U.S. first strike is likely to diminish greatly if the attack fails and a lot of Americans are killed.

The conclusion of this survey according to the authors shows us how bad the public is informed about nuclear weapons, missile defense, and North Korea and demonstrate how some U.S. citizens have no sense of a nuclear taboo, and some appear to hold a kind of atomic attraction.

The U.S. is the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons during the course of a war, with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War 2 as they killed around 200,000 people, The Hill informs.