In “Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants,” a pathbreaking survey of attitudes toward the laws of war published in the summer 2017 issue of International Security , Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino found that Americans are relatively insensitive to the targeting of civilian populations and to international norms and taboos against the use of nuclear weapons. We replicated a key question of this study, where respondents were asked if they would support saturation bombing an Iranian city to end a war. We also introduced some variations into the experiment to directly measure any potential influence of international norms and laws. Overall, our quantitative and qualitative findings are more optimistic than those of Sagan and Valentino's study: Americans do strongly believe it is wrong to target civilians. And in a real-life scenario such as this, a majority would likely oppose such a bombing. These findings suggest, however, that much depends on how survey questions are structured in measuring those preferences and whether legal or ethical considerations are part of any national conversation about war policy.

The nuclear nonproliferation regime has come under attack from proliferation determinists, who argue that resolute proliferants connected by decentralized networks can be stopped only through the use of aggressive export controls or regime change. Proliferation pragmatists counter that nuclear aspirants are neither as resolved nor as advanced as determinists claim. A technical review of recent proliferators' progress reveals that Iran, North Korea, and Libya (before it renounced its nuclear program) have been unable to significantly cut development times; the evidence that these regimes are dead set on proliferating and cannot be persuaded to give up their nuclear programs is not compelling. Because these states lack tacit knowledge, the most effective way to dissolve the hub-and-spoke or star-shaped structures of their nuclear and ballistic missile networks is to target the hubs-that is, second-tier proliferators such as Pakistan that have assisted these states with their nuclear and missile programs. Past strategies aimed at dissuading proliferants have been most successful when they combine diplomatic, social, and economic benefits with credible threats and clear red lines. The United States should therefore use these strategies instead of regime change to target current and potential hub states to halt further proliferation.