Last evening I came across the following article titled, "US Survey Reveals Public Support for Nuclear Strikes". [1]
Just reading the title my initial reaction was, "What! Are you kidding me".
Reading further...the survey done last July by two academics Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino was recently published in the Wall Street Journal under the title, "Would the US Drop the Bomb Again?"
Sagan and Valentino's survey set forth "a fictional scenario mirroring Pearl Harbor: an Iranian attack on a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf that killed 2,403 sailors. Faced with this scenario, would the US public support the dropping of a nuclear weapon on an Iranian city killing 100,000 civilians.
They found the result "startling"; 59 percent of respondents backed "using a nuclear bomb on an Iranian city".
According to the authors the survey was a "representative sample of 620 Americans" which they conclude, "When provoked (US citizens) don't seem to consider the use of nuclear weapons a taboo and our commitment to the immunity of citizens from deliberate attack in wartime, even with vast casualties, is shallow".
Admittedly, the survey was a small sample of 620 Americans considering we're a country of 320 million.
But there have been similar type surveys. One done in 2004 asked whether Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11 and some 70% said he was. Other recent surveys have a majority of Americans supporting the use of drones attacking and killing "suspected" terrorists-no reference to the usual "collateral damage"-killing of innocents in the nearby strike. Even Obama's killing of Americans in drone strikes has caused any large adverse reaction among other Americans. So maybe the Sagan/Valentino survey results shouldn't be so surprising.
The fact is since Pearl Harbor-and Hawaii wasn't even a state then-most Americans haven't been in war zones or under aerial attack. The continental US has not suffered any direct devastation of war since the Civil War.
The sense here is if most Americans had been forced to suffer direct bombardment in war on its soil-as people in Russia, Europe, China, Japan suffered themselves in WWII, Vietnamese in the 60's and early 70's, more recently the people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, eastern Ukraine-they wouldn't be so supportive of war much less a nuclear one.
These are troubling times. The neo-cons in official Washington are blood thirsty psychopaths pressing for more war, regime change against any country that resists US hegemony over it which is happening all over the world. Meanwhile Americans go about their daily business seemingly disconnected from this reality, not to mention the "ease" of accepting America's wars, NATO's expansion to the doorstep of Russia as well as US provocations against China in the South China Sea.
Consider; we're the only country to drop a nuclear weapon and that was against a non-nuclear Japan.
Russia and China are major nuclear powers that are capable of destroying the US in a retaliatory strike.
It is unprecedented the US could be so callous to directly provoke another nuclear power. Other than the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 the US and the Soviet Union never provoked the other to the point of a potential nuclear war. MAD, mutually assured destruction prevailed at the time.
Now absolute insanity has apparently gripped official Washington openly provoking Russia and China.
What's so disturbing is a propagandized, indoctrinated American populace appears so disconnected and oblivious to what's actually happening in the world and the horrific role the US is playing in it seems inconceivable.
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