title: From Moscow with a Mushroom Cloud? Russian Public Attitudes to the Use of Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict with NATO
abstract: &lt;p&gt;This preprint presents findings of an original survey experiment on public attitudes toward nuclear use conducted on a representative sample of Russian citizens. We randomly assigned our participants to experimental treatments with vignettes describing a military conflict between Russia and NATO in the Baltics, where Moscow considered a limited nuclear “escalate-to-deescalate” strike to avert defeat. Our findings show that Russians are significantly more averse to nuclear strikes than t