Abstract
During the pre-war debate about attacking Iraq, the Bush administration advanced
dubious claims about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions and capabilities. We suspect that the
nuclear threat was exaggerated and added to other WMD claims because it was more
effective at eliciting negative emotions about Iraq and creating a greater demand for
military action against Iraq. In order to test this hypothesis, we created fake newspaper
stories varying the type of threat—nuclear or chemical/biological—posed by a fictitious
country or Iran, and embedded these stories in a survey. We compared reactions to
WMD threats about countries other than Iraq because studying opinion about pre-war
Iraq at this late date would be hopelessly confounded by prior attitudes. Surprisingly, our
results do not support the argument that nuclear threats provoke different responses than
other types of WMD, but our data raise a red flag about the external validity of studies
using hypothetical scenarios involving fictitious countries. We conclude by discussing
the implications of these findings for understanding public support for invading Iraq,
likely public reactions to demands for war with Iran, and the validity of data generated
using scenarios involving fictitious counties.
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Convention