North Korea's advancing nuclear weapons program isn't the only news to unnerve arms-control experts this summer. A new survey has revealed that Americans are surprisingly willing to make a first nuclear strike — and kill millions of civilians abroad.
The survey casts doubt on the power of what experts call the "nuclear taboo," said Stanford University historian David Holloway, author of "Stalin and the Bomb." The idea, or hope, behind the concept is that it's not just luck that humans haven't dropped any nuclear weapons for 70 years — that there's a stigma that makes the use of nuclear weapons unthinkable.
But many Americans say it's quite thinkable. The taboo may be eroding, or it may never have been the protective barrier people thought it was.