Only two European countries – France and the UK, both NATO members – have nuclear weapons, and leading politicians have called for the UK and EU to maintain close military and security links post-Brexit. In the context of the Trident renewal debate and the UK government's recently published integrated defence and security review, this article uses data from the new UK Security Survey to analyse attitudes towards the possession of nuclear weapons among the British public. It assesses three key theorical strands in the wider scholarly literature on public opinion and states’ use of military force: domestic political attitudes, foreign policy predispositions, and the ‘gender gap’. We find that all three theoretical perspectives contribute to the underpinnings of contemporary public opinion towards nuclear weapons. Support for the retention of Britain's nuclear deterrent is associated with being a Conservative Party supporter, favouring Brexit, endorsing superior military power worldwide as an important foreign policy goal, wanting to protect the transatlantic relationship, and with being male. The article makes a distinctive contribution to the growing subfield of research on public opinion and foreign policy, while the findings advance wider empirical understanding of contemporary citizen engagement in a key dimension of security policy.

只有两个欧洲国家——法国和英国，都是北约成员国——拥有核武器，主要政界人士呼吁英国和欧盟在脱欧后保持密切的军事和安全联系。在三叉戟更新辩论和英国政府最近发布的综合国防和安全审查的背景下，本文使用来自新的英国安全调查的数据来分析英国公众对拥有核武器的态度。它评估了更广泛的学术文献中关于公众舆论和国家使用武力的三个关键理论分支：国内政治态度、外交政策倾向和“性别差距”。我们发现，所有这三种理论观点都有助于当代公众舆论对核武器的支持。支持保留英国的核威慑力量与作为保守党的支持者、支持英国退欧、将全球军事实力作为重要的外交政策目标、希望保护跨大西洋关系以及作为男性有关。这篇文章对日益增长的舆论和外交政策研究子领域做出了独特的贡献，而研究结果促进了对当代公民参与安全政策一个关键方面的更广泛的实证理解。