The recent change in the Russian Federation's nuclear doctrine has significantly lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons by that country and has revived the discussion on the use of nuclear warheads by the countries of the NATO. Including our country in the "nuclear sharing" program is returning to the Polish public debate, which in its full version would mean the deployment of American nuclear weapons on Polish territory and the certification of Polish aircraft to carry them. In the November survey, we decided to ask Poles whether they supported this idea, which was publicly raised by President Andrzej Duda, among others. Opinions on this subject turned out to be extremely divided. The percentage of affirmative answers (44%) is only a few percentage points higher than the share of the negative (40%), and it is among the opponents of this idea that we come across slightly stronger opinions. Rarely does any issue polarize Poles to such a degree, and no position is clearly dominant here.

Should Poland participate in the nuclear sharing program and deploy nuclear weapons on its territory?

Even in the most comprehensive version of "nuclear sharing", nuclear weapons deployed in our country would not be our property and Poland would not be able to decide independently about their use. It could therefore be argued that real security would only be available if Poland had its own nuclear weapons. How does society feel about the idea of ​​developing such weapons? The opinions of Poles turned out to be quite divided again, although approval (49%) outweighs the opposition (36%).

Should Poland have its own nuclear program in the future, i.e. work on producing its own nuclear weapons?

Since the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has repeatedly threatened both Ukraine and Western countries with a nuclear attack. These threats have been made directly to Poland on at least several occasions. The last time was in November 2024, when Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that the opening of the American base in Redzikowo was a provocation and “raises the level of nuclear threat”. To conclude the block of questions devoted to nuclear weapons, we decided to ask Poles again how afraid they were of such threats being carried out. We first asked about this shortly after the outbreak of the war, and at that time these fears were shared by the majority of the population (65%). A little over six months later, the percentage of respondents fearing a nuclear attack dropped by almost 20 percentage points to 47%, indicating that repeated and unfulfilled threats from Russians are being taken less and less seriously.

However, the current results show that the level of fear has increased significantly again and is very close to that at the beginning of the war (64%). At the same time, the share of people expressing them in a decisive way is lower than then (18% of respondents have answered "I am very afraid of it" compared to 25% in March 2022). The general increase in fear of an attack is probably related to reports of the worsening situation of Ukrainians on the front. As our September survey showed, Poles' predictions about the end of the war are increasingly pessimistic.

Are you afraid that Russia might use nuclear weapons against Poland?