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Recently:

Republican White House hopeful Donald Trump said he believed Israel should strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in response to the Islamic Republic’s recent missile barrage.

[...Biden's] “answer should have been, hit the nuclear first, and worry about the rest later,” Trump added.

(Interestingly, Trump finally agrees with Bolton on that, whom of course has himself reiterated that point recently too.)

Are or were there any polls in the US about this, now or ever before, whether Iran's nuclear facilities should be bombed, either by the US or with US blessing?

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  • The idea has been publicly voiced for a decade if not more, so I'd be surprised it was never polled. Although old polls may not exactly reflect the current mood, they might be interesting as a baseline.
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Oct 5 at 16:05
  • I suspect if any poll not from 2024 can be considered even as a baseline with all the scene being shaken so badly in the past year, neither ever Israel was as close to its death as it is now, nor Israel's face seems as clean as before it was, nor even Western governments were considered co-genocider by a portion of their own population. Maybe you should narrow your scope to only recent polls, I guess.
    – owari
    Commented Oct 5 at 17:44
  • Transforming of whole world outside of America into a radioactive desert doesn't need any poll. POTUS decision is enough with or even without agreement from senate. It is not like using nuclear bombs, just ordinary bombs dropped to some NPPs.
    – user13964273
    Commented Oct 6 at 11:34
  • Unsurprisingly Trump is is channeling Jared on this.
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Oct 7 at 2:36
  • Considering that just 10 years ago, a lot of Americans were in favor of bombing a fictional country from a Disney movie, I would not put too much importance on surveys like that.
    – Philipp ♦
    Commented Oct 16 at 12:42

2 Answers 2

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There is an August 2022 poll from The Chicago Council on Global Affairs/Ipsos addressing exactly your question here.

A minority of Americans would support the use of force to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities if it restarted development of a nuclear weapon: 46 percent would support air strikes and 38 percent would support the deployment of US troops.

It’s worth noting that this is a large amount of support in the post-2016 era of American foreign policy for US intervention, and digging into the poll one even finds that it’s concentrated on the right:

Republicans are about 15 to 20 percentage points more likely than Democrats or Independents to support the US government launching cyberattacks or airstrikes against Iran. GOP supporters are also significantly more likely than either group to support sending troops to destroy the country’s nuclear facilities (+12 percentage points compared to Democrats, +18 percentage points to Independents).

In a 2019, FiveThirtyEight noted that Americans are more in favor of using troops in Iran in case of them obtaining a nuclear weapon than in an any other case, including an invasion of a NATO ally or of Taiwan by China.

…a survey conducted in June found that the use of military force in Iran may be one military intervention that the U.S. public could get behind, especially if Americans perceive Iran’s nuclear capabilities as a threat. In that survey, which was released earlier this month by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 70 percent of respondents, including 82 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of Democrats, supported using U.S. troops to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

In a 2012 poll, 53% - 56% of Americans supported such strikes.

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It's extremely difficult, if not actually impossible, to isolate American's views on the specific causus belli of Iran's potential to develop nuclear capability, but the American opinion of opposing Iran in various ways is lengthy and frequently polled since Iran is such a major player in the Middle East and a key opponent to US foreign policy there.

This Harvard CAPS poll from 2023 is the most recent I can find, but one must read between the lines to arrive at an estimate of how supportive of military action the respondents are.

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