China's nuclear buildup and intensifying U.S.-China strategic competition have raised concerns about the future of nuclear dynamics between China and the United States. As U.S.-China nuclear competition escalates, understanding Chinese views of strategic stability will be important for managing this dimension of the relationship between these two global powers. During the Cold War, different conceptions of strategic stability influenced how the Soviet Union and the United States constructed their nuclear forces and approached arms control. For the U.S. strategic community, strategic stability consisted of crisis stability and arms race stability. This article analyzes extensive Chinese-language sources and finds that Chinese writings identify four pillars of strategic stability: nuclear mutual vulnerability, the overall state of bilateral relations, the nuclear taboo, and beliefs about the controllability of nuclear escalation. Chinese strategists perceive each of these four pillars as eroding, in part because of U.S. actions. The findings have important implications for understanding China's nuclear force development, nuclear dynamics in East Asia, and U.S.-China relations.

Does nuclear superiority offer states political or military benefits? And do those benefits accrue beyond acquiring a secure second-strike capability? International relations theory has long held that nuclear superiority does not confer significant advantages, a conclusion supported by much of the qualitative literature on bargaining and crisis interactions between nuclear-armed states. New work by scholars using statistical methods to analyze data on nuclear crises, interstate disputes, and compellent threats has sought to answer these questions, producing conflicting results. Despite the contributions of these recent works, this line of research has assumed that warhead counts are an appropriate measure of nuclear capabilities and that states possess accurate information about the material balance. Instead, states use multiple quantitative and qualitative characteristics to evaluate the nuclear balance, and they often have inaccurate or incomplete information about the size, composition, and configuration of other states' nuclear forces. Using new data, replications of two prominent recent works show that results are sensitive to how the nuclear balance is operationalized. Drawing on archival and interview data from the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, findings show how states and leaders often understand and respond to the nuclear balance in inconsistent, asymmetric, and subjective ways.