Amid growing global nuclear tensions, some theorists have argued that the United States should make a bid for nuclear superiority — that is, seeking a technologically or numerically superior arsenal of nuclear weapons in order to achieve a strategic advantage. In particular, they claim that nuclear superiority is necessary to compel other nuclear powers, such as China and Russia, to back down in a crisis, and they utilize interpretations of past events involving the threat of nuclear use to support their ideas. This paper examines the logic and evidence for the importance of nuclear superiority and finds it to be seriously flawed on both counts. The quest for nuclear superiority misunderstands the nature of nuclear crises, which are intensely personal, uncertain, and contextual, and overstates the role that nuclear weapons have played, or may play, in compelling other states’ behavior.