在全球核紧张局势日益加剧的背景下，一些理论家认为美国应致力于追求“核优势”——即通过寻求在技术或数量上领先的核武库来获取战略优势。他们声称，核优势对于在危机中迫使中国和俄罗斯等其他核大国退让至关重要，并引用历史上涉及核威胁的事件来支持其观点。
本研究审视了“核优势重要性”的逻辑和证据，发现其在两方面都存在严重缺陷。追求核优势误解了核危机的本质，这类危机通常是高度个人化、充满不确定性且与特定情境密切相关的。此外，这种主张夸大了核武器在迫使其他国家改变行为方面已经或可能发挥的作用。现代战争中，单纯的战略优势往往难以转化为实际的政治胜利，反而可能导致局势失控。因此，政策制定者应重新评估核威慑的本质，而非盲目投入资源以寻求难以实现且具有破坏性的优势地位。
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.