After months of watching hundreds of new nuclear missile silos being dug in the dirt northwest of Beijing, it is welcome news that President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping seemingly agreed at last week’s summit on the need for strategic stability talks. Strategic stability — the idea that nuclear-armed countries should not be able to gain decisive advantage over one another — has taken on new importance as China expands and modernizes its nuclear arsenal.

China is expected to quadruple its number of warheads in the next decade, and is upgrading its nuclear capabilities with new missiles, submarines and bombers. Over the summer, it reportedly fired a missile from a hypersonic glide vehicle while testing its fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) — a technical advance that, if true, means the Chinese can attack targets from space with nuclear weapons. Although China insists it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons, this claim has less credence than in the past, when the country’s nuclear force was much smaller.

The last thing we want to do is to repeat the experience of the Cold War, when the United States built over 32,000 warheads and the USSR over 40,000. We created a nuclear impasse that was expensive and destabilizing. It almost ended in nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, with new technologies once again driving the risk of escalation, we could end up in a similarly dangerous situation with China.

The United States and Russia have been working together since Cuba to avert new nuclear crises. The world’s first nuclear arms race offers two important lessons for how to prevent a second: First, the US and China should avoid trying to limit new technologies and focus on ensuring mutual nuclear predictability. Second, they should be prepared for a long road, since agreeing to joint measures to foster that predictability is far from straightforward. Luckily, both countries have more experience with nuclear diplomacy than the U.S. and the USSR did, which offers reason to be hopeful.

I may be dumb to say this but any country that develops such weapons what are they made to prove? To me nothing.

Yeah and look at North Korea! Who are they at war with?

Nuclear seems so old school and barbaric. In this day and age wouldn't they be better off to cripple our internet or power grid? Use bio or chemical warfare? Create an army of drones to invade? If the nukes really started to fly everybody would be destroyed, so who's the winner in that? What ever happened to the "star wars" system to shoot these missiles down? Or can't somebody just hack a computer somewhere? Currently China and the USA need each other too much, but some other countries have little to lose, it would be more of a concern for them to start things then the USA and China.