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Can arms control incorporate emerging technology? Other articles in this special issue identify potential risks emerging technologies pose to stability and how they are intertwined with international politics. Is there a future for multilateral strategic arms control? This article looks ahead to explore how arms control might reduce those risks but in order to do so we must update concepts of both arms control and strategic stability. Building on Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin's seminal study into the relationship between strategic stability and arms control, this article offers an original framework – asymmetric arms control – for incorporating new technologies, which is then used to identify six scenarios for arms control of hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs). It concludes that arms control can potentially reduce the risks to strategic stability associated with emerging technologies by incorporating dynamism into arms control design. Ultimately, asymmetric arms control can best contribute to strategic stability by crossing domains and reflecting the cross-domain nature of international conflict, and the framework has potential application to emerging technologies beyond HGVs.

The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been successful in starting new conversations about nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, many of those conversations are happening in silos with ban supporters and opponents talking past each other. Both sides of the debate often misrepresent one another, putting at risk cooperation within the global nuclear order and progress toward the 2020 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. To address these misperceptions, this article offers a bridge-building framework with steps for nuclear-weapon states, ban supporters, and regional and political coalitions. The framework is designed to be practical and to build trust following a heated and controversial debate around the ban treaty and its predecessor, the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons movement. The most important and timely of these efforts is for ban supporters and opponents to work together on risk reduction at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions with rising risks of misperception and inadvertent escalation.