This chapter surveys the literature on nuclear crises. It begins by summarizing the Cold War treatment of these episodes, highlighting the centrality of bilateral deterrence and models such as “brinkmanship” in creating expectations for nuclear crisis behavior. Even though third-party actors remained important as superpower allies during the Cold War, literature during this period suffered from a two-actor bias flowing from the global hegemony of the superpowers. Post–Cold War literature tends to account for regional nuclearization and unipolarity but in summarizing this body of work, the chapter identifies that there is still insufficient knowledge of the various factors at play in regional nuclear crises.