arms race

arms race, a pattern of competitive acquisition of military capability between two or more countries. The term is often used quite loosely to refer to any military buildup or spending increases by a group of countries. The competitive nature of this buildup often reflects an adversarial relationship. The arms race concept is also used in other fields. However, the discussion in this article is limited to military arms races.

Examples of arms races since the early 20th century

One example of an arms race is the “dreadnought” arms race between Germany and Britain prior to World War I. In the early 20th century, Germany as a rising power sought to challenge the United Kingdom’s traditional naval dominance. In 1906 Britain launched a new, more-advanced warship, the HMS Dreadnought, triggering a naval arms race. Between 1909 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Britain launched a further 19 dreadnoughts (i.e., turbine-powered all-big-gun warships) and a further nine battle cruisers, while Germany launched 13 dreadnoughts and five battle cruisers. This arms race is often cited as one of the causes of World War I.

The Cold War nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union is another example of a 20th-century arms race. The United States’ use of nuclear weapons to end World War II led to a determined and soon successful effort by the Soviet Union to acquire such weapons, followed by a long-running nuclear arms race between the two superpowers. The Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test in 1949. At the end of 1956, the United States had 2,123 strategic warheads and the Soviet Union had 84. Those numbers increased rapidly over the subsequent 30 years. The U.S. arsenal peaked in 1967 at more than 31,000 warheads, and the Soviet arsenal peaked about 20 years later at more than 40,000. The end of the Cold War by the early 1990s appeared to have ended that arms race. In 2019, however, the United States formally withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, citing multiple alleged violations of the agreement by Russia. Experts feared that the demise of the treaty, by which the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to eliminate intermediate-range and shorter-range land-based missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons, would lead to a new arms race.

Arms races may involve a more general competitive acquisition of military capability. This is often measured by military expenditure, although the link between military expenditure and capability is often quite weak. Such more general arms races are often observed among countries engaged in enduring rivalries, which may sometimes appear to follow each other’s military spending levels, especially during periods of heightened tension. Examples of such arms races include India-Pakistan, Israel–Arab states, Greece-Turkey, and Armenia-Azerbaijan.

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Consequences of arms races

Arms races are frequently regarded as negative occurrences in both economic and security terms. Large-scale arms acquisitions require considerable economic resources. If two countries spend large sums of money just to cancel out each other’s efforts, the expenditure might well be seen as wasted. There is, however, considerable debate surrounding the economic effect of military spending. Some argue that it provides benefits through technological spin-offs, job creation, and infrastructure development. Others argue that it displaces more-productive forms of investment, while its final output is not itself productive. Certainly, countries that must import arms will see more negative economic effects of an arms race, and arms imports are a major contributor to debt in the developing world. Even for arms-producing countries, excessive military expenditure is likely eventually to have negative economic consequences. The Soviet Union’s economic difficulties were certainly exacerbated by the very high proportion of the gross domestic product devoted to the arms race.

The question of whether arms races contribute to the outbreak of war is also the subject of considerable debate. An arms race may heighten fear and hostility on the part of the countries involved, but whether this contributes to war is hard to gauge. Some empirical studies do find that arms races are associated with an increased likelihood of war. However, it is not possible to say whether the arms race was itself a cause of war or merely a symptom of existing tensions.

One may also consider the gains for a country that “wins” an arms race in the sense of gaining a decisive military advantage. Arguably, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the United States as the sole global superpower, was partly due to the cost of attempting to keep up with the United States.

Arms race models

There is an extensive body of theoretical and empirical literature on arms race modeling. These include game-theoretic models based on the “prisoner’s dilemma” (PD), dynamic mathematical models based on the Richardson model, and economic models frequently based on a “utility-maximizing” framework. There is overlap between these categories.