| US Military History Companion: Arms Race |
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| US Military Dictionary: arms race |
A competition between nations for superiority in the development and accumulation of weapons, especially between the U.S. and the former USSR during the Cold War.
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
| Political Dictionary: arms races |
During the First World War, the Quaker physicist L. F. Richardson (1881-1953), noted that Anglo-German arms races had had the property that the number of extra ships built by Britain in period two partly reflected the number built by Germany in period one, and the number built by Germany in period three partly reflected the number built by Britain in period two. Richardson modelled this as a difference equation system which might have a stable or (as in 1914) an unstable outcome. After many decades of neglect, Richardson arms races are again studied both in international relations and in evolutionary biology.
| Quotes About: Arms Race |
Quotes:
"Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough."
- Martin Amis
"If this phrase of the balance of power is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure."
- John Bright
"Next week Reagan will probably announce that American scientists have discovered that the entire U.S. agricultural surplus can be compacted into a giant tomato one thousand miles across, which will be suspended above the Kremlin from a cluster of U.S. satellites flying in geosynchronous orbit. At the first sign of trouble the satellites will drop the tomato on the Kremlin, drowning the fractious Muscovites in ketchup."
- Alexander Cockburn
"At the rate science proceeds, rockets and missiles will one day seem like buffalo -- slow, endangered grazers in the black pasture of outer space."
- Bernard Cooper
"The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost."
- John Foster Dulles
"Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat."
- Hermann Goering
See more famous quotes about Arms Race
| Wikipedia: Arms race |
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The term arms race, in its original usage, describes a competition between two or more parties for real or apparent military supremacy. Each party competes to produce larger numbers of weapons, greater armies, or superior military technology in a technological escalation. Nowadays the term is commonly used to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors.
Contents |
Soon Germany began to build similar ships to Britain's.
Lewis Fry Richardson made an arms race model, trying to retrodict World War I, where he showed how two countries would go to war if more money was spent in the arms race than in trade.[citation needed]
More generically, the term "arms race" is used to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors. An arms race may also imply futility as the competitors spend a great deal of time and money, yet end up in the same situation as if they had never started the arms race. An evolutionary arms race is a system where two populations are evolving in order to continuously one-up members of the other population.
This is related to the Red Queen effect, where two populations are co-evolving to overcome each other but are failing to make absolute progress.
In technology, there are close analogues to the arms races between parasites and hosts, such as the arms race between computer virus writers and antivirus software writers, or spammers against Internet service providers and E-mail software writers.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
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