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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.
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:
"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
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The term arms race in its original usage describes a competition between two or more parties for military supremacy. Each
party competes to produce larger numbers of weapons, greater armies, or superior military technology in a technological
escalation.
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 Evolutionary arms races is a system where two populations are evolving in order to continuously one-up members of the other population. For example, A Predator / Prey arms-race involves predators evolving more effective means to catch prey while their prey evolves more effective means of evasion. This is related to the Red Queen effect, where two populations are co-evolving to overcome one another 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 anti-virus software writers, or spammers against Internet Service Providers and E-mail software writers.
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![]() | US Military History Companion. The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Copyright © 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more | |
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