This entry is a subentry of Arms Race.
The term arms race has been used since the 1850s to describe periodic competitions between states to shift (or preserve) the balance of power between them by modernizing their weaponry and increasing the magnitude of various arms stocks. However, it was not until the end of World War I that arms races were viewed as a special pathology of interstate behavior that required explanation. At a loss to account for a war whose duration and horror seemed inexplicable by the logics of political or strategic calculation, both politicians and the public seized upon the idea that arms competitions could assume a deterministic dynamic that made war inevitable. It followed that the best way for states to ensure that conflicts of this sort would not occur in the future was to regulate the building of armaments or, as it is known today, to practice arms control. President Woodrow Wilson fought to include a commitment to arms control in the League of Nations Covenant, and his sentiments received widespread bipartisan support. Even Senator William Borah, an ardent opponent of the League, argued that the postwar naval competition between the United States, Great Britain, and Japan had already begun to take on the characteristics of the prewar Anglo‐German naval race. If not contained, it would lead to a cycle of threats and counterthreats that would eventually spiral upward into war, as fear and mutual hostility increased in proportion to the size of each side's arsenal.
The situation in which a state's attempt to achieve greater security by expanding its arsenals can, at the same time, decrease the security of its rival is known as the “security dilemma.” The increasingly uncontrollable and volatile process of arms growth that can ensue as each state reacts to its rival's arms increases with increased suspiciousness about the rival's motives and an even greater increase of its own is termed the spiral model.
In 1960, Lewis Fry Richardson gave formal expression to this blind action‐reaction vision of an arms race in a mathematical model that remains influential today. His model postulates that the rate of each side's arms increases is a simple function of its rival's increase in the previous period. Depending on the magnitude of each side's response, arms production either manages to achieve a stable rate of growth or accelerates until it can no longer be sustained, at which time war ensues. In keeping with the absence of foresight that animates the security dilemma, Richardson's model is basically deterministic: states react to each other as automatons.
In the 1970s and 1980s, theorists attempted to formulate a richer, psychological account of the spiral model's dynamics. They argued that the real key to the perverse cycle of action and reaction lay in the operation of suboptimal decision‐making biases and heuristics that are fundamental to human cognition. These cognitive limitations lead state leaders (1) to underestimate systematically the extent to which their rival's arms increases are driven by defensive concerns and internal, “pork barrel” politics and to assume that they are motivated exclusively by aggressive aspirations; and (2) to assume that the rival will appreciate the fact that it was forced to increase its military capacity as a defensive necessity. This leads to a psychologically driven propensity to interpret the rival's behavior as indicating growing hostility without showing any corresponding sensitivity to the implications of one's own actions. As a result, both sides' incentive to engage in preemptive or preventative war increases.
In the last twenty years, the emphasis of researchers has shifted from psychological biases to strategic calculation as the principal inspiration for arms races. Investigators looking at the nineteenth‐century naval competitions between the British and the French; the naval competition between the United States, the Japanese, and to a lesser extent the British after World War I; and even the pre–World War I Anglo‐German naval race—archetype of the spiral model—found each to be a calculated competition between a militarily weaker challenger state trying to increase its relative power and another militarily stronger state committed to defending the status quo. This rationalistic view of the arms race dynamic is partly corroborated by the fact that the state leaders involved often speak in terms of maintaining the balance of power and publicly commit themselves to not pursuing an open‐ended building program. For example, in the U.S.‐Japanese naval race of 1916–22, President Wilson emphasized that the U.S. building program would be discontinued as soon as an arms limitation agreement was achieved.
Game theory, with its emphasis on rational expectations and complicated reciprocal effects, is a logical extension of the strategic calculation school, and its stylized models now underlie most theoretical work on arms races. Game theorists play down the role of psychological variables and argue that arms races are most frequently driven by a confluence of three factors: (1) the anarchic nature of the state system; (2) the presence of resources that permit both states to respond to the competitive incentives that it creates; and (3) uncertainty about the resources and motives of the rival state. Arms spirals tend to be seen as the product of severe (but rational) uncertainty regarding the ambitions and actions of the rival state.
Interestingly, given their close relationship with the “dismal science” of economics, game theorists tend to be more optimistic than their counterparts in the psychological or Richardsonian schools. Their most commonly used model, the repeated “Prisoners' Dilemma,” suggests that states in protracted arms races, such as that between the United States and the Soviet Union, will eventually learn about the attributes and motivations of their rival and devise strategies that take advantage of the cooperative benefits offered by arms control. Game theorists even offer strategies by which a state can induce its opponent to slow or terminate an arms race. For example, they recommend demonstrating a resolve to build an amount of arms that effectively cancels out any advantage the opponent would gain, but no more. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to believe that every arms race is driven by the logic of the repeated Prisoners' Dilemma. History suggests that different historical arms races are driven by “games,” or patterns of incentives, and not every type responds to a single strategy.
[See also Arms Control and Disarmament; Strategy: Fundamentals; Disciplinary Views of War: Causes‐of‐War Studies.]
Bibliography
- Charles E. Osgood, An Alternative to War or Surrender, 1962.
- Lewis F. Richardson, Arms and Insecurity, 1962.
- Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, 1976.
- Walter Isard, Arms Races, Arms Control, and Conflict Analysis, 1988.
- George W. Downs and David M. Rocke, Arms Races, Arms Control, and Tacit Bargaining, 1990.
- Colin S. Gray, Weapons Don’t Make War, 1993
